Sony is offering its PlayStation owners a five-day membership extension after the company's network was taken down on Christmas Day by an external attack. Owners - many of them new after receiving the console for Christmas - were unable to connect to the network due to a distributed denial of service attack on the Sony system. The attack bombarded the network with huge amounts of traffic, stopping playstation owners connecting to it.

Edward Herrmann, a prolific character actor on the stage and screen, classic car collector and the popular voice of Dodge advertising through most of the 1990s, and for Hyundai in 2006, died Wednesday. As the voice of Dodge from 1992 until 2001, he helped pitch everything from the small Neon car to the midsize Stratus sedan to the Durango SUV - often with an easy but professorial tone.