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Passage of Time Solves PS3 Glitch
An anonymous reader writes "A quick update on the widespread PlayStation 3 glitch we discussed recently: as of last night (Monday, March 1st) the problem has resolved itself. I powered up my PS3 to find the clock was set to April 29th, 2020, but once I went into the system menu and set the date and time via the internet I got an accurate date. That seems to be the test of whether your PS3 is 'fixed' or not; Sony says you should be all set."
First Quadrennial Childhood Obesity Awareness Day Goes Off Without a Hitch!
We'd like to thank all our gamers for observing our compulsory First Quadrennial Childhood Obesity Awareness Day that we had planned many years in advance back when we made our first consoles. We hope all the children took the time to get outside and exercise. As always, Sony endorses moderation in game play and we feel that this surprise holiday away from the Playstation Network will help today's youth become more healthy and social.
Should we decide to surprise you with a second Quadrennial Childhood Obesity Awareness Day, it could happen March 1st of 2012. See you in 2012 (maybe)! Until then, remember to get plenty of fresh air and exercise!
Totally in control of the situation,
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Chief Sony Public Think of the Children Relations Officer
My work here is dung.
Is SONY going to make my PS3 explode?
No, but every twenty minutes a kitten will come out.
That'll be fixed in the next update though.
That this particular bug "fixes" itself in a relatively short span of time.
/dev/rtc, The standard hwclock command can be used to manage the RTC. Since the RTC is read only, the PS3 Linux platform support maintaines a value in system flash memory that represents the difference between the hardware RTC value and the Linux RTC value."
According to the documentation provided for PS3 linux, the clock that is embedded in the PS3 cannot actually be manipulated from under the hypervisor:
"Similar to a PC, a built-in real time clock (RTC) keeps the wall clock time for the PS3. The RTC is backed up by a battery and so ticks even if external power is removed. The RTC value can be read by a hypervisor call, but it can not be written. The RTC value monotonically increases and never rolls back. The PS3 Linux platform support uses the standard RTC userland interface
I'm assuming that this read-only clock "feature" is in some way related to DRM, to keep people from playing tricks with expiration dates. Worst case scenario, it is impossible to modify the RTC without hardware tinkering. Had this not been a transient bug, that would have meant massive physical recalls. More likely, it is possible for sony-blessed firmware updates to modify the clock. However, Sony can only push those either through the internet, or on physical disks. Since the bug was preventing PSN logins, the internet option wouldn't have been automatically available(though, since the issue is transient, it now is again). They would either have to mail out upgrade disks to affected users, bundle the upgrade with future game releases, or make their customers go to some support site and burn their own upgrade disks. Gigantic pain in the ass.
Is SONY going to make my PS3 explode?
No, that's July 4th not April Fools Day.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I like that as much as Verizon and Brighthouse/Roadrunner's voice attendants. "Thank you for holding. You can also get help on the web by visiting our site com"
Every time I've been stuck on hold hearing that, it's been because the Internet connection was down. After hearing it every 30 seconds, for 45 minutes, I've been as polite as possible to the person who answers the phone and then asks
"Is your computer turned on?" ... where are you at? .. Yes, right there. It should be fixed soon. Give us a call back in a few hours if you're still having problems."
"Are there any lights on the front of the modem?"
"Are you sure?"
"Reboot your computer, and call back in 15 minutes if there are more problems."
"Well, reboot the modem and call back in 15 minutes if there are more problems."
"Well, it seems we're having an outage in
I'm pretty sure that's their full script, except for "Sir, please don't curse at us, we're doing our best." :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Your first word betrays your grasp of syntactical structure.
Well, apparently, it wasn't a Sony bug per se, it was a bug in one of the support chips.
Sony decided to be paranoid about time because of pirates. If you can hack the PS3 and change the date, then you can avoid expiration times and so forth. So if the hardware clock and software clock get out of sync, their DRM and such stops working. Considering the PS3 is the only major console that has not been hacked to the point of widespread piracy, keeping to this level of paranoia seems to have paid off for Sony's purposes.
As to Sony's "piss-poor handling of the entire incident", I'd like to know what, exactly, you think they should have done about it?
Seriously, I've just appointed you, _xeno_, to be CEO of Sony, and you just got a phone call. "Oh, crap, it's midnight GMT on March 1st, 2010, and all the older PS3 consoles can't play downloaded content or games with trophies or sign into the PSN!". What are you going to do? What orders do you give?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
A bug is a logic problem in the code; a glitch is misbehavior by the program. Glitches are normally associated with bugs, but faulty hardware or cosmic rays can also cause glitches. On the other hand, it is quite possible for a bug to exist without ever triggering a glitch, if the conditions that would trigger the bug are sufficiently remote, or if other code in the system corrects for the behavior of the bug (the latter is actually quite common).
In this case, I don't believe they've fixed the bug, but the glitch that is the manifestation of the bug is solved for now. If my understanding of what happened is correct, they should have nearly four years to ship a fix to the bug before the glitch reappears, so the fix will probably be bundled with the next system update.
If the headline had read "passage of time fixes bug", as you suggest, I would have had to call it an outright lie. As it is, however, I think the headline is exactly correct.
While I agree they should fix the problem I don't think there is any point in pushing an emergency fix at this point. The correct thing to do (assuming this is a periodic problem) is to release a properly QA'd fix as part of a normal firmware update cycle.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is /. Proper coding is a moral issue. By definition.
You can dump your geek card in the recycler at the exit. Thank you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
WTF dude? how long does it take you to type the rest of the logical statement?
unless you are considering limited processing power and you want to avoid extra checks. And I don't think this is the case here.
I love how sony said that they would "fix" this in the next 24 hours yesterday. I'm glad they worked so hard and diligently to apply this fix. One might even say they moved the earth for it.
I was being literal.
I used to work for a GPS tracking company, and the | was in packing the GPS stream into a byte for VHF transmission. It turned out that the tenths digit of longitude was always 0. It was part of an update to reduce the footprint. (This reduced the footprint from 98% to 92%, IIRC, which was a pretty big deal.)
It made it out through my tests, production's tests, and the test customer happened to be in a spot where the tenths digit was supposed to be zero. The reason was a formatting bug in the legacy parsing code that let you download the data. It would not put in the leading 0. Damnably, there is a highway in Rhode Island that is on a 0ths longitude place. We thought the problem was with reception, and the cleared highway had a good view of the GPS constellation. That was a good thought, but it didn't explain why the coyotes were swimming in a straight line in the harbour.
I had put the new code into the library, and we sent out hundreds of collars. One of the customers was the government of India, who wanted to put some collars on tigers to track their positions and look for poachers. The tigers all got faulty collars, and so several of them had to be tracked down and re-tranquilized.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Because they have to offset their losses on the PS3 somehow, and removing its ability to play PS2 games to make you have to buy a new PS2 when your old one breaks is one of those ways.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
...That's pretty much what ALL of you so-called Slashdotters do. Belittle anyone who doesn't agree with you ("you, sir, are an idiot, anybody who does X is an idiot", etc). I also see that so-called Slashdotters have a tendency to assume that anybody who doesn't have in-depth knowledge about the topics discussed is also an idot.
A bunch of armchair experts, who supposedly know everything from world politics to enterprise-level corporate management, but still SOMEHOW find the time through all of their corporate, financial and world-wide political success to post asinine comments on /.
Hence, the topic of my post.
And, who gives a fuck that I'm anon; stop waving your pseudonyms around, or leaving some silly signature as if your real name has any bearing on the validity of your posts.
Whatever, faggot.