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    PlayStation Network's Neverending Story, starring Capcom, Anonymous, and an unknown restoration date

    PlayStation Network's Neverending Story, starring Capcom, Anonymous, and an unknown restoration date

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    Everyone, please take your seats, there's no need for panic. PlayStation Network didn't get restored this weekend as planned — the company warned as much in a blog post late Friday night. There's been more than a few worried tweets and articles about Sony now telling Bloomberg the service won't return until May 31st, but that isn't quite the case. Let's stop and read what's actually written.

    Sony's spokesperson says the company is "in the process of adopting an improved security system and its plan to restart the services fully by May 31 is unchanged." The key word here is "fully," and as Sony has said from the start of the rebuilding process, only part of the service (i.e. everything that doesn't involve payment) will be re-enabled first. So while there's no set date on the partial service (i.e. multiplayer) restoration, your Portal 2 co-op buddies can probably plan for pre-June play dates. Probably.

    So, what else happened this weekend in the Chronicles of PSN?

    The weekend hack that never was

    This past Friday we heard whispers of a "third" hack, with some unnamed group (note: not Anonymous) apparently threatening to find more personal data and post it online along with personal data. Turns out that was much ado about nothing, and the one link I did get to work — listing names and some city / state combinations — was a list from a 2001 sweepstakes, according to Sony's official release on the matter. And that's that.

    Anonymous: 'Sony, I Am Disappoint'

    Hacking collective Anonymous took major umbrage with a Financial Times piece that seems to place blame on Anonymous as a group. Said one source, "if you say you are Anonymous, and do something as Anonymous, then Anonymous did it." Its press release strikes up the alternate philosophy — "Anonymous is anonymous to Anonymous" — which leads to a rather interesting question. Does the definition of Anonymous inherently means it can't be blamed for anything it doesn't take collective credit for? Forbes has a longer discussion on the matter.

    Capcom's missing revenue

    The House of Mega Man and Resident Evil isn't mincing words about the whole debacle (via Joystiq). Responding to a community question, Corporate SVP Christian Svensson summed up the business problem nicely: "the resulting outage [is] obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget." Ouch.