PSN Crash Timeline

The PlayStation network (PSN) has been down for over two weeks. This means gamers can't play online games, download new games, stream videos from the PlayStation Store, chat or send mail to one another... really, aside from downloading updates, nearly every networked function of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) has been disabled. And if you think gamers are upset, how do you think Sony feels?

Sure there have been apologies by Sony's big boss, Howard Stringer, and Kazuo Hirai, the man who made PlayStation what it is, and the company has promised to fix the problem, and even insure folks against damages. But the reality is that hackers broke into the PSN, millions of users' information, and the network is still down. It will be interesting to see how much one of the most public corporate hacks affects the PlayStation brand and those who love it.

The following is a timeline of Sony's recent public problem with hackers.

1/11/11 - Sony files sues hacker George Hotz, aka GeoHot, for figuring out how to bypass PS3 security, and for publishing it online. Up until this point the PS3 was the most secure of all the major consoles. This hack is referred to as "jailbreaking the PS3" and many worry it will allow users to copy games.

1/27/11 - Sony seeks a TRO, temporary restraining order, to stop GeoHot from distributing the jailbreaking hack to others.

2/12/11 - GeoHot stands up to Sony and posts a wildly entertaining rap video about their legal battle on YouTube.

2/19/11 - GeoHot starts blogging about the legal actions Sony takes against him.

3/6/11 - US Court grants Sony's motion to get all of the IP addresses of those who accessed GeoHot's webpage and had access to the PS3 jailbreaking info.

4/3/11 - The hacker group Anonymous launches computer attacks against Sony websites. They dub the operation #OpSony. They claim the attack is hacktivism, or hacks against Sony to punish them for taking legal actions they felt infringed upon hacker rights and freedom of speech.

4/11/11 - Sony settle suit with GeoHot.

4/19/11 - First signs of PlayStation Network (PSN) being attacked by hackers. Some PSN servers start rebooting on their own.

4/20/11 - Sony realizes that there was unauthorized access to the PSN servers. It detects that user data has been stolen. Sony brings in outside help to assess the damage. Sony is unsure how much data has been stolen, but knows that some has. It decides to take down the PlayStation network and 77 million users are not able to access the system as a result.

4/21/11 - Sony brings in another computer security company.

4/22/11 - Sony is still unsure as to how much data was stolen, and the extent of the hack. They turn info over to the FBI.

4/23/11 - Sony brings in a third outside team to help with the hack. They state that the attack was sophisticated and aggressive.

4/25/11 - Sony says it knows the amount of user data that was stolen. However, it does not know if or how much credit card info was stolen.

4/26/11 - Sony makes public announcement about the PSN hack. It starts working with several law enforcement agencies. Up to 77 million users personal information was at risk, and their credit card information may have been stolen.

4/28/11 - GeoHot denies having anything to do with the PSN hack.

4/29/11 - US House of Representatives ask for information from Sony. Considers passing legislation demanding that companies follow certain procedures and timeline in notifying customers of data theft.

4/30/11 - Kazuo Hirai, Sony's Representative CEO and driving force behind the PlayStation brand makes a public apology at a press conference about the PSN hack. States that Sony has upped its security and that the PSN will be up in a week. Sony does not make the stated deadline.

5/1/11 - Sony states that the Sony Online Entertainment servers were also hacked. These are not PlayStation Network servers, but rather ones used for Sony's online PC games, such as "Everquest," "DC Universe Online," and it's facebook games. Sony claims that there is evidence that Anonymous is involved. They claim a PSN file was named "Anonymous" and the hacker group's motto "We are Legion" was included.

5/4/11 - Sony delivers a report to the US Congress giving them information about the hacks. US Representative Bono Mack attacks Sony and accuses them of corporate irresponsibility. Sony put info about the PSN outage and user data theft on their blog, requiring users to search for info. Mack argues that companies have a duty to inform clients when their data is stolen.

5/5/11 - Anonymous denies having any part in credit card theft. They claim they are hacktivist, only interested in corrupt corporations and governments. Sony offers free ID theft insures to PSN users. Sony CEO Howard Stringer apologies for the PSN outage.

5/6/11 - Sony releases a statement saying that it will miss the one week deadline for restoring PSN service. No new date is given. Folks are very unsure about when the PSN will come back online.

5/9/11 - Sony announces that the PlayStation Network and its music service Qriocity will be fully restored by May 31st.

Update: 5/15/11 Majority of PSN and Qriocity services go back online, including online play, netflix, but not the PlayStation store. Sony announces the rest of the services will come back "soon." Users required to update to firmware 3.61 and change their PSN passwords to use services.

In an attempt to regain the trust of consumers, and to aid PSN users, on Sony offers a year's paid subscription to "AllClear ID Plus" a service that offers identity protection services as well as carries a $1 million dollar insurance against identity theft. Additionally they will offer a "PSN Welcome Back Package", which will include 30 days of free PlayStation Plus, as well as free games and other incentives to use the PSN again.

The hack certainly hurt Sony and all of us put out by the Great PSN Outage of 2011. Sony's lack of direct communication also affected us, and many PSN users had no idea what was going on for quite some time. I'm sure the PSN will come back up, and Sony will give us free things to try to butter us up. And it may work.

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Internet Game Timeline

This is timeline of key events in the history of Internet gaming. It includes significant developments in computer games, console games, and Internet technology. It is a work in progress, so if you see an error or you feel something important has been overlooked, please feel free to email me with the details.

1969
ARPANET, a network with nodes at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah, is commissioned by the Department of Defense for research purposes. Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA sends the first packets over the network as he tries remotely logging into the system at SRI.

1971
ARPANET grows to 15 nodes and an email program to send messages across a distributed network is invented by Ray Tomlinson. The possibilities for speeding up games being played by snail-mail at this time are immediately obvious.

1972
Ray modifies the email program for ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit. The @ sign is used to specify a string as an email address.

Atari is founded by Nolan Bushnell.

1973
Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax sell their first typewritten copies of Dungeons and Dragons, a game which continues to inspire both tabletop and computer RPGs to this day.

Will Crowther creates a game called Adventure in FORTRAN on a PDP-1 computer. Don Woods later puts Adventure on a PDP-10 several years later and it becomes the first widely used computer adventure game.

1974
Telenet, the first public packet data service, a commercial version of ARPANET, makes its debut.

1976
Apple Computer is founded.

1977
Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80.

Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels, a group of students at MIT, write Zork for the PDP-10 minicomputer. Although, like Adventure, the game is single-player only, it becomes quite popular on ARPANET. Several years later, Blank and Joel Berez, with some help from Daniels, Lebling, and Scott Cutler, produced a version for the company Infocom that ran on the TRS-80 and Apple II microcomputers.

1978
Roy Trubshaw writes the very first MUD (multi-user dungeon) in MACRO-10 (the machine code for DEC system-10's). Although originally little more than a series of locations in which you could move and chat, Richard Bartle takes an interest in the project and the game soon has a good combat system. Roughly one year later, Roy and Richard, at Essex University in the UK, are able to connect to ARPANET in the USA to conduct an international, multiplayer game.

1980
Kelton Flinn and John Taylor create Dungeons of Kesmai for Z-80 computers running CPM. The game uses ASCII graphics, supports 6 players, and is a little more action-oriented than the early MUDs.

1982
The first definitions of the term "Internet" surface.

Intel introduces the 80286 CPU.

Time magazine calls 1982 "The Year of the Computer."

1983
Apple Computers unveils the Lisa. It is the first personal computer sold with a graphical user interface (GUI). With a 5 MHz processor, an 860 KB 5.25" floppy drive, a 12" monochrome screen, a keyboard, and a mouse, the system cost $9,995. Even though the Lisa came with an astounding 1 Megabyte of RAM, it is a financial disaster and the home computer does not get revolutionized until the release of the Mac OS 1.0 about a year later.

The first Microsoft Mouse was introduced concurrent with Microsoft Word. About 100,000 units were built, but only 5,000 were sold.

1984
CompuServe hosts Islands of Kesmai, a reinvention of Dungeons of Kesami, on its network. The cost of participation is a whopping $12 per hour! The game lasts, in various iterations, right up to the turn of the century.

MacroMind, the company that would eventually evolve into Macromedia, was founded.

1985
On March 15, Symbolics.com becomes the first registered domain.

Microsoft Windows hits store shelves.

QuantumLink, the predecessor to AOL, launches in November.

Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar at Lucasfilm develop Habitat, a multiplayer online adventure game, for QuantumLink. The client runs on a Commodore 64, but the game doesn't make it past beta in the US because it is too demanding for the server technology of the time.

1986
The National Science Foundation creates NSFNET with a backbone speed of 56 Kbps. This allows a large number of institutions, especially universities, to get connected.

Jessica Mulligan starts Rim Worlds War, the first play by email game on a commercial online server.

1988
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is introduced by Jarkko Oikarinen.

AberMUD is born at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Club Caribe, a derivative of Habitat, is released on QuantumLink.

1989
James Aspnes writes TinyMUD as a simple, compact multiplayer adventure game and invites fellow CMU graduate students to play on it. Adaptations of TinyMUD remain in use on the Internet to this day.

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Board and Card Games Timeline

Games have existed in some form throughout human history, but only have been commercially published with the goal of selling them to a wide audience since the 1800s. These are my picks for the most culturally and historically significant games published since 1800.

If you prefer, you can also experience this list as a 14-week series of free email newsletters. A daily version is also available.

1800 - 1849

1850 - 1899 1900 - 1919 1920 - 1939 1940-1949 1950 - 1959 1960 - 1969 1970 - 1979 1980 - 1989 1990 - 1999 2000 - present Honorable Mentions

The games on the Honorable Mentions list didn't make it into the Top 50 for various reasons, but deserve to be mentioned as culturally and historically significant modern games.

Games by Publisher

The games listed here are also listed on a separate page organized by game publisher.

It goes without saying that this list is subjective. It was written with an admitted U.S. bias. If you think I've missed an important game or included one that shouldn't be there, please post a note in the About.com Board and Card Games Forum.

View the original article here

Board and Card Games Timeline

Games have existed in some form throughout human history, but only have been commercially published with the goal of selling them to a wide audience since the 1800s. These are my picks for the most culturally and historically significant games published since 1800.

If you prefer, you can also experience this list as a 14-week series of free email newsletters. A daily version is also available.

1800 - 1849

1850 - 1899 1900 - 1919 1920 - 1939 1940-1949 1950 - 1959 1960 - 1969 1970 - 1979 1980 - 1989 1990 - 1999 2000 - present Honorable Mentions

The games on the Honorable Mentions list didn't make it into the Top 50 for various reasons, but deserve to be mentioned as culturally and historically significant modern games.

Games by Publisher

The games listed here are also listed on a separate page organized by game publisher.

It goes without saying that this list is subjective. It was written with an admitted U.S. bias. If you think I've missed an important game or included one that shouldn't be there, please post a note in the About.com Board and Card Games Forum.

View the original article here