Sony Releases PS3 3.61 Update Ahead of PSN's Imminent Return 233
Sonny Yatsen writes "Sony has released the PS3 3.61 firmware update as a part of the phased return of the Playstation Network and Qriocity. The new update now requires all PSN users to change their passwords in order to sign back into the PSN service." And several readers are pointing to reports that the network is slowly being spun up. Snips one anonymous submitter: "Sony Japan told customers today that it would begin phased restoration of its services of its beleaguered Playstation Network which has been suffering from an outage for nearly a month. The company would start bringing back its gaming network this Sunday, on a country-by-country basis, and expects it to be completed by May 31."
The problems go much deeper (Score:5, Interesting)
There are reports today that Sony's networks still are oblivious to real security [reuters.com]. Among the serious vulnerabilities are links to globally viewable security consoles in robots.txt files, ID web-management consoles being publicly available and indexed in Google, and more!
I guess the upside is that if the hackers are going to get your credit card from Sony, they already have it so you may as well play your games too.
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I think the upside is for Nintendo because this is great advance marketing of their new system.
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Nintendo will need to seriously overhaul their model for online interactivity before they could even be placed in the same ball park as XBL and PSN. As it is, they could not use the Wii's present level of online interactivity on the new console and hope to welcome in PSN refugees. They'd all sooner hop over to XBL.
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I would bet big that Nintendo's new system will not include optional Linux. No one will be touching that feature in a long time.
And yet, I have yet to hear / read (until your comment) that is was OtherOS which caused this.
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Ohh I don't think the attack had anything to do with OtherOS. My statement says nothing of the sort. Apparently, a lot of people believe that this attack was revenge for removing Linux. I believe Nintendo will not want to offer a feature that has such a large backlash if they remove it. Especially a feature their customers are not likely to use.
Nintendo won't want to offer that as a feature because it has nothing to do with gaming.
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More like a *lack* of OtherOS.
Face it - was the PS3 the most secure console? After all, the Wii and Xbox360 have been "hacked" to some extent (piracy and/or homebrew), but the PS3 was "secure".
Then in 2009 Sony releases the Slim PS3. Sometime in 2010, the PS3 is completely hacked, which if you go by when the Slims without OtherOS get hacked, happened around 12 months later. And this is a complete pwnage - all secur
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Why would Sony make a move which would lead to *fewer* sales because a competitor "complained"?
s/competitor/supplier/
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I would bet big that Nintendo's new system will not include optional Linux. No one will be touching that feature in a long time.
Anyone paying attention would understand that the lesson from all this is the opposite: By offering Linux, Sony put off the day when people broke the PS3 for several years. Their biggest mistake was not giving Linux full access to the hardware, because it caused people to have to break their security in order to do that, which is what kicked off this whole mess.
The fact is that there are people who will do whatever it takes to install Linux on anything they own. If you give them what they want at the outset
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My Wii has Other OS function. Don't know what you're talking about.
Granted, it wasn't built in, but its a awful lot trickier to take away too.
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Too late I think.
An outage like this one will cause more than a few to rethink why they spend so much time gaming online. Perhaps the issue may serve a higher purpose and get folks out doing something else.
I'm very curious to see how many will cancel their accounts with SOE after this, and of those, how many will be better off for it.
Re:The problems go much deeper (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps the issue may serve a higher purpose and get folks out doing something else.
Yes, like playing D&D, which, of course, doesn't require any connection - only a steady supply of pizza! ~
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or maybe holier than thou assholes like yourself will simply kill yourselves over the fact that not everyone gives a shit about whatever it is that you do with your time.
.... said the guy who spent his Saturday anonymously flaming people on Slashdot.
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Note that the the report says some of these are already fixed.
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The upside for everyone else - Wii, Xbox, PC - is that they've been playing their games this entire time.
I've been playing my PS3 games for the entire outage without it affecting me in the slightest.
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I've been playing my PS3 games for the entire outage
This is true of disc games. But it's not true of a few PSN games published by Capcom that require logging in to PSN before playing as a way to crack down on what Capcom believes to be excessive "game sharing".
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I've been playing PS3 games this whole time, just not online. The same applies to my XBox since I refuse to buy Gold membership, but I will start playing on PSN again once it comes back.
I'm not going to apologize for Sony and say that they are not incompetent in online security, but this will not quell my interest in PS3 any more than Sony's other numerous blunders, because I still believe that PS3 is a great piece of consumer electronics. As a software guy, I have always known Sony are a bunch of guys who
Re:The problems go much deeper (Score:4, Informative)
Great. Keep giving your money to these assholes.
The ethical thing to do is to boycot them. Rootkits, pulling otheros, suing customers, this stuff won't stop so long as there are sociopaths like yourself giving them money.
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I will start playing on PSN again once it comes back
You mean you still trust them to keep your personal data, even now?
PS3 owners have two equally shitty choices:
A) Don't trust Sony and forgo PSN premium features, download-only games, DLC etc.
B) Give Sony your (new) credit card number and hope they don't leak it this time.
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I feel that there's a market for added security credit cards.
Not being able to buy things online is a pretty significant inconvenience, but putting your information in the hands of vendors with completely unknown security measures means you're gambling everytime you buy from someone new.
I love the virtual credit card numbers offered by citibank and discover. I wish someone would take this service to the next level with purchase approval cards. The card gets swiped, the owner gets texted, and replies to the
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What gamble? If someone uses your card for unauthorized purchases you call up the card company, they cancel the charges and issue you a new card. The most you are charged is $50, but most banks don't even charge that. It's a minor inconvenience waiting for your new card to arrive, but not dangerous unless you don't pay attention to your statements and end up with ruined credit.
If anyone is gambling it is the vendors that accept credit cards, because they are the ones that are out money and product if there
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Recharge time. Duh.
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Not to mention that Slashdot doesn't ask for CC numbers.
Phase in schedule posted (Score:2)
Playstation Blog [playstation.com]
Why is the whole network linked to credit cards? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems a big failure on design. If I designed a credit card payment system I would have it only be active in the portion of the network that required people to pay for something.
So... your playstation comes online and you want to sign in and play a game. Ok, the console has been authorized before it should be able to send a token saying "I'm whois let me play games."
In fact, PSN shouldn't really care who you are unless you're trying to buy something. Buying something and playing a game are two fundamental
Re:Why is the whole network linked to credit cards (Score:5, Insightful)
You got to love arm chair systems architects. Every thing is easy peasy and obvious. Simple answer is:....
Management has no idea how things work. So they turn everything off at once during a breach. And turn everything back on in small steps with tons of testing along the way. It is a best practice as old as computing.
Re:Why is the whole network linked to credit cards (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, PSN shouldn't really care who you are unless you're trying to buy something.
Or unlocking Trophies, or listening if you're receiving messages from other players, or setting the status of what game you're playing, or to check whether or not you've got game invites periodically...
Oh, wait...
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Which of those activities has anyone ever been forced to do?
In western civilization, ~2011, making something attractive is the same as forcing someone.
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Does free will exist?
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and it's not as if there's some sort of way you could relate information across various databases, in some sort of relational fashion that would make his complaint somehow completely baseless.
Oh wait...
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Has it actually been confirmed (by Visa, Mastercard, or Sony) that credit card numbers were stolen? Not just anecdotes -- we'd expect a few of the millions of PSN customers to be victims of ID theft anyway.
At least it happened to Sony (Score:2)
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That's what they get for not reading Slashdot...
Feature, not bug. All us non-functioning hi-IQ types have fucked this place up enough, what happens if the hoi polloi show up?
Oh, yeah, that [facebook.com].
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That's what they get for not reading Slashdot...
Well, to be fair, if they were reading Slashdot they'd hate a lot more things undeservedly.
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Anyone ever told you you're an arrogant, condescending douchebag? Frankly, it's none of your fucking business who any person wants to conduct business with, and if anyone deserves to suffer it's a jerkwad who thinks that just because a person chooses to deal with Sony (possibly because they don't give a shit about OtherOS or George Hotz) then they are apathetic fools deserving of righteous suffering.
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Spot on.
Ill go further. Its good when average people who are blissfully ignorant get some of the Sony treatment. Maybe now they will understand and stop giving these jerks money.
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There are no innocents, only those who are apathetic. If you're still putting money into Sony's pockets after the crap they've pulled then you are part of the problem and deserve to suffer along with Sony.
Among the 70 million PSN account holders there are, I would imagine, quite a few in a mood to rake the geek and the hacker over the coals.
Far from apathetic.
But simply sharing a different set of values and priorities.
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If you're still putting money into Sony's pockets after the crap they've pulled then you are part of the problem
Then how do you recommend that I find a grocery store that doesn't play Sony Music over its speaker system and therefore doesn't put money in Sony's pocket?
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I am not in favor of the innocent users becoming victims, but if this happened to any company, at least it happened to Sony. There are few companies that deserve this more than Sony.
It's not even really a case of 'deserving' it. They created ill-will with a group of people, and those people retaliated. In the short term, a lot of people are getting burned by the outage. Looking at the big picture, however, Sony will have to think long and hard about whether or not to remove features in the future.
What the 'hackers' did was criminal and not justifiable. They should not have done this. (I bet somebody replies without having read this bit.) But if Sony shows any wisdom at all, they'
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Wait, who's responsible?
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This whole thing got started because that is entirely incorrect you fucking moron. Sony got what they deserved, and hard. Chances are, it'll happen again.
Deal with it.
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You do know that there are developers who makes games for a living right?
Not everything is homebrew. Thanks to Sony's actual openness, I have Portal 2 for Steam.
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You don't know the meaning of the term.
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You don't seem to understand that the world isn't this black and white, good versus evil struggle where it's either all open or NOTHING.
Do you really want to get the firmware details for your toaster? Or do you really expect a JTAG port so you could hack your microwave's microcontroller?
I mean seriously. Get over yourself. It's a freaking games console.
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Actually, yes. I'd love having either of those.
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Woosh.
Seriously. Locking out homebrewers isn't on the same level as apartheid. Are you fucking serious?
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Yes, yes I do.
Apartheid and segregation were horrible things that my people(Non-whites) went through during the 50's and 60's. I've got photos of my dad protesting at lunch counters in the south so they could fucking eat and ride the bus.
You're talking about privileged geeks being able to play nethack or run Apache so they could turn their PS3 into a webserver.
Fuck you. No, seriously fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
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You're the one sticking up for him and the really insensitive analogy, you're an asshole.
Differences in scales do invalidate analogies. PS3 devs have to pay big bucks to Sony(like any dev would to Nintendo and Microsoft) for dev kits and support, as well as a license to publish onto their platform.
Having a group of developers who are licensed for development and a group of developers who want to hack at a machine for fun isn't the same as having a Whites Only bathroom.
One's a matter of profession, the othe
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It is not a matter of profession, it is a matter of consumer rights. The right to use your property as you see fit. If you have to buy yourself into a right, then your right is being violated. If you buy a car from Ford, you don't need to purchase additional permission from them to use it in Canada instead of Mexico; it is your right to do so and they have no right to prevent it. If you purchase a laptop from lenovo, they have no right to tell you that you must run windows, it is your right as a consume
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What gives you the right to run homebrew on the PS3? What law, constitutional amendment or court case says that if you buy computer hardware, it must support homebrew? If they're violating those rights, why don't you sue them? If Lenovo chose to lock down the bios and the boot loader such that it only booted Windows(like say, Motorola does with certain Android phones), what law would they violate?
I'm not saying that hackers can't or shouldn't break into these systems, but what I am wondering is why do yo
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Some of us are mature enough to recognize that we have rights which are not yet necessarily codified into law. That you speak of laws when others speak of rights is very interesting, I wonder what your father would say about that.
This is irrelevant however since under US law consumers are legally permitted to use their computer hardware as they see fit. Its a right that is inherent in the entire legal concept of ownership. In this country we don't need laws specifically allowing actions, we only use laws
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Wow.
You're insane.
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Wow, you're a lunatic Sony apologist.
But I repeat myself...
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they let devs be incredibly open development wise.
ummm they actually got arse fucked for being the exact opposite of incredibly open development wise. But I doubt you will see it that way as you are really grasping at straws with your fanboism here, not even Microsoft come close to depths that sony have dredged in their extorting and screwing of consumers.
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Everybody knows Microsoft is evil. Its also offtopic.
The topic here is that Sony is evil, a fact that everybody here with a sense of rationality recognizes. Microsoft being evil in no way precludes Sony from also being evil.
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Not in reference to this thread. The root poster said that Sony deserves this. They don't. No one does.
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Sony deserved it, and morose than just about and other consumer products company currently in business. Even Microsoft would of course deserve similar.
What this really boils down to is u mad, and the rest of us are still laughing our asses off and hope it'll happen again. This entire episode for Sony has been fucking hilarious, and this thread even moreso. I am genuinely pleased as punch, and there isn't shit you can do about it.
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At long last sir, have you no sense of decency?
Seriously. Get some perspective and some empathy. If that was your workplace that got broken into and your customer data, you'd be singing a different tune.
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What about the fact that Microsoft shipped an OS that could be root kitted by a CD claiming to be red book audio?
I could tolchock you with a pipe wrench and steal your wallet, but the difference between me and Sony is that I won't.
Likewise, with Microsoft and the rootkit business.
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Err, sony hasn't hit me with a pipe wrench and stolen my wallet.
OTOH, I worked at two OEMs who had been threatened with revocation of Windows licensing deals if they shipped Linux, BeOS or FreeBSD.
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Is a game like Garou: Mark of the Wolves going to ever come out on PC(PC based arcade hardware not included) first over a console? No.
PC gaming is limited because it's so damn open you cant assume anything and have to build for the broadest possible configurations.
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I don't think so.
I think there's growth in the PC market but it's not going to keep up with the console market. PCs suck as a dedicated entertainment platform. Driver issues, performance issues, configuration issues, OS crashes, disk crashes, malware, etc. God no.
As far as over priced products, it's up to the consumer to decide what's overpriced and what isn't, and consumers are choosing consoles over PCs.
DRM has been a reality for gaming since the NES. Consumers are used to gaming DRM. Requiring onlin
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Two points.
First, I'm not idolizing the console, but the year 1999 was a good year for gaming. PSone had lots of good games, the N64 had lots of good games, and the Dreamcast had lots of good games. No one bitched about DRM and online was a pipe dream.
I still maintain the Sony Rootkit Fiasco is really the Microsoft Why Can Our OS Be Owned This Easily Fiasco(Seriously, had it been someone distributing malware on bootleg CDs you'd get from some shady guy at the swap meet for $2, every one would be screaming
Mod GP up (Score:2)
That's good, because he's not a troll. He's posting his opinion, as valid as any I have seen here. His delivery is arguably offensive (which would justify a flamebait mod), but it's far from the most offensive +5 post I've seen here. He should not be modded down.
Remember mods, you can't have a real discussion without an opposing side!
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This is a touchy subject for me because I've been on the other side of that, "HELP SOMETHING GOT BROKEN INTO ALL HANDS NOW" call and email chain late at night and on the weekend.
Wishing that on other people just smacks of having no sense of empathy or sense of decency. What the hell.
SOE games restored today (Score:2)
Sony's SOE games (the MMOs, such as EverQuest) have been down for 2 weeks. They brought them back online earlier today.
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Are Sony offering any kind of counselling for those poor addicted geeks' horrendous withdrawal?
Activating it per state (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm curious about is why do they re-activate the network per state [playstation.com].
As of right now, just California and a few New England states seem to be "online". One server per state? Sounds a bit odd.
Oh and the map is stored on Flickr. For a moment there I thought someone hacked their blog system too, and just posted faked-up "we're about to go live again" message.
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I'm guessing they are doing it for the purposes of load testing. They selected two high population regions of the country on opposite coasts. If the system gets overwhelmed, they can spin up additional resources.
Re:Activating it per state (Score:4, Funny)
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Probably something to do with being able to predict how much horsepower is needed.
So if california get up, and theres not enough horses, buy more horses for the server farm.
If everything goes online at the same time, the horses dies.
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Certainly several hundred if not thousand of severs per state, and likely spread across several major data centers, at least in the case of more populous states like Calif. Of course I'm just feeding what Sony is doing based on my experience with Second Life's racks of 1U servers as far as the eye can see...
Latency is a huge deal with gaming, so yeah, it makes perfect sense that it's per-state in some fashion.
Generalizing.. (Score:3)
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Much of the point of ChromeOS is that applications will have offline functionality. But don't let facts get in your way or anything. This seems familiar, did you post this same troll before?
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Frankly, I think far more people are still confused about what ChromeOS gets them that Android doesn't.
And Google is definitely moving Android in a direction of running on multitude of form factors, not just phones and tablets. If you plug in a USB mouse into a Honeycomb tablet, you get a good old mouse cursor and can fully interact with the OS that way. In 3.1, they're adding mouse hover and scroll events to the API. Its browser syncs bookmarks, history and other settings with Google servers (which in turn
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Frankly, I think far more people are still confused about what ChromeOS gets them that Android doesn't.
Well, that IS the actual objection to Chrome OS, isn't it?
So, what's the advantage of ChromeOS, again? I expected it to be price, but those laptops they've announced recently don't look all that cheap compared to the recent slew of Honeycomb tablets; so that can't be it.
There is none. I think anyone buying a Chrome OS device is a tard because Chrome OS and Android will probably eventually merge [eweek.com]. And who's more likely to get an update, an Android user or a Chrome OS user? Yeah, you got it in one.
Re:Generalizing.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Much of the point of ChromeOS is that applications will have offline functionality.
The HTML5 technologies that ChromeOS will use for offline functionality are really designed to synchronise with the original server. So when Google Docs or your network goes down, you will be able to keep working on your document. But if you want to take your document somewhere else — say take a copy home as a file on a USB stick — you can't. Exporting documents is done in the cloud, not by the browser, so your document is stuck on your machine. You just have to wait until Google Docs works again so it can sync back up and then export it.
That is almost exactly the same as the PS3 outage. The PS3 console and games continue to work as normal offline, but you can't play online and you can't switch to a competing provider of online games. In a major outage of Google Docs, your ChromeOS would continue to work as normal offline, but you wouldn't be able to take the document anywhere or give it to someone else — and you wouldn't be able to switch to a competing provider like Office Live — because your data is stuck in the Google cloud. One day Google may fix this, but at the moment you would be stuck.
The problem here is being reliant on one company. On a desktop computer with a full operating system you've got myriad alternatives and competing solutions for any problem. On the PS3 and ChromeOS you've got a very simple-to-use system that's normally all you need; but if it fails then you're stuck with no alternative.
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In a major outage of Google Docs, your ChromeOS would continue to work as normal offline, but you wouldn't be able to take the document anywhere or give it to someone else â" and you wouldn't be able to switch to a competing provider like Office Live â" because your data is stuck in the Google cloud. One day Google may fix this, but at the moment you would be stuck.
That depends on whether you already had an account on some service like syncplicity which backups your Google Docs in realtime.
Google has open APIs to your data, and that makes all the difference.
Re:Generalizing.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Much of the point of ChromeOS is that applications will have offline functionality.
The HTML5 technologies that ChromeOS will use for offline functionality are really designed to synchronise with the original server.
That's not true, Google is adding additional functionality to handle local file access. [cnet.com] Again, don't let the facts get in your way or anything.
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But people already have offline functionality. Why do they need ChromeOS to give it to them? To use the obligatory car analogy, selling ChromeOS is like selling a car that is designed specifically to run on interstate highways and advertising the fact that it can also run on some local roads as a "feature."
No, it is not. It's more like buying an EV. It does the same stuff a different way. It comes with its own complexities but it also comes with simplification where there is otherwise complication. Don't try to make car analogies, because you are bad at it and they are usually stupid anyway.
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ChromeOS does not provide the the same stuff in the different way. It provides less stuff in the same way as other systems. I can run an HTML5 browser an most any modern platform. Why in the world would i want to handicap myself for no good reason?
Most people are buying an SUV and then using it like a roadster, or what's worse, an econobox. If you get a SUV with good enough suspension or a small enough motor you can do those things (respectively) but not as well as the real thing. For the average computer user who never actually does anything outside their browser that couldn't be done as well inside of it (e.g. they might download from their digital camera or something) they are buying way too much computer.
See, "car" actually covers stuff like pick
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With ChromeOS, you're essentially taking the same hardware that could just about run a regular OS, and crippling it for no good reason except to save maybe $50.
Less functionality means less attack surface. It's true enough to be an axiom. A security hole is all the more annoying when it's in a component you don't even use.
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And initially, I was like: "Awesome! Want!" when Google announce ChromeOS..
I'm genuinely interested: what made you think "Awesome! Want!" with regards to an "OS" not on your own computer?
too late (Score:2)
EQ2 Servers are back up (Score:2)
EQ2 servers came up about 5pm PDT today.
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Yep, just got into the game even though I haven't subscribed for over 18 months.. looks like they've activated every account for the next 45 days.
What the fuck did they remove this time? (Score:2)
They removed the ability to play PS2 games, and the ability to boot OtherOS.
What this time?
The ability to plug in controllers?
The ability to play sounds?
The ability to do hi-def?
Each update seems to be a slow descent into brickdom.
Fuck!!! It's a Sony!!!
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Er...no, they didn't. If you bought a PS3 able to play PS2 games, it is still able to do so. Sony never took that ability away from any PS3 that had it.
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You are incorrect. There were two forms of PS2 backwards compat.
If your console was a REALLY early original, with hardware compatability, you can still play some PS2 games.
If your console was the second gen, with software compatability, they removed it.
Not Signing Back On (Score:2)
I've lost my patience with all the forced firmware upgrades, so I'm just not signing back on to the Playstation Network. All of my PS3 games are single player, which I've been able to play during the outage, so I'm just fine with never signing on to the PSN again. Aside from single player games, the only other use I have for a console nowadays is Netflix.
Essentially, the Playstation Network has nothing of value to me.
Don't buy Sony shit (Score:2)
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Indeed, you don't miss it until you don't have it. That reminds me, I need to polish up my Mortal Combat moves .
This is easy... (Score:2)
Maybe *you* don't know your password, but there is a good chance that the attackers can crack their copy of the hash and know your password. Resalting does precisely nothing because the danger is the attackers getting your password, and once they have that, any salt you apply will make no difference.
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I have a completely random password that even I don't even know. The password is saved in my PS3 somewhere.
How is it going to help anything if I change the password? Sony could just re-hash with a different salt the next time I login.
Ah, this sounds like the 1d-10-T problem that's been going around.
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I had hoped they would include the maritime provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunsiwck, PEI) in their definition of 'northeast', but, sadly, no. I'm in Nova Scotia and was only able to download the update.
Uhh, wouldn't that be southeast? Geez, you guys don't want to be our 52nd state (don't forget Puerto Rico) until there's a slim chance it might help you out.
Give us the Tim Horton's, you keep the French, and we'll see about that software update.