Professor Colin Milburn of the University of California at Davis presented his paper, titled “Long Live Play: The PlayStation Network and Technogenic Life,” on Oct. 9. The talk was part of a weekly colloquial series for graduate students in the departments of History of Science and Technology and History of Medicine, but it was open to all members of the Hopkins community. The series hosted speakers on a wide variety of topics at both the Homewood and East Baltimore campuses.
The presentation sought to explore the relationships between technology, video game culture and hackers.
Milburn described Sony’s Apr. 20, 2011 shutdown of the PlayStation Network (PSN) after it discovered that the PSN had been hacked a few days prior. The system remained offline for 24 days.
“The intruders had extracted the personal information, passwords, and possibly the credit card numbers of registered PlayStation Network users — upwards of 77 million people — constituting one of the largest data thefts of all time,” Milburn wrote in his paper.
Matthew Franco, a graduate student, programmer and self-described hacker, emphasized the importance of this security breach.
“This has huge implications. Look at the wall in Brody Learning Commons... It makes for a fun game, but this is not just an academic exercise that we live in every day,” Franco said.
In 2007, PlayStation joined forces with Stanford University’s “Folding@home” program, eventually installing the software on all new PS3 units. Folding@home allows Stanford to tap into unused computer power by creating a distributed supercomputer.
The Folding@home project is a working database that could aid in research on diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, type-two diabetes and cancer.
“The application allowed gamers to navigate a global map of networked PS3s and to manipulate a simulated protein, rendering both the network and the molecule as objects of play,” Milburn wrote.
Folding@home added to the community aspect of the PSN by allowing users to see other users online.
“[The program] encourages users to think of themselves as citizen scientists, assisting the collective work of knowledge production,” Milburn wrote.
By 2012, more than 15 million PSN users had participated in the project. While the collaboration between Sony and Stanford ended in 2012, the program is still running at Stanford and now has a network of over 170,000 computers.
“It’s one of the new emerging fields of science. We have to imagine how future historians will see [what is happening now]. This is the history of the future,” Yulia Frumer, a professor in the History of Science and Technology department, said.
While users were outraged by the initial PSN shutdown, many found that they could still connect to the Folding@home network, since its servers were housed at Stanford rather than Sony. This did little to help the larger PSN community.
During the 24-day shutdown and before Sony admitted to the hacking, multiple PSN users came up with theories as to why the network was down.
One theory involved the National Security Agency’s purported interest in using gaming networks to track terrorists. Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, which was during the 24-day window.
Sony attempted to take actions against known hackers and hacker groups, particularly those who distributed information on how to jailbreak PS3s.
“On Apr. 2, 2011, in retaliation to Sony’s legal actions against the hacker community, the global hacktivist collective known as Anonymous launched its first wave of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS attacks) against various Sony servers,” Milburn wrote.
“Hacktivists” are activist hackers — those who believe they are hacking for a cause rather than to obtain information.
According to Milburn, some hacktivists resort to hacking when they don’t find success in getting their messages heard through legal channels.
These hacking attacks were targeting not the PSN but Sony. Some Anonymous hackers claimed to be gamers on the network, although few of their identities are known today.
“Since our program is jointly History of Science and Technology, it’s nice to have a speaker who can talk about the history of technology, because we don’t get quite as much of that,” graduate student Penelope Hardy said. “It’s a good reminder that things that are current in the news are also already becoming a part of history. It’s important to tie into the broader history of science and technology.”
