General Gaming Article

At Long Last, PlayStation Network Recovers from Lizard Squad DDoS Attack

Posted: 28 Dec 2014 06:39 PM PST

It took nearly three days for the service to stagger back to its feet

Hacker group Lizard Squad took down both Microsoft and Sony's online gaming networks on Christmas Day with denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that continued into the wee hours of Friday, December 26, 2014. (The attacks supposedly came to an end when the hackers agreed to Kim Dotcom's offer of 3,000 free vouchers for premium Mega accounts in exchange for stopping the DDoS campaign). While Microsoft was able to get its Xbox Live service back up and running on Friday itself, Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN), for some inexplicable reason, continued to remain offline for over two days after the DDoS campaign against it came to a halt.

"PlayStation Network is back online. As you probably know, PlayStation Network and some other gaming services were attacked over the holidays with artificially high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay. This may have prevented your access to the network and its services over the last few days," wrote Catherine Jensen, Sony Computer Entertainment America's vice president of consumer experience, in a post on the official PlayStation blog.

Sony's handling of the whole episode has left a lot to be desired. As if the surprisingly protracted outage wasn't enough, the company made matters worse for itself on Saturday when it rather prematurely announced that network services were "gradually coming back online", only to realize a few hours later that the problem had yet to be fully fixed.

For those still having issues signing in to PSN, Sony recommends that they reboot their machine and try again.

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U.S. ISP Beats Others to 10Gbps Internet Punch

Posted: 28 Dec 2014 03:27 PM PST

Minneapolis is now home to 'fastest service the world has ever seen'

A couple of month back, South Korean ISP (internet service provider) SK Broadband gave those attending the 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan a glimpse of its upcoming 10Gbps (gigabits per second) internet service while the rest of the world, including the U.S., looked on with envy. Well, not so fast. Minnesota-based ISP US Internet has just beaten the South Korean company to the 10Gbps punch by announcing the roll out of a 10Gbps fiber broadband service in Minneapolis.

"US Internet redefines the phrase 'broadband internet' with the launch of it's new 10GB [sic: read 10Gbps] internet service available to residential and small business owners, the fastest service the world has ever seen," the company said in a recent press release.

Available now for $399 per month, the company's (and the world's) fastest internet plan comes with the promise of matching upload and download speeds that are tens of times faster than your average U.S. broadband connection.

It will be interesting to see for how long US Internet is allowed to remain the only provider of 10Gbps internet in the world by others, with a few other companies around the world, including the notable likes of Verizon and Google, also having such high speed internet offerings on their agenda.

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