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Games Entertainment

PS2 a Weapons Development Platform? 139

Posted by Hemos from the my-scud-can-be-upgraded dept.
Moleman was one of the number of people who wrote in about the apparent move by the Japanese Government to restrict export of the Playstation 2. The reason? It has been apparently deemed to be a potential weapons development platform, in particular for missle guidance systems. Geez, get a couple and I can form my own rogue nation. The UK Telegraph has a more complete story - it's apparently only if you want to take two or more out of the country that they require permission - so you could fly and take one if you wanted without a problem.
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PS2 a Weapons Development Platform? More

PS2 a Weapons Development Platform?

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  • Re:Are there any HARD specs on this thing? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It does 33.32 on GRITspec. Powerful enough to force 1.1kg of high density grits into my pants.

    thank you

  • My god, the final piece of the puzzle! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We, as common teenage consumers, have already had in our possession the tools of destruction quite some time. All we were missing was a simple guidance system... But now we have it. The Free World is no longer safe from our bargin bin atomic bomb creations. For all you anarchists out there, here is what you'll need: 1 Sony Playstation 2 1 Can of Sprite 1 Bag of Pop Rocks So, my brothers: Down with government! Anarchy! Anarchy! We shall rain carbonated explosives over the capital!
  • There's more to it though. I don't believe it's about putting an emotion engine inside a tomahawk.

    It's about developing the tomahawk on a PS2. I mean, we have games that are flight simulators, fight simulators (notice no l that time :), and driving simulators. And from what's available for the PS2 - the physics is unbelievably good.

    Now, imagine a program where you can design your own tomahawk missile - you can change the materials, colors, type of paint, or overhaul the entire design. Then, you click a button, and watch its trajectory be plotted for you with a hundred billion different launch parameters changed in just the slightest way (degree of inclination, speed, etc). Sound stupid? Well, now put that program on every store shelf in the world, along with the system to run it. It's not that hard for some weird militant group to get their hands on it, is it? Sure, there was computing power to do it before - but in a Cray, which cost tens of thousands of dollars. This thing costs $200 - chump change.

    What's more interesting is handing it out to every idiot on the street. People get crazy ideas, and some are foolish enough to try them... That's why we have police departments these days.
  • Computers are not going to get any slower. Pretty soon, if countries continue to act this way, people won't be allowed to own any computers at all. Obviously something's going to change...

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • I agree about the collusion, but I'd be willing to bet it's actually aimed at the black market in exporting PS2s.

    I was recently in Melbourne, and some guy in a market stall was displaying an (illegally imported) PS2, and happily offered to get me one in if I gave a week's notice. People doing this are presumably bringing them back by flying to Japan, buying a couple for personal use and flying out again. By limiting it to one per person, you gut the traders.

  • What he said, plus military systems, particularly those used in satellites or upper atmosphere, need to be reasonably radiation proof.

    This pretty much means gallium arsenide as your semiconductor. This works out well, since the gallium arsenide family tends to be faster than its silicon cousins.

    Unfortunately, GA isn't as uniform as silicon, so density isn't as high. This limits the complexity of what you can reasonably put on a single die.

    Or at least, so it was back in the days when I studied semiconductors (in industry I went into software, not hardware, and my education in hardware is now well behind the times).

  • Supposedly a batch of Dreamcasts were left out in the hot sun and got baked. I DO NOT think that would work well in the extremes of storage or flight. If you were a terrorist that needed pinpoint precision, this wouldn't work. If you didn't need precision, why the heck would you make a contraption that uses a PS2? There's much simpler ways to do it. On the other side, it probably isn't all that useful as a design and development platform yet, and you couldn't really use it to simulation system unless you also had the development kits too.
  • Heh. This actually requires a little history.

    The _original_ play station was a cdrom module for (iirc) the SNES. Sony would build 'em in cooperation with Nintendo. But the deal fell through and Sony got stuck having spent a lot of money to develop this stuff, and no way to make it up.

    So they redesigned it as the Play Station X, as a standalone cdrom console. Somewhere the X got dropped, but everyone tended to call it psx anyway. and sony eventually convinced enough suckers to buy them to cover the development costs ;)

    so the new machine is the PS2, even though it really ought to be the PS3 or the PSY or PSXI or something along those lines.

    i'm sure someone around here knows more of the details than i do.
  • Random individuals are gaining the power to harm nations.

    Please! Pray tell me where Joe D. Schmuck is going to get a rocket engine with enough boost to deliver several hundred kilos of high explosive material?

    And don't give the line that he's gonna pack all of that boom into a cessna 182 and use it as a cruise missile ...

  • THAT is a truly awesome story.
    What a great way to waste 30 minutes of work time!

    dv
  • This is being done by drain bamaged people who don't realize that power of a simple FPGA for a specific task. Throw in a couple of sharcs or some other dsp of choice and you can put together a guidance/targeting/tracking system pretty easy. Relatively speaking.

    dv
  • A fundamental problem is that most ppl are reading and believing the technical issues in an article written by a technology clueless person. Even worse, ppl are believing the rather pathetic direct usage of this technology like this already exists. Think! The applications are hypothetical, but also possible. The better question would be, What would be required to implement the processor into another dual-use application? How much effort is required to do this dual-use transformation?

    All this crap has already been covered here when the specs of the PSII was first revealed. All of this was covered during discussion about Wassenaar (limits on theoretical operations per second).

    What always pisses me off is that this is News for Nerds, but this doesn't mean a good technical discussion by nerds. This should be News for Nerds Provided by some English Major, and Discussion by People That Believe This.

    I'm going to bed.

  • Humour aside, This is a nation state saying a game platform is too advanced. They wouldn't do that if it weren't. Random individuals are gaining the power to harm nations. There you go. This gets interesting really soon. Does South Korea get bombed with a play station powered missile? The days of nation states are over. Different ways of controlling individuals with the ability to topple states (large populations) have to be found.
  • J.D.S. won't. He might, though, make a bunch of sarin gas and not get it so completely wrong next time around. I'm not saying Japan is being rational, I'm saying Japan is scared. Kind of like other nation states. Maybe even one near you. Heard of encryption limitations?
  • I ain't no socialist. Is this a luvin' stick I'm pointing at you? Heh. Joke.
  • Wasn't this a plot for Seven Days?
  • In any case, floating point is totally irrelevant for code-cracking, which is the basic reason governments restrict supercomputers.

    Floating point may be useless for brute force attacks on keys but it would be useful for statistical analysis of ciphertext.

  • Why in the hell would they require permission to export them. Who is going to use psx2 for weapon development?....A band of terrorists?...no, they will just make some home-made bombs and blow shit up. A government?....who?....our government has enough money from us to buy expensive superior computers for that. Odd.
  • it also runs mame rather well too as well as a couple other emu's ... so any unix app that you might have should be easy to port if you have the know how....

    http://www.otakunozoku.com/ps2/index.html



    music the paint
    dancefloor the canvas
  • The potential for a rouge nation to

    I'm just curious as to what a "rouge nation" is, one entirely ruled by cosmetics salesladies?
  • Great. So, with the QNX crypt cracker, can I get root on a missle?
  • This export restriction should not be taken too seriously. It's just that the PS2's computing power is too much for old guidelines which designate everything above a certain line as "super computer". It was (is?) the same with the G4: too powerful -> super-computer -> dangerous.
    And there are exceptions to this rule. If you take equipment worth 50.000 Yen (about $450) or less out of the country yourself, it's perfectly legal. The PS2 costs 40.000 Yen. I'll be doing just that, next Saturday. They probably panic more on the electric circuits in my carry-on. Knowing it's legal, it will quite fun to see if/how anybody will react.
    BTW, if you took an laptop with an SSL-enabled browser with you (without the intention to bring it back) you'd break the very same law.
  • Havn't you seen Toys?
  • And how is the parent post a troll?

    Do moderators read past the first sentence?

    Come on, some of you moderators are worse than the trolls, in terms of making it hard to read good posts.

  • I agree - sounds like a good marketing ploy.

    But how are they going to back down - will Sony claim it's not much better than anything else, or the government say they made a mistake and it's crap after all ?

  • Well, yeah. But that graphics processing involves some serious SIMD action, and I reckon SIMD instructions are also used in image recognition.
  • I think you mean Hanlon's Razor [tuxedo.org].
  • Well, crypto isn't the only reason supercomputers are restricted - military and nuclear simulations exist, too. In fact, the latter two reasons are probably a more direct threat to national security than China trying to crack a 1024-bit encryption key. And those same applications are extremely floating-point intensive, which just happens to be the forte of the Emotion Engine.

    Typical teraflop supercomputers use several thousand CPUs - 825 standard-issue 300Mhz Emotion Engines would break 5 Teraflops (recall that the French Atomic Energy Commission just purchased an Alpha supercomputer with 5 teraflop performance and it required 2,000 1.25Ghz chips). Since the Emotion Engine has relatively few transistors and a fairly low clockspeed, getting high yields shouldn't be a problem, and it is cheap to produce. Remember, Sony builds the entire Playstation 2 for about $550, and with the .18 micron process that cost will decrease considerably, to probably much less than $200 per chip. A mere 250 CPUs would be needed if the EE were running at a 1Ghz clockspeed.

    Yes, in the wrong hands, the Emotion Engine could present a very real threat to governments.
  • it is, you know....
    --

    A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

  • get yerself an alpha or a K7. more floating point performance and bang for the buck + an open spec and chipset. and commodity boards can get you supercomputer performance without extensive mods.
  • DSPs/FPGAs are better suited to the task of image processing than any psuedo modified gaming console video processor that has to be rverese engineered and taken out of the board without breaking its leads. this is probably a tactic by sony to kill the grey export market.
  • The threat of "dual use" technology, i.e., technology that is commercial but could be adapted for military purposes, has been around for a long time.

    However, in our *brave new world*, the international buying and selling of advanced technologies is an extremely large and important market to highly industrialized economies. It is interesting to note that The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) was disbanded in early 1994. COCOM was established to keep advanced technologies from being transferred to an expanding Soviet regime. The abolishment of COCOM was an obvious message from the Clinton Administration that after the fall of the Soviet Union, a policy of export denial would be doing more harm than good. In todays world, the diffusion of technology can no longer be controlled.

    The best possible policy for highly industrialized economies is the management of the purposes for which the technologies they gave birth to are used. The connection between computers and weapons development is overplayed anyways. Remember, the United States designed the first nuclear bomb without a computer. ;-)
  • This Playstation is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it...
  • another government of people who fear and fail to understand technology.

    Not to mention the fact that by bringing this up as an issue, the Japanese government is broadcasting this idea to everyone, bringing it into the awareness of all of the people who could/would possible try to use it as such (or, more realistically, something else equally as "dangerous") - people who might or might not have already known about it, but sure as heck do now.

    If they really didn't want people to use it as such, they could've come up with some other excuse, or just have forgotten the whole issue and let them slide. I mean, if you're dealing with missiles/nuclear weapons/stuff like that, you're dealing with expensive stuff and so I figure it wouldn't be out of your budget to have actually bought something made for that purpose rather than trying to buy a Playstation 2 and use it as your targeting device.

    I mean, come on people!
  • Heh, I'm sorry, but if they were to make the PS2 into a missile guidance system, they'd have to disassemble the unit to do so... somehow I think that whoever would be that desperate to get their hands on processors would find a cheaper or easier alternative.
    Besides which, how would I'd be pretty pissed if my new missiles didn't work because I didn't have a black CD in the drive and was too cheap to get a mod chip ;)

  • now the question is, can you still read this with the right voices?
  • This could be the work of the MPAA and not Sony. They playstations in Japan have a simple mechanism to disable region locking for DVD's. Essentially, you can play any DVD.

    How's this one for you conspiracy theorists?
  • Yes, but you'd think the Japanese government would be smarter then that. I'd expect that from Americans, possibly Brits, but Japanese? Idunno, maybe I'm just stereotyping. Damn subconscious racism.
    From a purely cultural perspective, though, you'd also expect them to be the government with the motto "Let's do whatever Sony tells us to do." I mean, where do you think all that Japanese protectionism came from, sound governing policy? They probably did it this way to avoid WTO sanctions.
  • At which point Sony promptly gets sued by Steve Jobs... [themes.org]
  • I got it working alright, they had a pretty good thing going, but they had to make it proprietary.

    I love my PS/2. I still use that noisy bulky keyboard. I love it :-)
    I used to confuse kids at school by swapping the keycaps around :-)
    -Paul

    The original PS/2 hellion ;-)

  • "What are we doing tomorrow, Hiboku?"
    "The same thing we do every day with our PS2, Jubai, try to take over the world."

    - overheard

    telnet://bbs.ufies.org
    Trade Wars Lives

  • You have total agreement from me. Sony has pulled so many marketing stunts just to get the PS2 in every media format possible. The amount of computers in this room is exponentially greater than in a bunch of video game consoles, because they're still just that: consoles. They are designed with one purpose in mind, to play awesome games with killer graphics. Maybe a bit of the 3D rendering mathematics could be used in a guidance system, but hell, there's way better open source physics modelling programs for munitions guidance. K, I'm done ranting.

    So everyone just sit back, keep your mind open to Slashdot and follow the media carrot. :-)

  • Did it hurt when your sense of humor was hacked away from your frontal lobe?

    k., just curious.

  • Please! Pray tell me where Joe D. Schmuck is going to get a rocket engine with enough boost to deliver several hundred kilos of high explosive material?


    Ebay? Edmund Scientific? Estes? Bin Laden? Russian Mob (via Ebay, of course)? That guy who strapped JATO bottles to his Chevy: where'd he get them?

    IIRC, cruise missiles are airbreathers: a small turbofan powers Tomahawk, smaller than what you'd find on a corporate jet like a Lear or Gulfstream.

    Ramjets and pulse jets are pretty simple to build from scratch but need forward motion (catapult, air drop) in order to initiate the combustion cycle.


    And don't give the line that he's gonna pack all of that boom into a cessna 182 and use it as a cruise missile ...


    An allusion to Mathias Rust?

    It doesn't have to be "boom". It could be chemical or biological.

    k.

    "Play-stay-shun"
  • Actually is called a reporter here.... :)

    errrr I mean air bag

  • Hmm, let's see now. What cannot be used as a missle guidance system... you're average toaster oven (altho' some have fancy digital timers in there, so that's open for government investigation), my white board (altho' it could be used in the construction of the missle itself), video tapes (altho' they can be used -- rather inventively -- to form radar absorbing material, but then again, so can asphalt)

    Hmm, it looks like everything can be used in one form or another as a weapon or weapon component. I guess we'll have to turn over everything and run around naked with our hands cut off. But then, what about that built-in water gun some of us have?

    In all seriousness, almost any computer electronics can be used to create weapon systems. Guidance systems are rather easy to build -- some model rocket shops can order a kit for you. (Of course, they are getting hard to find; just like 'G' engines.)
  • Ignoring the whole mod chip/plug mod arena and the often less then legal acts taken by those who posses them wouldn't a person rather use the playstation2 itself for the number cruncing? Why take the CPU (which as other posters have pointed out, if you are capable of removing a CPU for other uses and actually using it you could probably find other means of obtaining the CPU), why not make a CD with your app for number crunching and fill it with test data and have the output be directed to the screen (or if you are more inteligent use the built in modem of the PS2 and have it upload said info to your server). Now you can have a distributed system of PS2s crunching on your trajectories, all uploading as they finish.

    On the same note, I wish there was an easy way to develop for personal use for the playstation. I have seen the banned Playboy Game - which isn't a game at all, but allows the user to view pictures. What I wouldn't give to be able to put my own collection of digital picks on a burned CD and (heck I'd settle for the playboy engine) view the images. Sure, there are apps (even for linux) but they all require proprietary sony apps. Couldn't the bleem! guys put something together for this?
  • Can you clarify just how a powerful PS2 whose makers don't seem to be fighting off any dominating force in the gaming industry is being marketed like the uphil-fighting, often power-lacking apple mac?
  • They say it's "a potential weapons development platform" not that it would itself be used for the system in whatever you are shooting. The idea is old, (think back to why the US needed the second computer [yes the colosus was first]) to shoot big guns loaded with "dumb" ammo you need to calcualte trajectory for different sized/weighted ammunitions, explosive devices, and firing angles (as well as wind, temperature, etc...)

    So they are apparently worried that tom, dick, and or harry will have the smarts to create a powerful gun - so powerful that they would need to know trajectories - but apparently in all of their engineering skills and needed tools to create such a gun they don't have access to your (or someone else's) 8086 via ebay and enough time to wait for the numbers.
  • Oh, and not to pick on Japan, because Sony is part of the Entertainment Trust, which, in this country, has managed to successfully equate content control with "anti-piracy" and has judges going along with it.

    Can you please elaborate?

    --

  • Can you say "Media Stunt"? <BR><BR>
    I'm sure that Sony's VAIO's have passed the same threshold of processing power, this is just the biggest opportunity for Sony to push a product, like Apple's commercials with the tanks only with the government's help.
  • Sorry. It just sounded socialist, because it was advocating socialist ideas. Heh. This ain't no joke. This be an "lovin' fork" pointed in your general direction.
  • I hereby nominate your post for the Random Socialist-NWO Advocate of the Day Award.

    Heh. Joke.
  • How is that possible? Is there CAD software for the PSII? Is someone going to export one of these, then write some, then use it to design a missle? Why not buy a missle from Russia, or just go to the US, and get a damn computer.

    Decisions like these are made by government idiots who look at the specs and say "hmm... such-and-such megaherz, we'd better not let people export it!"

    fools!
  • My thoughts exactly. It cuts out importers.

    Look for Sony to offer them direct of the net with a legal disclaimer that reads: "I live in the us and won't return my PS/2 to japan in the form of a cruise missle".


    ___

  • PSX2? (Score:1)

    by cot ( 87677 )
    I always thought people referred to the playstation as "PSX" for some reason. Now people are calling it the "PS2" rather than the "PSX2".

    I guess somehow three letter acronyms are sexier than two (PS) or four (PSX2).

    Now we really know why BSD is better than LINUX. Five letters, and it isn't ever really an acronym! Yuck...
  • From what I read, the Japanese gov't isn't worried about anyone using the PS2 as a development platform for missle guidance systems, but rather as a component in them. The graphics processor in it is powerful enough that it could be used as the image processing unit in a missle guidance system. That's why they are worried. Also, it's only exports over $432 USD or somewhere around there that are covered by the restriction. So you can technically export just one for yourself, but one for you and one for your buddy won't fly.
  • Anyone know of any Linux (or generaly open) missile guidance and control systems? I have seen some stuff using PIC chips and accellerometers(sp??!) but that costs lots of money. What about having a program that models what the thrust should be and predicts its course reliably with just some simple optical or strain gauges as backup?
    An almost purely ballistic system, yet with enough accuracy that the course can be modeled to provide a simple sequencer for dodging around obstacles.
    Would this be dreaming to expect enough mapping between a simulation and a real launch to get a very small payload into orbit?

    cya,Andrew...

  • maybe i'm just being paraniod, but doesn't it just seem like the japanese government is helping sony protect their own interests by stoping export? sony would be protecting their profits in the united states and elsewhere by keeping the japanese ps2 in japan. the question is, do large corporations really have that much control over the japense government? i guess i could see the US congress cutting a deal for certain american corps

    ---

  • What the hell do you mean first cheap but powerful game machine. Consoles have always seemed "powerful" when they first are released. The N64 was created with SGI, for cryin' out loud!

    This is just another bad news article beatup.

    (And why am i replying to a 0?)

  • 1. The Playstation2 is a game console. It's supposed to spit out a bunch of images, not take in a feed from a camera like a missile and analyze the stream.

    2. Japan IS allowing these consoles to be leaked to the US, just not in large quantities, one per person, but how many do you really need if you just want to build a bunch of rockets with'em?

    3. Why is the US the only country where the export is forbidden to?

    I think this calls for a war! :)

    It would be funny to one day find out that NASA used the Playstation as a component of the lander:)

  • Come on people, lets be serious here. The excuse that it could be used as a military tool is just a cover. Everyone knows that the Japanese government and the Japanese buisnesses are very closely tied. (moreso then america) This is just a plot to get more money out of us. They fear that if too many people export then they wont buy the other region releases.

    Sony says "hey! too many people are exporting ps2s and selling them" (as the demand is super-high.) Then they re-sell them at an inflated price and sony is unable to get the profits from selling to the person in the states.

    yes, this logic is highly flawed, but since when have big buisnesses/government made sense?

    They dont literally mean that they are afraid people are going to start a war with ps2s.. they just want to save the profit margins of Sony.

  • I remember when as a apoolboy I imported a Amiga 500 (wow!) machine into the then Apartheid South Africa... Was that a mission - the UK government wanted to know the same thing!

    What did thay expect me to do with the thing!

    I guess it could have been seen as an instrument of mass destruction, since I learned to program BASIC on it. (Which was then written by Microsoft incedentally)

    This makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

    I feel like taking a trip to Japan...

    -giggle-
  • I find this odd, since before the release of the PS2, the AMERICAN government was (quite stupidly) talking about restricting the overseas sales of PS2s. This was, of course, stupid, sincme the PS2s were made in *JAPAN* for sale in *JAPAN* so they couldnt very well slap any export laws on it

    The PS2 really isnt all that powerful, really. It just doesnt have the overhead that a comparable-power PC has to worry about.

    IIRC, the processor is what, a 400?

    ----
    Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
  • >>That guy who strapped JATO bottles to his Chevy: where'd he get them?

    That happens to be an urban legend. The guy who strapped weather balloons to his lawn chair and reached several thousand feet, on the other hand, is real.
  • I don't think I can blame them. Whatever leverage they can use to sell thier stuff.
    At least they are not using monopoly tactics *cough* No description needed *cough* - I mean,
    if our corps play dirty why should anyone else fight fair. Isn't SONY going to be in serious
    competition with Microsoft's X Box? I can picture the commercials now.. stuff blowing
    up and some serious graphics action sequences (probably with MTV style generic
    techno music blaring in the background) and some kind of funny slogan mocking the export restriction.
  • This stikes me as _extremely_ funny. For some strange reason, Japan/Sony thinks that stopping the exportation will keep "certain" countries from developing WMD. BULL-SH1T! Granted, the PS2 is a powerful machine, but it would have to be seriously modified in order to guide a missile, hell, a PALM Pilot could _feasably_ do the job. But you must consider the amount of resources that would have to put into "porting" the device to operate a missile or rocket of some sort. This is paranoia in its purest form. -Commiez are the least of our worries-
  • HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

    GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR



  • I think you're right about this being a tactic to strangle the grey-market importers. It's absurd for anyone to think that Sony would be at the mercy of ANY Japanese law. Sony Power-owns that whole country and certainly enacted this law in its own best interest.



    Seth
  • As someone said twentysomething years ago about video games, the soldiers of the future ae training themselves, one quarter at a time.
  • It just occurred to me that this could be an act of collusion between Sony and the Japanese government, in order to provoke more excitement for Sony before it goes to export: that a few political leaders push to restrict export, which creates a considerable amount of mystique for the product. Thinking that this could be military grade in its processing power is going to make a lot of people very excited.

    So after a little show 'wrangling,' the politicians who sponsored the objection back down, and the export of PS2 goes forward to everyone's excitement - the orders fly in, and everyone's happy.

    Just a little healthy paranoia.

  • The PlayStation 2 is considered a weapons development platform by the Japanese government.

    The Sega Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64 aren't.

    Which would you rather have, kids?

    -jon

  • Seriously, I am trying to figure out the possibility of turning these (or the chips in them) into some other purpose. My particular case would be for sceintific computing. Would it be "practical"? I have not heard much on them, other than they have insane performance, and I heard once they have a very small instruction set (a RRISC?), but I have not seen anything else. Anyone have some good info?

  • Reuters Tokyo -- In a surprise move today Iraq citizens are flying to Japan in droves, each one buying one Sony Playstation 2, game consoles recently classified by the Japanse government as potential weapons development platforms, and returning immediately home to Iraq.

    One Iraqi citizen, when asked why this was happening, told this reporter about how Saddam Hussien is paying for each round trip ticket and each game console. He also spoke of rumors about a massive underground bunker where these consoles were being collected and tied together in a "Baywolf Cloister".

    Saddam Hussein is apparently taking this designation seriously. High level Japanese politicians claimed the designation was just made to help Sony raise the price of the units in foriegn markets: if it was harder to export then the massive electronics corporation could justify the extra cost to consumers.

    A Sony spokesman remarked, "While the computing power of our Playstation 2 console is impressive, a normal desktop personal computer would aid better in weapons development unless you want to play Crash Bandicoot on your Tomahawk missile."

    Former US General Schwartzkoph said, "That's something we need to be looking into. Our men and women get really bored out there on those ships, maybe if we had more entertainment it would raise morale. That's why we couldn't kill Saddam, he plays more games then us."

    -- iCEBaLM
  • Maybe one day lawmakers will put a Moore's law trailer on their 'supercomputer' bills so we won't see crap like this anymore, though I'm sure the people at Sega are getting more than a chuckle out of this. I hate to defend megaconglomerates like Sony, but this could hurt their chances with the American market and in the end consumers have the most to lose.

  • Well, we now have Apple G4's considered weapons (I don't know how, but oh well) and a gaming station from Sony not allowed to be exported because it could act as a weapons system...

    So now both a desktop computer for graphic junkies (mac people are fanatics) and a gaming station for quake junkies (equally fanatical plus they have weapons training and bloodlust) are both able to purchase machines that are considered weapons.

    <sarcasm>What the hell is this world coming to? Screw gun control, we're now putting dangerous hardware in the hands of crazy radicals!!!</sarcasm>
  • Because, you know, if you're going to wipe out humanity with a massive nuclear strike, you're going to want to be able to get in a few rounds of the next Tekken while you do so!
  • Think about the economics of the situation.

    Most of the time, countries support exports, and often like to put restrictions on imports to protect the stuff they have at home.

    In this case, Japan is being rather oppressive and is restricting exports, hurting a company within their domain! There is no justification for this at an economic level. Whenever foreign money wants to buy your stuff, it's favorable to your country and corporations.

    I believe you've all dissected the "weapons" BS as well. Truly pathetic from Japan on all levels. A country that actively and purposely hurts its citizens. I normally don't see that.

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

  • Japanese gov't and business are tied together much more closely than in the US. This looks to me like a play by Sony to try and make sure not too many of the consoles make it out of Japan before the real release.
  • okay.. all this is is sony, and the japanese government blocking the exporting of more than one psx2 unit out of the country (the article explicitly states 2 due to the minimum $ amount being 475$ for exporting restrictions)

    right.. so what this does is effectivly stop grey importing of units en masse, personal exporting is still possible. as soon as they are ready to do a us/world release.. the japanese government will sign the piece of paper which allows sony to export them at will, until then sony wish to stifle the grey import market in order to get more money from shipping the 'real' console, rather than the importers (ie they can sell more of the console at a greater cost on release).

    who controls who? the government or the multinational?

    its not about munitions.. its about blocking grey imports.. expect the dolphin from nintendo to fall under exactly the same controls when it comes out in 18mths or so...

  • While I'm not inclined to overestimate the intelligence of the Japaneese Gov't (or any other) the simple fact that the whole ruling deals with real property, not intellectual property shows that Sony could get around it by simply exporting the design to another point of manufacture, if they wished to sell it abroad. Therefore, whatever their motives, Sony is obviously FOR the injunction.


    TangoChaz

    --------------------
  • now all we have to do is hijack a plane to japan, grab a couple playstations and brandish them in front of us as we head to a plane destined for Cuba.

    "Stand back or Solid Snake's gonna put a cap in your ass!!"

    This is going to start a X-mas revolt in the states "Mom...you got me an X box instead of a PSX2??? ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS???? SOMEBODY GET ME A FUCKING GUN!!!!"


    FluX
  • Playstation 2 as a weapons platform? HA!

    Video games... promoting violence??? What kinda crack is the Japanese government smoking?!

  • Finally, a game system that lets you get some real work done!
  • And then there's Rainbow 6 teaching potential terrorists techniques to get bye anti-terrorist groups...;) wink wink
  • It doesn't have graphics processing hardware, it has graphics rendering hardware; so I really don't see how this could be used for much of anything else.

    --
  • I think craw made a good point regarding this, though it's hard to tell if he made a point at all. "All this crap has already been covered here when the specs of the PSII was first revealed. All of this was covered during discussion about Wassenaar (limits on theoretical operations per second).".

    It's possible the Japanese are simply afraid of breaking the Wassenaar agreement (or somebody is), by releasing a console with enough computing power to do standard DES encryption at 128 bits or higher.

    The PS2 may, though I don't know, already have the DES algorithm hardwired to authenticate Sony games, and therefore the new ability to program the unit easily would result in a very simple way to encrypt beyond the limits allowed for export.

    These news reporters always get things like this wrong, or lie about the information they receive for ratings. I'm sure encryption is important in the guidance of tomahawk missles, perhaps the anonymous author of the article at Reuters limited (a respected journalism firm?) simply misused a quote.

    Journalist train of thought:

    "And why is the hardware of the Playstation 2 a threat"
    "It contains encryption algorithms which break export regulations, and which are easily programmable"

    [hmm, that's boring]
    "And what is encryption used for?"
    "Everything from credit card authentication to guiding tomahawk missiles"

    That's where your news comes from.

  • well, any computing device could be used for 'Bad Things'tm. any desktop, laptop, handheld, whatever

    i mean, hell, i can use my calculator watch to calculate the correct angle at which to shoot my 'Real-Shitty-Ballistic-(nonpropelled)-Missile'tm.. .

    i dont know. seems whack to me. another government of people who fear and fail to understand technology.

  • Oh great, recruiting the next generation of super soldiers from the ranks of teens who spend too much time playing video games.

    Where's my pong, dammit?

  • It's Appropiate (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16, 2000 @01:04PM (#1129063)
    It's been bombing since it's been released.

    thank you.
  • ... Get the Japanese government to enforce a weapons order on the export of >=2 PS2's, and you effectively cut out *all* foreign importer shops who would be willing to buy a bunch in Japan and sell them for $600 here in the US. In other words, only individuals can buy 'em directly from Japan, one at a time.

    I bet we won't see this one get sorted out any time soon - at least not until after the US launch of the PSX2.
  • You won't even want to consider using a CPU from a consumer product because they're not harden for military use. One good warm sunny day or a sudden change in temp from going 70F to -60F in the upper atmosphere and pop, the missile's brainless. Most CPUs in satellites and even the space shuttle are no more powerful than 486s because it takes at least 5 years of extra developement to get a processor redesigned and tested for such environmental extremes, plus they don't need to be anymore powerful. Read a few inertial devices etc. for positioning, recompute the correction and turn the fins.
  • Total floating point performance: 6.2GFlops at 300Mhz, or roughly equivalent to a 1.5Ghz Athlon.

    Yeah, so it does kick-arse floating point, but the performance less than a factor of two better than what a bog-standard Athlon - provided you can write code that uses the chip to its full potential (and, given the brief description above, that's probasbly quite a challenge).

    In any case, floating point is totally irrelevant for code-cracking, which is the basic reason governments restrict supercomputers.

  • Narf! (Score:3)

    by suss ( 158993 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @01:52PM (#1129067)
    "What are we going to do tomorrow, Brain?"
    "The same we do every day, Pinky, try and take over the world!"
    "Now stop playing those games on our weapons development platform Pinky!" "Narf!"

  • Re:Are there any HARD specs on this thing? (Score:4)

    by Gary C King ( 34445 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @03:39PM (#1129068)
    It's a modified (aka, reduced) MIPS III instruction set with 128-bit registers and multimedia extensions (PADD, PMUL, etc).

    The main chip has the standard-issue 1xFMAC and 1xFDIV floating point unit.

    Additionally, there are two more coprocessors: VU0 and VU1. VU0 can run in independent or MIPS coprocessor mode (typically used in MIPS coprocessor mode) with 1xFDIV and 3xFMAC. VU1 can only run in independent mode, and adds an elementary function unit (1xFDIV, 1xFMAC) to its standard 1xFDIV and 4xFMAC. VU1 has its own internal instruction and data cache

    Total floating point performance: 6.2GFlops at 300Mhz, or roughly equivalent to a 1.5Ghz Athlon.

    The EE is currently fabricated on a .25 micron process, but Sony just finished development of .18 micron fabs for EE production. Once volume production is started, and the initial Playstation 2 lauch hysteria dies down (early 2001 in the US/Europe, probably), multimedia and scientific computers based on faster Emotion Engines will be released. The workstation model should have 4 parallel Emotion Engines running at a slightly higher clockspeed (better than 25GFlop performance).

    Basically, as long as you're doing floating point operations, this chip would rock.

  • Re:why this has nothing to do with weapons (Score:4)

    by ronfar ( 52216 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @04:36PM (#1129069) Journal
    Absolutely,

    This is similar to the Apple commercial with the tanks.

    The fact is Sony is willing to use whatever FUD tactics it can to control it's profit base.

    Just about any advanced circutry can be converted to weapons use... if you are from a country that doesn't have the advanced circutry. This is why, in the 80's the Russians were buying handheld Pac-Man games to study the technology. It didn't mean that the Pac Man machines were "dangerous weapons" it just meant that the Russians were really badly behind, technology-wise. The PS2 might be more powerful than, say, the stuff they have in Afganistan, but then so is the average laptop. It is certainly not more powerful than what we have in the US... scary to see marketing hype accepted as fact by the government of Japan.

    So, Sony goes to the Japanese government and tells them, "We don't want any Sony Playstation 2s to be exported out of the country before they are released in other countries. Say it is because they might be used for dangerous weapons." The government of Japan says, "Yes sir, may we clean your shoes while we're at it?"

    Sony gets free publicity, and maximum level security to prevent their valuable toys from getting out of the country.

    Oh, and not to pick on Japan, because Sony is part of the Entertainment Trust, which, in this country, has managed to successfully equate content control with "anti-piracy" and has judges going along with it. Compared to Sony, Micros~1 are just amateurs.

    It amazes me that people are still probably going to buy from a company that is this despicable and has had such a corrupting influence on the government of its own country and our country. Sigh... the power of advertising, I guess.

  • The (flawed) reasoning (Score:4)

    by Spiff28 ( 147865 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @02:04PM (#1129070)

    The linked article has an example about how the graphics processing capability is so great that it would be suitable in the head of a tomahawk missile that needs to 'see' where it's going. While everyone in /. is going to be cracking jokes about this (speak softly and carry a palm pilot with missile guidance), someone tell me, please, how feasible is this?

    No really, I'm asking. I'm not technically proficient enough to dissassemble a PS2, nor do I know how its innards work. I am no circuitry expert, just a Geek who's not afraid to take a peek.

    I'll tell you why I think this is wrong, so you guys tell me where it is I'm screwing up. Japan woke up and noticed that, well gee, consoles are getting damn powerful. They're (once again) just about on par with PC's. Apparently, they're also just about on par with the tech inside of a tomahawk missile's guidance system. The tomahawk needs to be able to quickly process where it's at, so it's gotta do image recognition, which is no easy feat. Well, it wasn't anyway.

    Now all of a sudden a playstation's circuitry could supposedly in some half-ass way be re-wired to do this task. So all the terrorist needs now is.. all the rest... casing, explosives, triggers, fuel, launchers.

    Gee ya know, I'd think if someone had access to those resources they'd have access to a CPU. Actually.. aren't CPU's right now about the same in terms of raw computing power as the next-gen consoles? Hey, ya know, those things cost just slightly more too. Hey and they don't have customn circuitry to futz with either, they're general purpose things. Wouldn't be too hard to get a little CPU/Mobo/Linux missile guidance system (heh), at least no less than it would to rip out the innards of a customn designed system.

    It's a given that this is FUBAR, but the question is are we going to start seeing more of this? Wouldn't surprise me. PC's have a huge consumer market and a ton of people like us to drive software and hardware development forward. Military? Once it works, it works, why bother upgrading?

    So... talk amongst yourselves

  • PS2? (Score:5)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @01:11PM (#1129071)
    How many (other) people thought "PS/2? A weapons platform? I can't even get the microchannel support working!"

    Please, call it something else, or I'll be confused forever!

    (even "Sony PS2", as opposed to "IBM PS/2"...)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].

  • why this has nothing to do with weapons (Score:5)

    by nocent ( 71113 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @02:57PM (#1129072)
    this is an agreement between the japanese government and sony to restrict distribution of the ps2 worldwide before sony are ready to do so, plain and simple. it has nothing to do with the potential weapons abuse.

    the key is the last sentence in the telegraph article:

    "Sony said it did not expect the restrictions to affect PlayStation 2's release in other countries."

    So, the technology inside is the same, still could be misused as they claim but soon it will be legal to be exported for the sole reason that it will be distributed by sony and not some third party. if this were truly a weapons concern, wouldn't you think that they would restrict sony from releasing it in other countries as the US once did for crypto?
  • Using my own experiences playing Swat 3 and Half Life, not to mention Super Tecmo Bowl on the original Ninetendo, I can safely say that the potential for the Playstation to be used as a passive weapon is quite real.

    Think of it: I spent countless hours playing computer games when I should have been doing Calc II. The potential for a rouge nation to dump millions of playstation 2 systems into the US threatens the very viability of the US GDP.

    Look at the recent declines in the stock market. They come very close on the heels of the Playstation 2's introduction. A coincidence..hardly.

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