HankMan said:
Anonymous said they weren't going to to target PSN anymore, and I'd take their word over Sony's thinly veiled insinuations any day of the week!
Well, to be honest, it occured to me that I couldn't see anything else Anonymous could do against Sony given their sphere of influance other than to attack things like PSN. In the end the only viable way to attack Sony short of some kind of massive armed assault on their corperate facilities, is to go after their customers and cost them money. You deny people access to PSN, demonstrate Sony can't protect them, and those people are going to leave the network and find other online services to use for gaming and so on. Sony winds up in a position where it either concedes and gives their online assailants whatever is being demanded, or winds up taking a bath and pretty much having to give up on the entire online sector.
I commented on this when I read about Anonymous' statement about not going after the innocent users anymore, how else are they going to do anything to Sony?
It's very possible they changed their mind, or maybe never made that annoucement to begin with. It's also possible with a group like Anonymous that there isn't a total consensus.
Anonymous is like an elemental force of chaos, it's kind of unpredictable, one moment they are wearing the "Hacktivist" hat, the next they are making miseries out of the online existances of people who got their attention.
In keeping with the spirit of Anonymous, they themselves say that they really don't have any kind of serious agenda overall, and I don't think anyone ever accused them of being honorable or reliable. That could be changing, but it's the kind of thing that comes with time, right now I can't say that I'd be shocked to learn that Anonymous was responsible for the PSN attack.
It's also quite possible that we'll never know if it was them or not, if PSN was attacked. While Anonymous loves their annoucements, there is no rule saying they have to broadcast everything they are doing. If I was a hacker going up against a major technology company like Sony, and wanted to do it seriously, I certainly wouldn't be telegraphing my moves, or jumping around going "it's me!!!". Like it or not Sony is one of the big boys out there, who set the standards for technology, it's not like going up against Gene Simmons, or even the "Operation Titstorm" thing against Australia. Sony is the kind of group you'd expect to have the experts that a nation in serious trouble would want to hire.
