Sony is trying to flip the switch back on for their PlayStation Network globally, and apparently North America, Europe, and Middle East had their services restored, although some hiccups are experienced during the process due to overwhelming network congestion from the password resetting emails.

However, things aren’t going very smoothly in Japan. The government has refused to allow Sony to reactivate its online service until they are very sure that all issues are sorted out. This may be due to reports that Anonymous and the previous group that attacked PSN in the first place (may or may not be Anonymous) are targeting PSN once they are restored.

“We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them,” Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, told Dow Jones Newswires.

“The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference,” he said, adding that he could not provide details on the outstanding issues for security reasons.

The second was in how Sony hoped to regain consumer confidence over personal data such as credit card information.

“There were similar cases in the past that were caused by other firms, and we are asking Sony whether their measures are good enough when compared to countermeasures taken in the past,” he said.

The company’s promised counter-hacking measures announced on May 1st have not yet been fully reviewed by the government too. Also, the government wants even more preventive measures taken to ensure that users’ credit card numbers and other private data won’t be exposed through their use of Sony’s online services again.

As of current, Sony is still in talks with the authorities to make sure that the system is up to their expectations.

“We are still in talks with various authorities (in Japan and Asia),” Sony spokeswoman Kumie Tanaka said.” By receiving advice from the industry ministry, we would like to have the service in Japan ready.”

SOURCE via Dow Jones Newswires (Fox Business)