Paystation
First of all, my sincere condolences to those of you who were expecting to be Raptured on May 21st. Going to work the following Monday must have really sucked, especially for those of you who had some choice things to say to your boss on the previous Friday afternoon because you were certain that the Great Celestial Swiffer was going to sweep you off your feet over the weekend. You should take consolation in the fact that your belief system brought a great deal of hilarity to the rest of us, and we’d like to thank you for taking the hit.
I’m pretty certain that the board of directors at Sony wishes the world had ended this month. There aren’t enough swords in the entire Kurosawa catalog for those guys to fall on.
I’m pretty sure that the PSN Terms and Conditions didn’t include agreeing to having all of your personal information (which is part of the capital you pay Sony with, make no mistake about it) stolen by hackers so that someone in Russia could refurnish their Internet fetish studio on your MasterCard. Sony says there is no evidence that credit card information was stolen, but it can’t rule out the possibility. Yeah… 77 million compromised user accounts? Sony has single-handedly expanded “caveat emptor” to “caveat emp-tore-me-a-new-one”.
Still, I suppose it’s just another train robbery in the Wild West Web. The credit card companies may have to spend a few million dollars to refund bogus charges and reissue new cards, but that is just a drop in the revenue bucket for them. The final consequences for Sony, both legally and financially, are still unclear. The consumers will demand the moon and the stars, envisioning a giant victim windfall from some class action lawsuit, but they will end up settling for some magic beans and a few free digital downloads.
If I could hope for a silver lining to this cybercrime cloud, it would be for the network and computer security experts out there who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into getting (and staying) trained and doing everything and anything to find work, to suddenly find their phones ringing and contracts and job offers coming their way. Many of these people are friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances of mine, and there isn’t a company out there, Sony or otherwise, who wouldn’t benefit from signing them on.
In the meantime, stay tuned Rapture fans: the Mayan apocolypse is coming in 2012!
A.J. Axline
www.ajaxline.ca
I’m pretty certain that the board of directors at Sony wishes the world had ended this month. There aren’t enough swords in the entire Kurosawa catalog for those guys to fall on.
I’m pretty sure that the PSN Terms and Conditions didn’t include agreeing to having all of your personal information (which is part of the capital you pay Sony with, make no mistake about it) stolen by hackers so that someone in Russia could refurnish their Internet fetish studio on your MasterCard. Sony says there is no evidence that credit card information was stolen, but it can’t rule out the possibility. Yeah… 77 million compromised user accounts? Sony has single-handedly expanded “caveat emptor” to “caveat emp-tore-me-a-new-one”.
Still, I suppose it’s just another train robbery in the Wild West Web. The credit card companies may have to spend a few million dollars to refund bogus charges and reissue new cards, but that is just a drop in the revenue bucket for them. The final consequences for Sony, both legally and financially, are still unclear. The consumers will demand the moon and the stars, envisioning a giant victim windfall from some class action lawsuit, but they will end up settling for some magic beans and a few free digital downloads.
If I could hope for a silver lining to this cybercrime cloud, it would be for the network and computer security experts out there who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into getting (and staying) trained and doing everything and anything to find work, to suddenly find their phones ringing and contracts and job offers coming their way. Many of these people are friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances of mine, and there isn’t a company out there, Sony or otherwise, who wouldn’t benefit from signing them on.
In the meantime, stay tuned Rapture fans: the Mayan apocolypse is coming in 2012!
A.J. Axline
www.ajaxline.ca
