News: Fail Sony Fail

Happy Mother’s Day, readers of Lusipurr.com! Did you thank your mother yet today for allowing you to come into existence and ruin her life? No? That’s okay, we will send Nate ‘Bup’ Liles to thank your mom in unimaginable ways. Apology accepted.

I suppose I should apologize to you as well. Last week, I wrote that PlayStation Network would be up within the week. I LIED. Or rather, Sony lied to me and in turn I lied to you. I am not sorry for betraying you, but are they? Not really. Sony now only says PSN will be up in “mid-May” which really could mean anything. They stress that they are working on putting the system back up, insisting that the delays are because they are in internal testing. This testing is unspecified, though some dark corners of the internet have been whispering that they will give PSN their own personal testing when it does go back up, probably followed by evil laughter until they drop their soda and cheesy poofs into their rolls of nerd obesity.

Okay, that paragraph was vague and uninteresting, Biggs. Clarify your statements from last week: just what the hell happened to cause all this? At a House of Representatives meeting on online security breaches this week, a statement was made by Purdue University professor and “security expert” Dr. Gene Spafford that got the internet all fired up. Spafford claimed that Sony’s servers were found to be running old, outdated versions of Apache and that there were no firewalls in place, and although both of these assertions were proven false, the internet only heard the bad news and spread it like wildfire. Investigative work found that as of March, Sony was running the most up-to-date versions of Apache, proving Dr. Spafford wrong.

Fine fine, we accept that PSN was not as poorly secured as we thought and that we will have to wait a bit longer for it to be back up. But Sony must be focusing all their efforts on reviving the PSN, right? Right?

Nope! During these times of turmoil, Sony has made an absolutely baffling move by encouraging people to install Linux. Wait, what?! The one thing we’ve been reading over and over from PS3 hackers is their complaining about the loss of the install third-party OS option, what is going on here?! Well that is because we are not talking about the PS3. While those of you desperate to log in to PSN would like it to be their only concern, Sony still produces things other than the PS3, like their Xperia line of Android cell phones. Android is developed on a Linux platform and has seen an explosion of independent development not seen on other smartphones like Blackberry or Apple, but the previous released Xperia phones were bootlocked such that users could not utilize them as they would with other Android phones. With their new line of Xperia phones, they will no longer be bootlocked, and even before they are released, Sony had put up a site dedicated to showing users how to jailbreak their phones and install a customized Linux kernal. Of course, they repeat over and over that they are not responsible for what damage it causes, but they now give you the option. Presumably they would like to say “now shut up about Linux, you whiny brats.”

So what else happened this week? If you have forty minutes to kill, a lucky student was able to sit down for an interview with Valve’s Gabe Newell. Available here on YouTube, the Hutt overlord discusses the future of Valve and single-player games, micro-transactions, the possibility of Gordan Freeman and Chell ever meeting, and his ridiculous knife collection. Seriously guys, this man owns a lot of knives. In addition to having them make video games, he has given Valve employees the gift of blacksmithing. His random acts of weird make him the fat Lady Gaga of the video game industry.