If you attempted to use your PS3 this past week on the PlayStation Network (PSN), you discovered that there was an outage and has continued well into this week. This is apparently the first outage of its kind since the inception of PSN. I don’t like to spread misinformation around, so here are the relevant blog posts on the official Sony PSN blog:

• Update on PlayStation Network/Qriocity Services
• Latest Update for PSN/Qriocity Services
• PSN Update
• Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity (This has all the juicy details on the breach and what you can do about it.)
• Clarifying a Few PSN Points

And the boiled down FAQ.

Basically, a hacker got into the PSN system late April 19, 2011, did a database dump of all PSN accounts, and high-tailed it out of there before anyone could do anything about it. The PSN system went offline April 20, 2011, presumably to prevent others from doing the same thing while they repaired/rebuilt the system. Sony still is not sure whether or not the credit card numbers stored in that system were also stolen but enough information was definitely extracted to create fake identities:

14. What personally identifying information do you suspect has been compromised?

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information provided by PlayStation Network/Qriocity account holders: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birth date, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password, login, and handle/PSN online ID. Other profile data may also have been obtained, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip). If an account holder has authorized a sub-account for a dependent, the same data with respect to that dependent may have been obtained. If an account holder provided credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, it is possible that the credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.

I saw one comment today from someone who claimed they had unauthorized use of the same credit card they used for PSN happen around the time of the breach. But we’ll probably find out soon enough directly from Sony. It took Sony a few days to get around to telling people what was going on but, after 24 hours, it was already obvious that a security breach took the PSN servers down. Credit card breaches of this nature have serious repercussions, so I’m not terribly surprised that Sony is withholding that information until they are certain.

And, of course, what would be a trust and massive data breach like this be without the class action lawsuit?

This whole ordeal makes me glad I’m a PC gamer.

Do you have a set price tag of what you will pay for video games? I do. When a new video game comes out, it is inevitably priced at $49.99, or as seems more trendy, $59.99. And today, I saw a pre-order of Starcraft II for $99.99 plus $4.99 shipping. Starcraft II has been hyped for way too long but…$100 for a video game plus some trinkets? (Who doesn’t have the original Starcraft? Silly extras don’t count.)

Clarification: Some places are calling $99 for the Collector’s Edition of Starcraft II a “deal”. I’ve been saving this post for several months and that just seemed perfect for getting you to view this article. The price of new games is silly when there are thousands of other, slightly older games to be played on the cheap. The original Starcraft was an inferior RTS game with severe limitations even back then and I never played it online but watched lots of other people get frustrated at the lag of Battle.net. $60 for a single game is too expensive for me. As I say later in this article, I’m a cheapskate and I don’t mind being one. If you think I’m foolish, that’s fine. This article is intended to get you to think about your budget for video games.

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This past weekend I had difficulty remembering to blog on the Direct2Drive contest and submit my entries. And today Idonyo mentioned experiencing a similar difficulty. This blog post is designed to help you easily track the Holiday Gamez posts that contain Direct2Drive contests and get updates sent to you via e-mail and, optionally, text messaging. The same technique can be applied to other blogs and posts on this site so you get just the content you want.

First off, a quick plug for the Tucson Citizen, which runs a Twitter feed of all posts across all blogs (not sure why it isn’t linked everywhere). The feed is located at http://twitter.com/TucsonCitizen/. If you already have a Twitter account, follow the user ‘TucsonCitizen’ and optionally enable SMS notifications to not miss a thing.

Tucson Citizen Twitter feed

Now back to the topic of following a specific topic on the Citizen site such as the Direct2Drive contest posts found here on the Gamerz blog. I attempt to tag each of my posts with as many relevant tags as possible. Each time I’ve included the contest, I have tagged the post with a ‘contest’ tag:

Post with the contest tag

Clicking the tag takes you to a page with all of the posts that are tagged with the ‘contest’ tag:

Viewing just the posts with a specific tag

Notice the URL is: http://tucsoncitizen.com/gamerz/tag/contest/

This is important because now we are going to do some fun stuff to get even more specific by using some little known features of WordPress.

Changing the URL to: http://tucsoncitizen.com/gamerz/tag/holiday+gamez+food/

Causes only posts containing the tags ‘holiday’, ‘gamez’, and ‘food’ to show up. While food is interesting, let’s change the URL to be the target objective:

http://tucsoncitizen.com/gamerz/tag/holiday+gamez+direct2drive+contest/

Now only posts containing the tags ‘holiday’, ‘gamez’, ‘direct2drive’, and ‘contest’ will show up. But the question becomes: How do we get this into a usable format? The answer is a RSS feed. RSS feeds are usable by many other websites. Let us modify the URL one last time:

http://tucsoncitizen.com/gamerz/tag/holiday+gamez+direct2drive+contest/feed/

And now it is a RSS feed of posts that contain the aforementioned tags. All that needs to happen now is to make this RSS feed do something useful.

Send via E-mail

Many e-mail clients have RSS feed functionality already built into it. Most web browsers also have RSS feed functionality as well. But some people just live and breathe e-mail. Many of those people carry a Blackberry (or similar device) and read their e-mail on it. Feed My Inbox takes a URL of a RSS feed and sends an e-mail message to the target e-mail address containing new items in the feed. Normal people can use this service too and have the e-mails arrive in their e-mail in-box.

Feed My Inbox

Send via Text Message

And, of course, there are the text messaging and Twitter addicts. If you use Twitter, you are likely already aware of the RSS2twitter service that plops all RSS feed content onto your Twitter timeline, have connected Twitter to your mobile device, and don’t really need me to babble on about it.

RSS2twitter

For the rest of those folks who are addicted to text messages, there is another option. Instead of entering your personal e-mail address into the Feed My Inbox “e-mail address” field, enter your mobile device’s e-mail address. Most mobile devices have an e-mail address you can send an e-mail to that arrives as a text message. It can be difficult to determine what carrier you have if you aren’t using one of the major U.S. carriers. But you may be able to still find your carrier’s SMS gateway and e-mail address format. I recommend sending a regular e-mail first to make sure it works.

Disclaimer: Normal text messaging rates apply. You may want to send yourself a limited number of messages and check your bill at the end of the month before doing too many messages via this method to make sure you aren’t utilizing a “Premium Text Messaging” service by using the carrier’s SMS gateway.

And now you know how to remind yourself about those Direct2Drive contest entries via text message. But keep in mind you can do the same thing with any other blog on the Tucson Citizen. You can also take the RSS feed of the Tucson Citizen and convert the whole thing into a text messaging disaster (aka your monthly bill).