On a personal note, the more I read about this game, the more I think that it's doomed to fail by design. A plot-based game is good for one playthrough - after this, you're done with it. Meaning you'll buy a copy, play through the game and be done with it. You'd have to patch in new content (and by extension, new plot lines) at an incredible pace to keep people interested. I suspect that even blizzard with its incredibly polished development machine could not pull that kind of development speed off.
Well the Lord of the Rings Online is "plot-based" and is doing alright especially since going free-to-play / micropayments. The plot is a series of epic quests arranged in books & chapters that you can play more or less as soon as your level is high enough. It hasn't even reached The Return of the King yet so they have plenty ways to go and string it out further, probably an expansion or two at least. I imagine a Star Wars game doesn't even that limitation to be concerned about.
Strawman argument and kind of stupid considering the OT was proposing a per mile tax anyway. A tax that would punish your poor down trodden person to the same degree as a rich person driving the same distance even if that person were tearing up the road in a hummer.
So punish anyone who is extremely tall like myself who can't reasonably fit in anything that could possibly be graded in the A band?
Where did I say it would be based on vehicle height or leg room? Ireland has tax bands for vehicles based on engine size & CO2 emissions and it's quite easy to find large estate / SUV vehicles which quality for the lowest tax band.
Perhaps the answer is to tax cars by calculation of fuel economy, weight, engine size, tank size etc. and stick them in various bands, e.g. A-F with A being most efficient, F being worst. Don't tax anyone in A and punitively raise the tax from bands B-F. People will buy more fuel efficient vehicles just to avoid the hassle of paying taxes on them.
Utter rubbish. The initial attack may have required hardware but it opened the door to software hacks. His hack allowed him to manipulate and dump the memory tables of the PS3 and doubtless uncover bugs that could be exploited in software & packaged up as an Other OS dist which does not need signing like other executables. Indeed that was the speculation amongst modders contemprary with the hack, e.g. here, "
It is quite possible someone will package this attack into a modchip since the glitch, while somewhat narrow, does not need to be very precisely timed. With a microcontroller and a little analog circuitry for the pulse, this could be quite reliable. However, it is more likely that a software bug will be found after reverse-engineering the dumped hypervisor and that is what will be deployed for use by the masses.".
Yes it does. It more than excuses them. On the one hand they (and people who have bought into the platform) could watch it disintegrate under a weight of piracy. They would lose hundreds of millions of dollars. And users would suffer as 3rd parties deserted in droves and they were left with a wasteland of shovelware.
Or Sony could remove a feature which was barely used and protect their platform. It was a no brainer. As for Geohot having every right, maybe he did (initially until he started disclosing copyprotection measures in earnest). And so did Sony.
Code written for Android can't be run on another platform without rewriting large portions of the code. In essence, it's basically just the same sort of additions that Microsoft did and got tons of bad press about.
Android application code really doesn't care where it's running. It's running on a VM after all. If someone ported Dalvik to another platform, Android apps would run there too. In fact RIM have done that already, porting Dalvik over QNX. If they can do it then it's clearly not proprietary or lock-in. I'd actually like to see Dalvik ported in this way since it would speed up development no end and might prove useful for other purposes
As for Microsoft's issues with Java, it's not the same at all. First Dalvik / Android are not Java. Never have been, never claimed to be. It's always been made explicitly clear that devs write with the Java language but the target is not a JVM.
You didn't have access to one CPU. You had access to the CPU and 6 SPUs. The only major thing that was "nerfed" was the graphics driver which was adequate for 2D but not up for much beyond that. I doubt that restriction would have meant much to supercomputers either where it was unlikely any of the nodes were even plugged into a display.
Skype's success was almost certainly down to it's client. It was user friendly, clean, modern. It combined instant messaging with phone with free person to person voice chat. If you want to have an idea how revelatory this was, compare to abominations like Net2Phone.
I was certainly using it WAY before Android or the iPhone turned up. It had a Windows CE client which I used on several occasions to make cheap calls via an iPaq.
That said, it's gone a down the route of other IM clients stuffing in ads and other annoying behaviour which I could well do without. If facebook pull any shit like trying to make me use a Facebook login to use it, then bye bye Skype.
1) The danger that Linux posed was it was an attack vector. If Sony had left OtherOS there after it was compromised it would have developed into an easy to deploy crack that people could simply download and run. The only time they'd be using Linux would be to crack the hypervisor before installing custom firmware. After the reboot they'd be running a modded GameOS and could discard the OtherOS partition completely.
2) Well once you have modded firmware you can mod / patch any game you like. Write code that highlights / sights on enemies, turns the walls transparent, modifies network traffic so bullets always register headshots etc. Aside from cheating you could also grief, e.g. sending corrupted data to the server to take it down, glitch it or whatever. Basically, allowing people onto PSN with modded hardware would open the door to cheats and griefers.
If GeoHot had not of done his shit the OtherOS would still be there.
Hi troll, GeoHot didn't "do his shit" until after Sony removed OtherOS.
Go and check your facts. Geohot produced a viable attack against the hypervisor which used OtherOS as the attack vector. Sony was hardly likely to sit idly by while the attack evolved into a download, burn & run iso which rooted a PS3 and used it to install custom firmware. So it is correct to say if he hadn't used OtherOS to attack the hypervisor that OtherOS would still exist today.
Why do you assume they lost access. The firmware updates only affected PS3 users who used OtherOS and PSN. I doubt any super computer clusters which had used the PS3 were affected by the change because they wouldn't be updating their firmware anyway.
Now, I'm not saying that this was sophisticated attack. I don't know. But the fact remains that any network/server can fall to this kind of stuff.
Most security admins acknowledge it too which is why logging is enabled, roles are separated out, teams perform penetration testing an so forth.
I have no idea how sophisticated the attack against Sony was but the way they're talking of moving their data centers and that they had defence at the perimeter suggests to me that someone broke in through their intranet or wifi (e.g. sitting in their carpark) to gain access rather than through a public facing interface to the service.
Firefox has a multitude of memory leaks, and it's trivial to trigger them. Just leave Firefox open at the end of the day. You can start getting picky about it when it's harder to reproduce.
What are you doing when you leave Firefox open? Perhaps it is the JS in the page which is "leaking", i.e. holding strong references to objects that it continuously allocates.
Funny, but the first thing I do when installing a dist is install proprietary drivers. Give the choice between abysmal performance and open source, or decent performance and proprietary I'll choose the latter every single time. I'd add that 3D and X do not like each other one little bit (X is blissfully 2D at heart) and many of the problems faced by Firefox (and Flash) are directly related to all the extensions and fallbacks needed to composite 3D, 2D, video and text into the same RGB colourspace. Extensions like DRI, DRI2, Compiz (which relies on a OpenGL extension) produce a passable looking modern desktop but really X is an impediment and liability at this stage.
The sooner it is ditched for local desktop the better Linux will be in the long term. Wayland seems the most viable way to cut X out of the equation but I can't imagine what horrors are lurking in the average dist to sort out before this can happen.
Sony hasn't fixed their issue. Kind of hard to have a post mortem while the solution is still ongoing. There has plenty of extrapolation and bullshit in the information vacuum surrounding the attack though. So when things return to normality it would be in their interest to provide a decent technical overview of what happened, the safeguards that were there before, why they failed and what steps have been made since to improve things.
.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent.
So what's wrong with running CyanogenMod Android without any of the Google apps if that's your definition of a smart phone? Why would Nokia's phone (be it based on Symbian or Meego) be any less likely to engage in the kinds of other things smart phones do?
I'd love to know which bank you're even talking about. If your bank relies on stupid questions like "what is your maiden's name?" then I suggest you have larger issues to worry about than what happened in some online game service. Such details are easily discoverable which is why every bank I've dealt with will challenge me with a combination of account number, a password and usually a pin for good measure with potentially a hard token challenge too.
As for personally identifying information, you're talking about name, age, address, all of which is readily available from more or less anywhere. If that's all it took to steal someone's identity I could just trawl through Facebook, or the birthday classified, or listen to radio shout outs, or the numerous online credit report / background check services that yield that info and more for a small fee.
I think the data leak has been massively damaging for Sony but a little perspective would go a long way. It's a pain in the ass to be sure but hardly the end of the world.
I assume the global menu require the cooperation of the application's widget set, i.e. when the app launches, the menu widget sees the global menu proxy and coordinates to show its menus through that instead of rendering it's own. Of course apps which fake a menu or use some weird widget set may not behave as they are meant to behave.
What I find particularly annoying about the single menu there is no way to change the behaviour in the UI. I appreciate that in a small netbook with a touchpad that a single menu is probably a good thing since it saves vertical space on all app windows and minimizes clutter. However on large displays it is counter productive - it increases the amount of mouse travel required to do simple multitasking e.g. if I have app in the background and I want to access it's menus I first have to locate one of its windows or icon, click it and then travel to the top of the window and click on the menu and possibly travel back down to the window again. Whereas with menus on windows I can just click straight on the menu, bring the app to the foreground at the same time.
At the very least it should be a configuration setting even if it requires a logout to take effect. It would also be nice to see the Unity shell be configurable too so that users can choose the hide / show behaviour, the position & scale of the dock and all the other things that would be taken for granted on any other modern desktop UI.
I expect the first question an insurance company would ask in the event of a theft was "were your windows and doors locked?". It may even go further and they may require the locks to be certified to some national standard. And if you answer no then don't be surprised if you get nothing.
Perhaps the real solution is don't expose your very expensive stereo system where thieves can see it in your car. Invest in a hatch or cover where the system can reside without being visible. If thieves can't see the item they're trying to steal, the chances are they won't even bother breaking in in the first place.
Problem here is, it wasn't Sony's $1.27 that was lost. It was my stuff lost, and 77 million other people..... The biggest problem of all is that Sony did not alert their customers in a timely manner. Fuck Sony.
Stop with the histrionics. The only thing you lost was a week or two's worth of PSN service and the potential hassle of cancelling a credit card. Annoying yes but hardly the end of the world.
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On a personal note, the more I read about this game, the more I think that it's doomed to fail by design. A plot-based game is good for one playthrough - after this, you're done with it. Meaning you'll buy a copy, play through the game and be done with it. You'd have to patch in new content (and by extension, new plot lines) at an incredible pace to keep people interested. I suspect that even blizzard with its incredibly polished development machine could not pull that kind of development speed off.
Well the Lord of the Rings Online is "plot-based" and is doing alright especially since going free-to-play / micropayments. The plot is a series of epic quests arranged in books & chapters that you can play more or less as soon as your level is high enough. It hasn't even reached The Return of the King yet so they have plenty ways to go and string it out further, probably an expansion or two at least. I imagine a Star Wars game doesn't even that limitation to be concerned about.
Strawman argument and kind of stupid considering the OT was proposing a per mile tax anyway. A tax that would punish your poor down trodden person to the same degree as a rich person driving the same distance even if that person were tearing up the road in a hummer.
So punish anyone who is extremely tall like myself who can't reasonably fit in anything that could possibly be graded in the A band?
Where did I say it would be based on vehicle height or leg room? Ireland has tax bands for vehicles based on engine size & CO2 emissions and it's quite easy to find large estate / SUV vehicles which quality for the lowest tax band.
Perhaps the answer is to tax cars by calculation of fuel economy, weight, engine size, tank size etc. and stick them in various bands, e.g. A-F with A being most efficient, F being worst. Don't tax anyone in A and punitively raise the tax from bands B-F. People will buy more fuel efficient vehicles just to avoid the hassle of paying taxes on them.
Utter rubbish. The initial attack may have required hardware but it opened the door to software hacks. His hack allowed him to manipulate and dump the memory tables of the PS3 and doubtless uncover bugs that could be exploited in software & packaged up as an Other OS dist which does not need signing like other executables. Indeed that was the speculation amongst modders contemprary with the hack, e.g. here, " It is quite possible someone will package this attack into a modchip since the glitch, while somewhat narrow, does not need to be very precisely timed. With a microcontroller and a little analog circuitry for the pulse, this could be quite reliable. However, it is more likely that a software bug will be found after reverse-engineering the dumped hypervisor and that is what will be deployed for use by the masses.".
Or Sony could remove a feature which was barely used and protect their platform. It was a no brainer. As for Geohot having every right, maybe he did (initially until he started disclosing copyprotection measures in earnest). And so did Sony.
Code written for Android can't be run on another platform without rewriting large portions of the code. In essence, it's basically just the same sort of additions that Microsoft did and got tons of bad press about.
Android application code really doesn't care where it's running. It's running on a VM after all. If someone ported Dalvik to another platform, Android apps would run there too. In fact RIM have done that already, porting Dalvik over QNX. If they can do it then it's clearly not proprietary or lock-in. I'd actually like to see Dalvik ported in this way since it would speed up development no end and might prove useful for other purposes
As for Microsoft's issues with Java, it's not the same at all. First Dalvik / Android are not Java. Never have been, never claimed to be. It's always been made explicitly clear that devs write with the Java language but the target is not a JVM.
You didn't have access to one CPU. You had access to the CPU and 6 SPUs. The only major thing that was "nerfed" was the graphics driver which was adequate for 2D but not up for much beyond that. I doubt that restriction would have meant much to supercomputers either where it was unlikely any of the nodes were even plugged into a display.
I was certainly using it WAY before Android or the iPhone turned up. It had a Windows CE client which I used on several occasions to make cheap calls via an iPaq.
That said, it's gone a down the route of other IM clients stuffing in ads and other annoying behaviour which I could well do without. If facebook pull any shit like trying to make me use a Facebook login to use it, then bye bye Skype.
2) Well once you have modded firmware you can mod / patch any game you like. Write code that highlights / sights on enemies, turns the walls transparent, modifies network traffic so bullets always register headshots etc. Aside from cheating you could also grief, e.g. sending corrupted data to the server to take it down, glitch it or whatever. Basically, allowing people onto PSN with modded hardware would open the door to cheats and griefers.
If GeoHot had not of done his shit the OtherOS would still be there.
Hi troll, GeoHot didn't "do his shit" until after Sony removed OtherOS.
Go and check your facts. Geohot produced a viable attack against the hypervisor which used OtherOS as the attack vector. Sony was hardly likely to sit idly by while the attack evolved into a download, burn & run iso which rooted a PS3 and used it to install custom firmware. So it is correct to say if he hadn't used OtherOS to attack the hypervisor that OtherOS would still exist today.
They might be different physically but you can write OpenCL apps which will run on a regular CPU, GPU or even a Cell.
Why do you assume they lost access. The firmware updates only affected PS3 users who used OtherOS and PSN. I doubt any super computer clusters which had used the PS3 were affected by the change because they wouldn't be updating their firmware anyway.
Now, I'm not saying that this was sophisticated attack. I don't know. But the fact remains that any network/server can fall to this kind of stuff.
Most security admins acknowledge it too which is why logging is enabled, roles are separated out, teams perform penetration testing an so forth.
I have no idea how sophisticated the attack against Sony was but the way they're talking of moving their data centers and that they had defence at the perimeter suggests to me that someone broke in through their intranet or wifi (e.g. sitting in their carpark) to gain access rather than through a public facing interface to the service.
Supply side Jesus applauds your sentiment.
Your example of what Apple blatantly copied?
Konfabulator with Dashboard, and Classics / Delicious Library with iBooks would be obvious examples of blatant copying.
You think anything over the last 2 weeks is remotely convenient for Sony? The company's reputation is fucked at the moment.
Firefox has a multitude of memory leaks, and it's trivial to trigger them. Just leave Firefox open at the end of the day. You can start getting picky about it when it's harder to reproduce.
What are you doing when you leave Firefox open? Perhaps it is the JS in the page which is "leaking", i.e. holding strong references to objects that it continuously allocates.
The sooner it is ditched for local desktop the better Linux will be in the long term. Wayland seems the most viable way to cut X out of the equation but I can't imagine what horrors are lurking in the average dist to sort out before this can happen.
Sony hasn't fixed their issue. Kind of hard to have a post mortem while the solution is still ongoing. There has plenty of extrapolation and bullshit in the information vacuum surrounding the attack though. So when things return to normality it would be in their interest to provide a decent technical overview of what happened, the safeguards that were there before, why they failed and what steps have been made since to improve things.
.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent.
So what's wrong with running CyanogenMod Android without any of the Google apps if that's your definition of a smart phone? Why would Nokia's phone (be it based on Symbian or Meego) be any less likely to engage in the kinds of other things smart phones do?
As for personally identifying information, you're talking about name, age, address, all of which is readily available from more or less anywhere. If that's all it took to steal someone's identity I could just trawl through Facebook, or the birthday classified, or listen to radio shout outs, or the numerous online credit report / background check services that yield that info and more for a small fee.
I think the data leak has been massively damaging for Sony but a little perspective would go a long way. It's a pain in the ass to be sure but hardly the end of the world.
What I find particularly annoying about the single menu there is no way to change the behaviour in the UI. I appreciate that in a small netbook with a touchpad that a single menu is probably a good thing since it saves vertical space on all app windows and minimizes clutter. However on large displays it is counter productive - it increases the amount of mouse travel required to do simple multitasking e.g. if I have app in the background and I want to access it's menus I first have to locate one of its windows or icon, click it and then travel to the top of the window and click on the menu and possibly travel back down to the window again. Whereas with menus on windows I can just click straight on the menu, bring the app to the foreground at the same time.
At the very least it should be a configuration setting even if it requires a logout to take effect. It would also be nice to see the Unity shell be configurable too so that users can choose the hide / show behaviour, the position & scale of the dock and all the other things that would be taken for granted on any other modern desktop UI.
Perhaps the real solution is don't expose your very expensive stereo system where thieves can see it in your car. Invest in a hatch or cover where the system can reside without being visible. If thieves can't see the item they're trying to steal, the chances are they won't even bother breaking in in the first place.
Problem here is, it wasn't Sony's $1.27 that was lost. It was my stuff lost, and 77 million other people..... The biggest problem of all is that Sony did not alert their customers in a timely manner. Fuck Sony.
Stop with the histrionics. The only thing you lost was a week or two's worth of PSN service and the potential hassle of cancelling a credit card. Annoying yes but hardly the end of the world.