Week In Review - PSN Predictions + SingStar

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What a Week

PSN intrusion to SingStar, I've tried to cover it all. Here's some highlights:

From PSN Still Out. Why? (My Best Guess):
Monday, April 25, 2011 @ 6:15 AM PDT

So Sony had an intrusion. Why isn't this a non-event and we go on with our lives? Simple, PSN accounts have associated names, addresses, and credit card information.

I'm guessing that the real work has just started today. I'd expect some real progress in the next 24-48 hours, but don't be surprised if PSN is off into the weekend.

Sony Response, Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity:
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 @ ~12:50 PM PDT

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, [sic] PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

We have a clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems back online, and expect to restore some services within a week.

From PSA on PSN Data Breach:
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 @ 4:15 PM PDT

The problem is Sony relied on their leaf node security to protect users. In other words, they thought the PS3/other services were not hackable so no need to secure the inner data. ... now we find out they didn't encrypt the user data?

Sony Response, Q&A #1 for PlayStation Network and Qriocity Services:
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 @ ~5:15 PM PDT

Q: Was my personal data encrypted?
A: All of the data was protected, and access was restricted both physically and through the perimeter and security of the network. The entire credit card table was encrypted and we have no evidence that credit card data was taken. The personal data table, which is a separate data set, was not encrypted, but was, of course, behind a very sophisticated security system that was breached in a malicious attack.

From PSN Security - Transparency and Trophies:
Thursday, April 28, 2011 @ 6:05 AM PDT

The thing about trophies is, they are kept on your local system and synced to the server. Even if somehow Sony screwed up and didn't have this data backed up, your PS3 does. Your trophies will be fine people.

But what's more important is this is still described as a data breach not vandalism. That means the person(s) in question just copied data and didn't trash the database. They likely had read only access through a partially privileged account, meaning they couldn't trash the database.

I full [sic] expect all profiles to be fine.

Sony Response, Q&A #2 for PlayStation Network and Qriocity Services:
Thursday, April 28, 2011 @ ~8:50 PM PDT

Q: Will our download history/friends list/settings be affected by the PSN downtime?
A: No, they will not.

Q: Will trophies that were earned in single-player offline games during the outage be intact when the service resumes?
A: These trophies are intact and will be re-synched [sic] when the network is once again operational.

Q: Will my PS+ cloud saves be retrievable?
A: Yes, once PSN is restored.

Finally, there's the SingStar Dance review. As a gamer, who can't sing in general I was actually surprised by the game. Well worth checking out.

SingStar Dance - Review

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While PSN is still out, I thought I'd do a good old fashion game review.

A Singing Game? Really?!?

So why am I reviewing a singing game? Well, as anyone who's played with me while drunk knows I like to sing. Unfortunately for those poor souls, my voice (as my wife puts it) brings blood to the ears (and then all over the carpet). To be honest, I have a lot of post processing going on in my head so not only do I sound good to myself, most people do. That said, here's a game that can actually help you improve.

Starting at the Beginning

So about a month ago my wife went out drinking, dancing and singing with a friend. When she got home, she was still raving about how much fun it was to go out singing. Later that week we were at a Fry's Electronics and saw SingStar dance for $40, with two microphones. I checked the price against online pricing, it seemed decent and the game looked interesting so we grabbed it. We were going to a friend's birthday party and thought it would be fun to drink, laugh at ourselves and play this.

At the same time we picked up the 80's pack of music for the PS2 @ $5. I figured for $5, how wrong could things go.

Once we got home I hooked everything up. I hadn't bought my PS Move stuff yet, when I did I had to rearrange my setup as the PSEye didn't like my USB hub.

For the record I have plugged into my PS3 now:

• PSEye (Move)
• Keyboard
• SingStar Mic Adapter
• IR Receiver

While I have 4 USB ports, one is broken so I have to use a hub.

We started playing within minutes. Here's where the game blew me away.

Helping You Hit Those Notes

So, I should note before this I had never played a SingStar game. I had no knowledge of it going in other than I could see that it had been around for a while and seemed to have a lot of support. SingStar analyzes your pitch and scores you based on that. You can move up or down an octave and it deals with that just fine. There is varying levels of difficulty which allow better singers (like my wife or her friends) to work at hitting the note exactly while having me just get close to start with.

It amazed me how many songs I didn't actually know the words to. That day we bought about 20 songs off of the SingStar store and we were having a blast. We almost didn't make it to the party we were having so much fun. We then took this to the party, and it was a huge hit. Guys vs girls, and of course the girls kicked our collective asses.

In the next couple of weeks I purchased about 3 other PS2 game discs, as the game read the old discs perfectly. We downloaded a bunch of songs, I even put together a database so we could keep track of which songs we had. Full disclosure, I do have a backwards compatible PS3, I haven't tried any other model, but it should work.

We are now up to 153 songs split between downloads and 4 discs. I've gotten microphone stands and we've had people over just for this. As you sing the game records you and you can listen to it afterwords which is really cool.

Oh, and here's a great feature, if you have a PSP, you can use remote play to select the next song, player or players, mode, difficulty, etc. You can create a queue just like a high end karaoke machine, and it is all wireless. The interface is a little slow on the PSP, but manageable.

I've also had a chance to play with the dancing piece. It is a pain since sometimes they give you directions while your back is to the TV. In addition the lead time on moves seems to be too small for me, making it hard to score well. That said, with the PSEye attached there were videos/pictures to go with performances, a nice little bonus.

Over the past few weeks, my singing has improved dramatically. My wife says I no longer make her ears bleed. That makes this worth it.

Not Perfect, Yet

So while this is a blast to play, there's a couple of areas I'd like to see improved. The first being tracking other discs in game. The game only shows songs for the current disc and what's been downloaded. This makes getting a full list hard. I don't mind switching discs (even though it is annoying) but show me all my songs. What would be better is if the other discs could be downloaded to my PS3. Songs on the store cost ~$1.49 so buying old discs is economically the better choice in a lot of cases.

This brings me to my second issue, some songs are limited by region. I sort of understand this if the languages are different, but why does the UK have a different selection than the US? WTF is up with that?

Also, while the store is big, and has lots of different songs, there's a few artists who are missing. For example, there's no Tom Petty anywhere that I've found. This is one of my biggest frustrations, but is likely not the fault of London Studio who produces the game.

Finally, some songs such as Baby Got Back are classified as rap scoring. Rap scoring isn't explained in the user's manual (which is in game) and neither myself or my wife can figure out what makes the score good or bad.

The Good

• Fun
• Lots of songs
• Inexpensive
• Can actually improve your voice
  

The Bad

• Song selection (No Tom Petty? Really?)
• Specialty songs per region (Why does the UK get Love Shack and we in the US don't?)
• Rap Scoring (Makes no sense)
• Store songs are expensive

Overall

I love it but there's rough edges. I give this a rating of 8/10.

PSN Security - Transparency and Trophies

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Doing the right things

If you read the FAQ yesterday you most likely saw:

Q: What steps is Sony taking to protect my personal data in the future?
A: We’ve taken several immediate steps to add protections for your personal data. First, we temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and, second, we are enhancing security and strengthening our network infrastructure. Moving forward, we are initiating several measures that will significantly enhance all aspects of PlayStation Network’s security and your personal data, including moving our network infrastructure and data center to a new, more secure location, which is already underway. We will provide additional information on these measures shortly.

This is actually unprecedented news. No one tells you how they are protecting your data. Not Microsoft, not Steam. The only thing this can be described as, is goodness.

A Note About Trophies

The thing about trophies is, they are kept on your local system and synced to the server. Even if somehow Sony screwed up and didn't have this data backed up, your PS3 does. Your trophies will be fine people.

But what's more important is this is still described as a data breach not vandalism. That means the person(s) in question just copied data and didn't trash the database. They likely had read only access through a partially privileged account, meaning they couldn't trash the database.

I full expect all profiles to be fine.

PSA on PSN Data Breach

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Your Info, For the World to See

So Sony admits that data has been taken from the PSN breach, including:

• Real Name
• User Name
• Password
• Address
• Phone Number

Other Possible Data Includes:

• E-mail
• Security Questions
• Credit Card info (but not your CCV)

This is a major breach of trust. And from the sounds of things it could affect all 75 million users.

It Never Should Have Happened

The problem is Sony relied on their leaf node security to protect users. In other words, they thought the PS3/other services were not hackable so no need to secure the inner data. This is huge. The PS3 hacks only worked because they failed to use proper security on the console, and now we find out they didn't encrypt the user data?

It is called AES-256. Same encryption the military uses. Can it be hacked? Sure; however, given all the computing power on the planet (which hackers don't have access to) and reasonably long salts, the sun will explode first.

What To Do

Unfortunately not much. Change your security questions, passwords, etc. Be wary of phishing. While the hackers did grab the data, be glad they did it in such a public way. Imagine if you will, instead of mucking up the works the hackers only took 1 or 2 accounts. They could have done this for months or years unnoticed.

On The Brighter Side

Look for PS3s at a deep discount on CraigsList this weekend. Sony will hopefully learn from this.

Microsoft should take note as well. Since consumers aren't told how their data is secured, Xbox Live could have the same thing happen. Be safe out there.

Oh and I should note, they finally have a plan to get the network up, but only expect part of it to be up within the next week.

PSN Still Out. Why? (My Best Guess)

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Rebuilding a Network from Scratch

First, let me say this post is based on my own experiences in IT and computer programming. I have no knowledge of what Sony is actually doing, but this is my best guess.

So Sony had an intrusion. Why isn't this a non-event and we go on with our lives? Simple, PSN accounts have associated names, addresses, and credit card information.

Now according to Sony they have people working around the clock trying to rebuild the network. As much as anyone would like to believe them, I'm calling BS.

Here's the thing, a major rebuild requires an architect. One guy who, in essence sees the big picture. This is true for both small software as well as products like office. It is especially true in IT, where interactions can cause major problems.

Now think about it, if you have one guy you're depending on to give orders to everyone, it simply isn't possible to have them up for 5 days straight and have a coherent strategy. Hop that person up with as much Ritalin and coffee as you want, by about 24 hours they'll start to make mistakes.

So we have the outage on Wednesday and 48 hours to investigate/formulate a plan of attack. That brings us up to Good Friday, a holiday for a lot of people.

Assuming the mitigation plan on Friday/Saturday was to rebuild the network as evidenced by blog posts, I suspect that this nameless person would have taken Easter off. I mean really, work is one thing but family, they are paramount. So at best I give this foreman of the network 24 hours in the last 5 days to put a set of orders together. (Assuming 12 hours on Friday and 12 on Saturday.)

Now 24 hours seems like a lot of time, but you have to realize 90% of that time would have been working with other engineers to get a grasp on the changes needed and to start to formulate a new networking strategy.

I'm guessing that the real work has just started today. I'd expect some real progress in the next 24-48 hours, but don't be surprised if PSN is off into the weekend.

Incentives for Getting the Lights Back On

So even through people point out PSN is free, it really isn't. PSN pays for its self via online purchases and such. Ever wonder why a game that costs $5 in the store still costs $30 on PSN? It is because Sony controls the pricing and can get people to pay the higher rate to have the game right now.

Every second PSN is down, they are losing money. Lots of money. So while I've painted a picture of doom and gloom above, I could be wrong. Money talks and depending on who's overseeing the network overhaul, the architect could be listening.

Sony May Have to Pay For Removal of OtherOS (At Least in Finland)

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Normally I don't publish news like this; however, I thought a little run down would be useful:

I ran across this article.

For those who just want he summary, basically the Finnish Consumer Board was looking at the OtherOS removal mess. Sony claimed because the user agreed to the new EULA, they could do anything they wanted. The board said, that EULAs can't remove rights given by law.

Right now this is only a recommendation, but he board wants Sony to pay consumers 100 euros to everyone who had this feature. The PS3 sold for 265 euros to give a perspective of how much this is. Over 1/3rd the original purchase price.

This ruling is not legally binding, but it will be considered by the actual court case. I gotta say, I agree with the Finnish Board here.

Portal 2 - Spoiler Free Review

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It has been a long time.

I've finished up the single player on Portal 2. For those who haven't played it yet, here's a spoiler free review.

Which Version To Buy:

If you have a PS3 but like PC gaming, still go with the PS3 version. It gives you the PC/Mac version for free. The reverse isn't true, nor is it true on the XBox360.

Goodness:

• Retains the old Portal style, more dark comedy
• Smoother play (only got stuck on 1 or 2 puzzles)
• Gives some back story
• Developer commentary (This is just plain awesome!)
• Easy to skip back to sections
  

Badness:

• Song for credits is a bit weaker
• Still feels too short, at ~10 hours to beat the single player
• Low replay value

Advice:
So if you played the first game and liked it, there's more to like here. If you haven't played the first game, it is well worth the money on Steam.

This is definitely not for everyone, but it will have a great fan base.

Now time for multi-player.