2010-03-01

PoS3

As an owner of a Sony Playstation 3 console and a user of the Playstation Store, I have recently joined the Registration of the trophy information could not be completed. The game will quit. (8001050F) club. When this first appeared, the system time reset to Dec 31 and a decade ago. Now I can't sign in to the Playstation Network or even run Assassin's Creed 2 (a game with no network features). Sadly, resetting the time manually and trying again didn't fix anything. Neither did disabling the Internet connection setting. So it looks like the major symptoms are not causes. Something else is broken.

The timing (2010/03/01) and the clock-reset have led to widespread speculation that it's a Y2.01K event, which seems plausible. It's reinforced by the news that this doesn't affect newer ("slim") PS3.

I have a horrible feeling that Sony is trying to put off confirming another rumour: that the clock-reset has tripped a DRM wire, and that the PS3s are now defying their rightful owners in the mistaken belief that we are all freeloaders. Part of me hopes this is the case, because it will be a large stake in the heart of this trespass-on-owner's-property DRM that has become popular in recent years. We might even get a judicial precedent out of it.

Another part of me just wishes the best of luck to my unknown colleagues in Sony who are doubtless trying desperately to save the product line. Good luck, guys.

Failure recovery

I've been categorizing distributed system designs into four groups, according to how they recover from the loss of a single critical ele...