PSN Outage

The PSN is nearing a week of being down.  Today, it's revealed that evil hackers have gotten to personal information, which may include credit card information.  This figures to be a couple/few hours of due dilligence on my part.  First, I'll need to change login information on the PSN when it comes up, order a new card, change passwords on anything that uses the same ID/password combo.  I'm somewhat let down by this.   I'm not really down with competitive multiplayer, so the inability to play Socom 4 isn't too terrifying to me. 

Part of me is laughing on the inside.  Sony's been a rather customer unfriendly entity for some time now - rootkits, proprietary formats, the arrogance of the PS3 launch, the disappearance of Linux on the console, mandatory installs, etc...  Despite the fact that my credit card information and username/password may be in the hands of someone who intends to commit fraud is troubling, the giant middle finger in Sony's direction is somewhat jovial. 

I do think the rancor in which they went after George Hotz was uncalled for.  Perhaps they were so adamant about it because they knew about unintended security holes it presented?  Being able to play unsigned games doesn't seem like a big deal to me.  Being able to completely infiltrate their network and take customer information is a completely different animal.  I have no idea if the latter was borne from the former, but I'm inclined to think not. 

Sure, XBL can be hacked.  People have had their gamertags hijacked, though not on a mass scale that I'm aware of.  What if the PSN is restored and most passwords have been changed?  I guess the thing that bothers me most is that we just don't know how far this outage goes.  Sony says their rebuilding the PSN.  To me, a rebuild of the underlying framework will take a lot of time.  Not 9 ladies get together in a month to make a baby kind of time either.  How can this be properly tested, tuned and scaled in a short amount of time?  Let's say the outage is resolved this weekend - are we in for a week of poor performance, random crashes, disconnects, etc... while the bugs are being worked out?

I wonder if there will be any substantial fallout on the consumer side of things.  Gamers are a fickle bunch.  While I think this is a huge hit on Sony's credibility, I think they'll just come up with a more restrictive ToS and let gamers download a free dynamic theme and Q*Bert and most will be fine with it.