Sony vows to switch off Home abusers

The director of Sony's forthcoming Home platform has told an audience at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival that users who frequently abuse the service will have their consoles banned and disabled from online use.Peter Edward also stated that a serious abuser would "have to move house and buy a new PS3 before they could get online again".Although Sony said it does not intend to become a 'virtual police', the firm said it will take a dim view of anyone who consistently causes problems.Edward added: "Ultimately we know a user's details, we know machine details and we know where they live."If you really feel like you've been abused or that someone has just shown wholly inappropriate behaviour then you are able to complain about it. If you really, really misbehave you can have your console disconnected at a machine level."Clearly that's not something we would want to be doing very often but as a disincentive to mess round too much it's in our power."Sony is hoping that online users will police the Home environment and other users, adding: "It's a hard line to draw because we don't want to be walking around telling everyone off for saying 'bloody' so we've got to strike a balance there."We're going to be relying on users assessing what's appropriate to them – if they've been subject to behaviour they don't like they can complain about it rather than we walk around as virtual police."The firm is planning to offer adult areas in its Home environment, with possible branding from companies such as Durex, Marlboro and Bacardi. Edward said: "It's relatively simple to be confident that somebody is over 18. So it's no problem to have areas that are only open to those aged 18 years' and over. We are able to do that quite comprehensively, we have access to the log-in data that they use for the PlayStation Network."Undoubtedly there are going to be some things and some brands that we are not going to want to be involved in the environment at any stage."But a large proportion of our demographic is over 18 so we will make a point of catering to that demographic – we certainly don't want to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator."