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MS Zone Users Must Use Passport Accounts

Posted by timothy on from the start-your-own-instead dept.

pathos writes: "CNet reports in this article that Microsoft, in its continued obsession to get everyone and his/her mother to be a registered Passport user, forced all of it's MS Zone gaming site users (including players of 'Asheron's Call') to open accounts in Passport in order to keep using the service... too bad that a bug with their .NET deployment kept many users not being able to access the service..." Of course, if you run the hotel, you get to say who uses the pool ...

3 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. My ignorance is outstanding.... by pi+radians · · Score: 3, Troll

    So when the XBox's online program comes out in 6 months, will the users have to do the same thing? I would assume so. Which is one of the reasons I will never get the XBox and why I shake my head at everyone that did. Tsk, tsk, tsk kids.

    --

    sin(6cos(r)+5A)
    1. Re:My ignorance is outstanding.... by swordboy · · Score: 3, Troll

      Which is one of the reasons I will never get the XBox and why I shake my head at everyone that did. Tsk, tsk, tsk kids.

      As patriotic as that sounds, the term "resistance is futile" comes to mind. Joe and Jane Consumer could give a shit. They just want to play their video games, watch Friends on Thursday night, and listen to the Backdoor Boys and Britney Spears. They could care less if that means having an MS Passport, submitting to TV viewing research and using Windows Media Format.

      They DON'T care!

      The problem is that there IS NO ALTERNATIVE. Sure PS2 and GameCube are there now but Xbox is just a friggin' PC. Xbox2 will just be another PC with the latest and greatest video and processor hardware. How can Sony and Nintendo compete with this? They can't... and they will die soon enough for Microsoft. Unless Sun/Apple/Sony/Linux Community get their collective acts together, MS will be the only practical solution.

      In the end, you will have a Passport or you will sacrifice a large chunk of convenience.

      Resistance is futile!

      --

      Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  2. What's your alternative? by Richard5mith · · Score: 3, Troll

    Everybody always likes to jump down Microsoft's throat every time they try and breathe. But please, stop for a second and get a grip on reality.

    Keeping up with the usernames and passwords for every account I have is a complete nightmare. I have hundreds of them, I can't remember them all, its nuts. Passport solves that problem by giving me one password to go along with my email address (that's my normal email address, not a Hotmail address).

    Now everybody seems to have plenty downsides to this convienence, most of which are uninformed rubbish (a site using passport doesn't suddenly get all my information, they only get the information I want them to have for instance) - some of it important (if I break the terms of use, I get cut off all sites). But does anybody have a better method of solving the multiple account problem?

    Sun are going to have all the same issues with theirs, so is anybody else trying to do the same thing. They're all going to be the target of every script kiddie under the sun, they're all going to have terms of use that can be broken and you use access to them all, they'll all have the problem of being hacked and the hacker getting your information for all sites. Other companies won't be invulnerable to these problems just because they aren't Microsoft. And don't think that Microsoft aren't going to get all the best security they can on these things either, they're not THAT dumb (not when they're business really depends on it that much).

    So how do you propose these problems are solved?