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Oculus Rift Headsets Are Offline Following a Software Error (polygon.com)
Polygon reports that Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets around the world are experiencing an outage. The outage appears to be a result of an expired security certificate. "That certificate has expired," said the Oculus support team on its forums, "and we're looking at a few different ways to resolve the issue. We'll update you with the latest info as available. We recommend you wait until we provide an official fix. Thanks for your patience." Polygon reports: One place where users experiencing the issue are gathering is on the Oculus forums. Last night user apexmaster booted up his computer, tried to open the Oculus app and was greeted by an error indicating that the software could not reach the "Oculus Runtime Service." That same error is cropping up on computers all around the world, including several devices here at Polygon. Once it has appeared, there's no way to restart the Oculus app, which renders the Rift headset unusable.
It sounds like The Cloud bites again!
It's not buggy software. The software seems to be doing exactly what it was intended to do. This is a fucking specification problem - some idiot decided that proper behavior is to shut down the system when a cert expires, instead of simply warning the user and asking if it was OK to continue. Or alternately, creating an infrastructure which ensures certs get updated as necessary.
On a deeper level, who the fuck would ever pay for an Oculus product going forward when this just proves you can't actually buy one to own and they can shut you down at any time (CRL, anyone?).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A certificate expiry takes your entire fucking VR gaming rig down?
That's what you get for using a Facebook company.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yeah... it's sort of hard to believe the bumbling that would allow a certificate to expire before realizing that it would shut down every single one of their users. I mean, I understand bugs slip through, but this is sort of astoundingly bad.
More to the point, as you indicated, what the hell is an expiring certificate doing in their software anyhow? A normal code-signing certificate expires after a time, but the software that was signed with it does NOT expire. We now know that their device-critical software has a time bomb in it that only they can periodically reset, and they were already slipshod enough to miss the deadline once.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Can't access it? Security feature. It's undeniably secure.
Just wait until Ford or Toyota or VW inadvertently lets a certificate expire and a few hundred million vehicles glide silently to a stop ... wherever they may happen to be,
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey