When you establish a pattern of fucking with the network and lying about it, having the worst assumed about you when circumstances are shady comes with the territory. Did people reach the wrong conclusion? Yes, apparently. Were they wrong or was it irrational to do so? Not particularly.
I didn't so much mean "internal" versus "external" as much as I meant "don't wait until AFTER shit hits the fan to start hiring some forensic/security experts". These guys supposedly required many days to catch up on Sony's deployment and then analyze it and Sony's own blog posts seem to suggest this, too. That shouldn't have been the case. They should have had these guys on staff (in-house or contracted - whatever) who were maintaining things and, when it all went belly-up -- instantly prepared to do a post-mortem review and begin the recovery process.
All I want is for Sony to get things back online and learn some lessons from this. I don't want gifts or subscriptions or any other stuff. Just learn the importance of pro-active security measures. Always be validating the integrity of your systems. Have people on the payroll who can deal with these things instead of having to hire out for them after the fact. Especially when you're directly involved in litigation and supposedly under threats of "hacker" groups. And learn how to communicate with your customers. Take a lesson from the LastPass guys, for example.
I don't want trinkets. Just get your shit together.
Ideally, you would have multiple providers competing against each other and the one that best served the needs and wants of customers would thrive and those that did not would wither away. However, when government gets involved and sets up what is primarily a service-monopoly, you now have one company providing the service and customers largely just have to take what they're given with no incentive for the provider to do anything.
So then the solution to regulation becomes more regulation. To counter the monopoly we have granted them as a "public utility" in a region, we have to further involve government by enacting net-neutrality laws.
It seems to me that the better solution would not be to pile more shit on existing piles of shit, but to eradicate the initial problem by opening up the pipes and encouraging competition so that if you don't like one company fucking with your traffic, you can go vote with your dollars at the company who stays the hell out of your way.
Comcast is given a monopoly as, essentially, a public utility. Capitalism and free market and all that would be fantastic. Competition and all. The problem is when regulation and government involvement make them a tax-payer subsidized monopoly with no competition to shape the services, performance, and behavior they offer customers.
Yeah, I think we all jumped to the conclusion this morning -- but I do think it was understandable. Comcast's history. The nature of the problem as it arose as a Comcast-exclusive "outage" for many hours while everyone else reported it worked fine for them (and vpn/proxy access kept working) *and* that TPB initially said "it's not us - we're not doing anything that would cause this".
So everyone (me too) made a big leap in accusing Comcast of nefarious behavior, but given circumstances, it wasn't all that unreasonable.
Even if it really is starting to impact other ISPs, it seems really weird that it *always* seems to work for users going through a VPN or an anonymous proxy. It makes me wonder exactly how it is setup on the service-end, if they're somehow aligning traffic in such a way that once server so precisely impacts swaths of users. Given the history of Comcast and the way this behavior began, today, I can't really blame people who assumed it might have been an ISP's heavy hand at work.
It's a good thing we don't have revolving doors between corporations and the government committees that regulate them. Otherwise we might have FCC Commissioners working in the FCC and then being rewarded by employment by the companies they were regulating, like going to work for NBC/Comcast. Oh, oops.
First, I believe people assumed Comcast was doing something, because TPB said that *they* were not doing anything. Second, they probably chose PCWorld for the same reason that you can't use TorrentFreak as a citation to support a wikipedia article on Wikipedia, because TorrentFreak is not considered a notable news source.
You must not be an American or a Brit. If you're not famous, you don't exist. Well, I mean -- you exist, of course. The famous people need guys to park their cars and wipe their asses and buy their products. It's just that you, as an individual, might as well not exist without fame. There's famous people and then there are cogs.
Really? I don't care about anime, comics, star trek, star wars and I hate idiots who go around claiming they have Aspergers, because it makes them feel special.
Successful adults are the ones who trudged through the school system, despite itself. Who hated it and hated the people and hated the experience and couldn't wait to get out of it so they could get into the real world and start life. (Something I can't stress enough to young people is that no matter how much school sucks and no matter what anyone tells you, it all will be different the day you graduate and nothing from high school -- not your popularity, your clique, your grades, your record -- nothing will count against you like all the adults try to convince you it will, so just fucking hold on until you're out).
On the other hand, you have all the fucking idiots who say things like "they were the best years of our lives". If high school years were the best years of your life, you should just fucking kill yourself *now*. I shouldn't even need to extrapolate on this. Even if you're popular and successful in high school, it is of so little consequence and impact and meaning that it can't possibly be the greatest time of your life and if it is, that means you are planning to become stagnant the moment you leave those supposedly "hallowed halls".
People who act like the golden age of television is over make me sad. The last fifteen years of television (especially thanks to FX, HBO, AMC and SHO among others) have been unbelievable. Not to mention a few decent shows on the big-three that have managed to find their way to air during that time.
Not really worth $100-$200/mo, but still . . . if all someone is watching is reality television and countless "Dating Story, Wedding Story, Makeover Story, Baby Story" shows on TLC, then they really only have themselves to blame.
All Netflix needs is the consumer on their side. They have that, already. Just not enough, yet. Right now, it's about 7% of the population with Netflix accounts. When they reach 20%, they'll have the critical consumer support to push those efforts. People will continue to flee cable, because even though there's more great television on now than ever before, it's not worth $1,200-$2,400/yr for it. Especially when the competition can do it for only $96/yr. For that much of a price difference, I think just about everyone can tolerate their content being a year behind.
In the mean time, Netflix is already working on generating their *own* content. They'll be able to sell that content to traditional television/cable networks for a nice up-front price and then after they've run it, he can return it to his own service and make long-term profit from it as content to generate new Netflix viewers. If he burns his bridges with cable before that, he has nowhere to shop that content they're currently spending $100,000,000+ producing.
Also, it's hard to argue with the man's history. In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg was listed in the CNN or Forbes (I forget which) list of "Top Tech Industry People That Don't Matter". Zuckerberg was on that list, because he came too late to the game when Myspace was already the big guy on the block. Then, they listed Reed Hastings a couple pages later, because the world was moving to streaming content and DVDs weren't going to remain relevant.
Five years later, those two "people that don't matter" are the biggest shit on the planet.
When it happens to any other company and they miserably fail at recovering and managing their public facing interactions, we'll all rip on them, too. People aren't anti-Sony. They're anti-shitty-security and anti-bury-your-head-in-the-sand-and-blow-hot-air-up-your-customer's-asses. Until then, don't take it so hard. You shouldn't rest all of your self-esteem on your choice of gaming platform.
I haven't. But I also do not have a $35-billion company with 167,000 employees and hundreds of millions of customers and 65 years of experience with which to deploy one and properly react to emergencies like this without totally flubbing it up.
Rather than Slashdot linking to some site called "I4U" which links to Joystiq, which links to the article on Sony's playstation site, how about we just fucking link to the Sony article and do away with the blog self-promotion chain?
Sony is handling this outage in such a bad way, seriously, it's been what, 2 weeks?
As of tomorrow morning, it will have been 20 days since the outage started (April 20th) and 24 days since the breach occurred (April 16th). If they're not expecting to have it up this week (which doesn't surprise me, I said it would be around a month as soon as we learned what happened), then it'll end up being at least 27 days since the outage started and 31 days since the breach.
I don't want rewards, bonuses, freebies. I just want them to be an example of a humble and gracious company communicating with customers in an honest and direct way that shows they appreciate their customer base and understands that their customers are neither idiots nor ignorant. And, more than that, I just want them to get the shit secure and running again.
Until then, it makes it easy to decide on the "which console do I buy this game for?" front. Buy it for the system I can actually play it on.:)
I just spent the past five years listening to every geek tell me he has Asperger's. Now I get to spend the next five listening to everyone tell me they have "too much brain".
We didn't have fancy joysticks to play videogames with. We only had our cocks. And it was all single player. And you only had one television in the house, so you had to wank it in front of the black and white in the family room, while pop paid the bills and mom cooked dinner and big sis did her homework.
Games are interactive movies, now. Players don't want them to be longer than about six hours (even if they paid $65 for it), because they "want to be able to finish it, even if they have a busy life" (because I guess playing an hour a day for three weeks instead of one week is just out of the question). Developers want everyone to see the entire game (why waste $100m making a game when only 50% of people see the last 50% of the content?). So, it becomes more about "make choice, watch cut scene, shoot some stuff, watch another cut scene" rather than an actual game. You end up with Dragon Age turning into Dragon Age 2 and RPGs turning into Mass Effect, turning into Mass Effect 2, and then Mass Effect 3 (which is supposed to be even more "refined" and simplified as far as the RPG elements than Mass Effect 2 was).
I can understand in certain contexts. I don't want to spend two weeks trying to get beyond one boss. I just don't have the time or patience for that, like I did when I was ten years old and had nothing else to do than try and fight the same fucking guy for thirty hours. On the other hand, It should require some effort, investment, and skill to reach the end of a game. It shouldn't be a certainty that I'll get through to the end simply because I play *long* enough to get there.
I can see a market for "experiences", as things like VR come to market over the next fifty years. But an "experience" should not itself replace a "game".
Steam lets you install your games on as many computers as you want, the service will only allow you to logon with one system at a time though. It's all in the EULA.
Sadly, that isn't true, anymore. I couldn't find what game it was that I saw this on, but a few days ago I was looking through the Steam store and under the "features" section of one of the games, it said that it used Secu-ROM and had a "four installation limit" (very Spore-like). It made no fucking sense, since the entire point of Steam is that I can install any of my 400+ games *anywhere* and *everywhere* for as long as I live and have access to the game . . . as long as I log into my account.
I really hope that is not going to be the new thing by publishers distributing through Steam, in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
When you establish a pattern of fucking with the network and lying about it, having the worst assumed about you when circumstances are shady comes with the territory. Did people reach the wrong conclusion? Yes, apparently. Were they wrong or was it irrational to do so? Not particularly.
I didn't so much mean "internal" versus "external" as much as I meant "don't wait until AFTER shit hits the fan to start hiring some forensic/security experts". These guys supposedly required many days to catch up on Sony's deployment and then analyze it and Sony's own blog posts seem to suggest this, too. That shouldn't have been the case. They should have had these guys on staff (in-house or contracted - whatever) who were maintaining things and, when it all went belly-up -- instantly prepared to do a post-mortem review and begin the recovery process.
All I want is for Sony to get things back online and learn some lessons from this. I don't want gifts or subscriptions or any other stuff. Just learn the importance of pro-active security measures. Always be validating the integrity of your systems. Have people on the payroll who can deal with these things instead of having to hire out for them after the fact. Especially when you're directly involved in litigation and supposedly under threats of "hacker" groups. And learn how to communicate with your customers. Take a lesson from the LastPass guys, for example.
I don't want trinkets. Just get your shit together.
Why would you get a notice from the RIAA or MPAA? What copyright of theirs are you infringing by visiting a torrent indexing website?
I'm actually on the fence about net neutrality.
Ideally, you would have multiple providers competing against each other and the one that best served the needs and wants of customers would thrive and those that did not would wither away. However, when government gets involved and sets up what is primarily a service-monopoly, you now have one company providing the service and customers largely just have to take what they're given with no incentive for the provider to do anything.
So then the solution to regulation becomes more regulation. To counter the monopoly we have granted them as a "public utility" in a region, we have to further involve government by enacting net-neutrality laws.
It seems to me that the better solution would not be to pile more shit on existing piles of shit, but to eradicate the initial problem by opening up the pipes and encouraging competition so that if you don't like one company fucking with your traffic, you can go vote with your dollars at the company who stays the hell out of your way.
Comcast is given a monopoly as, essentially, a public utility. Capitalism and free market and all that would be fantastic. Competition and all. The problem is when regulation and government involvement make them a tax-payer subsidized monopoly with no competition to shape the services, performance, and behavior they offer customers.
Yeah, I think we all jumped to the conclusion this morning -- but I do think it was understandable. Comcast's history. The nature of the problem as it arose as a Comcast-exclusive "outage" for many hours while everyone else reported it worked fine for them (and vpn/proxy access kept working) *and* that TPB initially said "it's not us - we're not doing anything that would cause this".
So everyone (me too) made a big leap in accusing Comcast of nefarious behavior, but given circumstances, it wasn't all that unreasonable.
Even if it really is starting to impact other ISPs, it seems really weird that it *always* seems to work for users going through a VPN or an anonymous proxy. It makes me wonder exactly how it is setup on the service-end, if they're somehow aligning traffic in such a way that once server so precisely impacts swaths of users. Given the history of Comcast and the way this behavior began, today, I can't really blame people who assumed it might have been an ISP's heavy hand at work.
It's a good thing we don't have revolving doors between corporations and the government committees that regulate them. Otherwise we might have FCC Commissioners working in the FCC and then being rewarded by employment by the companies they were regulating, like going to work for NBC/Comcast. Oh, oops.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/regulator-to-join-comcast-after-ok-of-nbc-deal/2011/05/11/AFSSl6zG_story.html
Remember that one time (a year or two?) when they said they didn't throttle torrent traffic?
First, I believe people assumed Comcast was doing something, because TPB said that *they* were not doing anything. Second, they probably chose PCWorld for the same reason that you can't use TorrentFreak as a citation to support a wikipedia article on Wikipedia, because TorrentFreak is not considered a notable news source.
No, it's blocked along the Comcast route somehow. Even using a non Comcast DNS server won't resolve and you can't ping the IP, either.
You must not be an American or a Brit. If you're not famous, you don't exist. Well, I mean -- you exist, of course. The famous people need guys to park their cars and wipe their asses and buy their products. It's just that you, as an individual, might as well not exist without fame. There's famous people and then there are cogs.
Really? I don't care about anime, comics, star trek, star wars and I hate idiots who go around claiming they have Aspergers, because it makes them feel special.
And, yet, I'm apparently a geek.
Successful adults are the ones who trudged through the school system, despite itself. Who hated it and hated the people and hated the experience and couldn't wait to get out of it so they could get into the real world and start life. (Something I can't stress enough to young people is that no matter how much school sucks and no matter what anyone tells you, it all will be different the day you graduate and nothing from high school -- not your popularity, your clique, your grades, your record -- nothing will count against you like all the adults try to convince you it will, so just fucking hold on until you're out).
On the other hand, you have all the fucking idiots who say things like "they were the best years of our lives". If high school years were the best years of your life, you should just fucking kill yourself *now*. I shouldn't even need to extrapolate on this. Even if you're popular and successful in high school, it is of so little consequence and impact and meaning that it can't possibly be the greatest time of your life and if it is, that means you are planning to become stagnant the moment you leave those supposedly "hallowed halls".
People who act like the golden age of television is over make me sad. The last fifteen years of television (especially thanks to FX, HBO, AMC and SHO among others) have been unbelievable. Not to mention a few decent shows on the big-three that have managed to find their way to air during that time.
Not really worth $100-$200/mo, but still . . . if all someone is watching is reality television and countless "Dating Story, Wedding Story, Makeover Story, Baby Story" shows on TLC, then they really only have themselves to blame.
All Netflix needs is the consumer on their side. They have that, already. Just not enough, yet. Right now, it's about 7% of the population with Netflix accounts. When they reach 20%, they'll have the critical consumer support to push those efforts. People will continue to flee cable, because even though there's more great television on now than ever before, it's not worth $1,200-$2,400/yr for it. Especially when the competition can do it for only $96/yr. For that much of a price difference, I think just about everyone can tolerate their content being a year behind.
In the mean time, Netflix is already working on generating their *own* content. They'll be able to sell that content to traditional television/cable networks for a nice up-front price and then after they've run it, he can return it to his own service and make long-term profit from it as content to generate new Netflix viewers. If he burns his bridges with cable before that, he has nowhere to shop that content they're currently spending $100,000,000+ producing.
Also, it's hard to argue with the man's history. In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg was listed in the CNN or Forbes (I forget which) list of "Top Tech Industry People That Don't Matter". Zuckerberg was on that list, because he came too late to the game when Myspace was already the big guy on the block. Then, they listed Reed Hastings a couple pages later, because the world was moving to streaming content and DVDs weren't going to remain relevant.
Five years later, those two "people that don't matter" are the biggest shit on the planet.
When it happens to any other company and they miserably fail at recovering and managing their public facing interactions, we'll all rip on them, too. People aren't anti-Sony. They're anti-shitty-security and anti-bury-your-head-in-the-sand-and-blow-hot-air-up-your-customer's-asses. Until then, don't take it so hard. You shouldn't rest all of your self-esteem on your choice of gaming platform.
I haven't. But I also do not have a $35-billion company with 167,000 employees and hundreds of millions of customers and 65 years of experience with which to deploy one and properly react to emergencies like this without totally flubbing it up.
Rather than Slashdot linking to some site called "I4U" which links to Joystiq, which links to the article on Sony's playstation site, how about we just fucking link to the Sony article and do away with the blog self-promotion chain?
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/06/service-restoration-update/
Sony is handling this outage in such a bad way, seriously, it's been what, 2 weeks?
As of tomorrow morning, it will have been 20 days since the outage started (April 20th) and 24 days since the breach occurred (April 16th). If they're not expecting to have it up this week (which doesn't surprise me, I said it would be around a month as soon as we learned what happened), then it'll end up being at least 27 days since the outage started and 31 days since the breach.
I don't want rewards, bonuses, freebies. I just want them to be an example of a humble and gracious company communicating with customers in an honest and direct way that shows they appreciate their customer base and understands that their customers are neither idiots nor ignorant. And, more than that, I just want them to get the shit secure and running again.
Until then, it makes it easy to decide on the "which console do I buy this game for?" front. Buy it for the system I can actually play it on. :)
I just spent the past five years listening to every geek tell me he has Asperger's. Now I get to spend the next five listening to everyone tell me they have "too much brain".
We didn't have fancy joysticks to play videogames with. We only had our cocks. And it was all single player. And you only had one television in the house, so you had to wank it in front of the black and white in the family room, while pop paid the bills and mom cooked dinner and big sis did her homework.
Games are interactive movies, now. Players don't want them to be longer than about six hours (even if they paid $65 for it), because they "want to be able to finish it, even if they have a busy life" (because I guess playing an hour a day for three weeks instead of one week is just out of the question). Developers want everyone to see the entire game (why waste $100m making a game when only 50% of people see the last 50% of the content?). So, it becomes more about "make choice, watch cut scene, shoot some stuff, watch another cut scene" rather than an actual game. You end up with Dragon Age turning into Dragon Age 2 and RPGs turning into Mass Effect, turning into Mass Effect 2, and then Mass Effect 3 (which is supposed to be even more "refined" and simplified as far as the RPG elements than Mass Effect 2 was).
I can understand in certain contexts. I don't want to spend two weeks trying to get beyond one boss. I just don't have the time or patience for that, like I did when I was ten years old and had nothing else to do than try and fight the same fucking guy for thirty hours. On the other hand, It should require some effort, investment, and skill to reach the end of a game. It shouldn't be a certainty that I'll get through to the end simply because I play *long* enough to get there.
I can see a market for "experiences", as things like VR come to market over the next fifty years. But an "experience" should not itself replace a "game".
Steam lets you install your games on as many computers as you want, the service will only allow you to logon with one system at a time though. It's all in the EULA.
Sadly, that isn't true, anymore. I couldn't find what game it was that I saw this on, but a few days ago I was looking through the Steam store and under the "features" section of one of the games, it said that it used Secu-ROM and had a "four installation limit" (very Spore-like). It made no fucking sense, since the entire point of Steam is that I can install any of my 400+ games *anywhere* and *everywhere* for as long as I live and have access to the game . . . as long as I log into my account.
I really hope that is not going to be the new thing by publishers distributing through Steam, in the future.