14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet based activist group known as Anonymous has announced that it plans to take its actions against video game hardware creator and publisher Sony to an all-new level on Saturday, April 16, with members ready to head out and protest in official Sony stores all over the world.
The action will take place for four hours and until now more than 1,000 people have said that they will take part in the boycott and protest action on Facebook although it is not clear how many of them will actually show up on Saturday.
It is likely that Anonymous activists will wear Guy Fawkes masks, as they have been known to do when they took their fight against fringe religious group Scientology into the real world after a space of Internet powered attacks.
The Anonymous actions against Sony have begun a week ago on Monday when the group announced that it was launching an attack on the electronics giant because of the way it has used legal action against George Hotz, aka Geohot, and the other hackers which breached the defenses of the PlayStation 3 home gaming consoles and then made their method available online.
Initially, the operation consisted of Distributed Denial of Service attacks which targeted both the official Sony sites and the PlayStation Network service, resulting in the sites being intermittently offline and the PSN has taken down quite a few times for what Sony described as “maintenance”.
Since then Anonymous announced that it would no longer be targeting the PSN after quite a few gamers complained about being caught in the digital crossfire.
The group says that it will continue to act against Sony and against a number of executives.
George Hotz and Sony have announced that they have settled out of court recently, but it’s not clear how Anonymous might react to the news.