After This, Sony Will Be the One You CAN Trust.

Hey guys, this is my first blog post, so please be as painfully honest as you can. Anyhow, Here's my opinion on this whole PSN debacle.

PSN has been down for a week and a half now. Information has been leaked, and people are reporting that they're seeing unauthorized transaction on their account. Nearly everyone who has ever played online on a PS3 now has his or her information floating out there somewhere. On N4G, people are taking sides. Some say that Sony was not to blame as the hackers were the ones who stole the information, that they couldn't have stopped it regardless, and that Sony has been keeping people up-to-date. The other side is stating that Sony failed to encrypt all of their personal information, that this kind of thing would never happen on Xbox Live, and that Sony failed to inform consumers about the information leak until an entire week after it happened. So, is it okay to be mad? I say heck yeah!

When I first heard about the info leak, I was pretty mad. First, I hadn't been able to play online for a week, and now my address is floating around somewhere for anyone to get? I'm not usually one to care much about privacy, but it's a big deal when you leak 70 odd million people's emails and passwords. I was one of those threatening to exchange my PS3 for a 360, grinding on Sony for being irresponsible with our information, and not giving us information the entire first week of the outage. However, after I settled down, I realized that perhaps I was making too much of a fuss.

In this day and age, one can do almost anything on the internet. Amazon is there for your shopping needs, and delivers right to your front door. Paypal is there for easy online transactions. News is literally at your fingertips almost the second it happens. With the internet, who needs banks? Who needs paper money? Unfortunately, now we realize the dangers of this kind of living: All of our information is sitting somewhere in a server just waiting to be cracked by some hacker who will promptly sell it on the black market. However, Sony isn't the only company that this has happened to.

Xbox Live has been known for inadvertently giving out personal information to the wrong people. Paypal has had its share of leaks. Even Facebook has had its trip-ups. Granted, they've never been on the same scale as the PSN scandal, but it goes to show that Sony isn't the only one vulnerable to these attacks.
I say that the era of the hacker terrorist is near. Who will be next? iTunes perhaps? maybe Amazon? How about Paypal? All of these are just waiting for a hacker to come along. "But these companies are more responsible with our personal information," you say! I don't care how safe they have it, a hacker with the right amount of skill can crack it within an hour. The truth is, we can never be safe. All of our information was probably floating out there on the interwebs long before Sony's trip-up. Your credit card info was probably leaked when you accidentally downloaded that spyware that your anti-virus didn't pick up; your passwords, when you signed up for that free iPhone you never got.

The internet is a dangerous place, the Wild West of the 21st century. Sony isn't going to be the only one to leak your information. I'll bet you that soon, of of the big names that we all know and love will leak your information. We all have to be careful; monter your credit card account weekly, try to avoid using the same password too much, and always make sure that an email that you get from your bank or paypal is legitimate.
Right now, Sony is rebuilding their servers. Do you think that they'll make the same mistake twice? I don't. They’ve hired an outside company to help them make sure that your information will now be as safe as possible. Their servers will most likely be safer than any other of the big names out there. They're most likely trying to avoid this kind of thing ever happening again. So I say, who will you trust: the company with the brand new, most likely entirely encrypted servers, or the company making fun of them near the Bill-Gates-shaped water cooler?

TL;DR: Sony just rebuilt their servers, so they're safer now. But seriously, man, I put alot of work into that wall of text, Y U NO READ IT, LAZZY MAAAN!