PlayStation Network and Qriocity online services remain shut as of today, Shigenori Yoshida, a Tokyo-based spokesman said. Sony is uncertain when it can resume the services, Yoshida said by phone today.
The company is in the process of adopting an improved security system and its plan to restart the services fully by May 31 is unchanged, he said. Sony shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services April 20 because of possible data theft by hackers.

"In short, the hackers appear to be trying to 'punish' Sony for some perceived injustice, and they've been effective in that I suppose," Svensson concluded. "But they're also punishing millions of other consumers and businesses which makes it impossible to be sympathetic to their 'cause.'"

-- not to mention play Capcom's pair of DRM-protected PSN games offline.

One member of the Beyond3D forum, deathindustrial, was curious about the outdated server software claim and did a very brief amount of very interesting research into the issue....

(Beyond3D's community has a unique combination of technically knowledgable users with a low rate of console fanboyism, allowing for an honest discussion of things like the PSN data breach without the conversation devolving into another proxy battle in the great fanboy wars.)

As it turns out, it is fairly simple to use Google's webcache to show what version of Apache the PSN servers were using back in March. According to a page request archived by Google on March 23, 2011, at that time Sony was running version 2.2.17 of the software. You can see from Apache's website that 2.2.17 is the latest stable version of the webserver available even today. This is a direct repudiation of the claims being made that Sony's webservers were out of date by as much as five years.

Poster deathindustrial also goes on to point out the folly in using "security expert" Dr. Eugene Spafford's testimony before Congress as a source for the claims that the servers were outdated and that Sony knew about it. In the written statement which accompanied his testimony, Spafford clearly states:

"I have no information about what protections they had in place, although some news reports indicate that Sony was running software that was badly out of date and had been warned about that risk."

So he had no first-hand knowledge of the state of Sony's servers or Sony's knowledge about possible exploits, and he was literally repeating claims that he read in the media, which might have stemmed from IRC chat logs that were being passed around back in February. He didn't even do the very basic detective work it would've taken to completely repudiates the claims.