PlayStation Y2K-Like Battery Bug About To Become A Problem As Sony Shuts Down Check In Servers

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We've had a couple of discussions now about video game preservation with the impetus being Sony's shutdown of support for the PlayStation Store for PSP, PS3, and Vita owners. The general idea there was questioning what happens to games for those systems in the very long term if suddenly nobody can get to them anymore and the developers and publishers are not always retaining the source code and assets for these games on their end. That sort of thing is probably primarily of interest to us folks who look at these games as a form of art and culture, very much worth preserving.But Sony may well have a much bigger issue on its hands. As a result of a strange internal time-check issue that exists on PS3 and PS4 consoles, there is the very real possibility that those consoles will be unable to play any purchased game soon if the end user replaces the battery on the device. It's, well, it's a bit like Y2K, but for real.

The root of the coming issue has to do with the CMOS battery inside every PS3 and PS4, which the systems use to keep track of the current time (even when they're unplugged). If that battery dies or is removed for any reason, it raises an internal flag in the system's firmware indicating the clock may be out of sync with reality.After that flag is raised, the system in question has to check in with PSN the next time it needs to confirm the correct time. On the PS3, this online check happens when you play a game downloaded from the PlayStation Store. On the PS4, this also happens when you try to play retail games installed from a disc. This check has to be performed at least once even if the CMOS battery is replaced with a fresh one so the system can reconfirm clock consistency.

Sony could render the problem moot relatively easily with a firmware update that limits the system functions tied to this timing check. Thus far, though, Sony hasn't publicly indicated it has any such plans and hasn't responded to multiple requests for comment from Ars Technica. Until it does, complicated workarounds that make use of jailbroken firmware are the only option for ensuring that aging PlayStation hardware will remain fully usable well into the future.

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Content Moderation Case Study: Friendster Battles Fakesters (2003)

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Summary: While the social media/social networking space today is dominated by Facebook, it's interesting to look at how Facebook's predecessors dealt with content moderation challenges as well. One of the earliest social networks to reach mainstream recognition was Friendster, founded by Jonathan Abrams in 2002 and launched in early 2003, gaining millions of users who signed up to connect with friends. Originally built as a dating site, it expanded quickly beyond that.One of the first big content moderation questions that the site faced was whether or not to allow fakesters. As the site grew rapidly, one popular usage was to set up fake accounts -- these were accounts for completely made up fictional characters (e.g., Homer Simpson), concepts (e.g., Pure Evil), random objects (e.g., Giant Squid), or places (e.g., New Jersey). Researcher danah boyd catalogued the different types of fakesters and studied the phenomenon of fake accounts on the site.

In early July, Friendster's affable chief operating officer, Kent Lindstrom, told me the only fakesters that the company would likely remove would be ones it received complaints about. (On Friendster, users can flag somebody's profile for the company to review, and write comments about why it offended them.) But Abrams shakes his head emphatically when I mention this.No. They're all going, he says, his voice steely. All of them.

Though they are some of Friendster's most ardent fans many spend several hours a day on the site fakesters do everything they can to create anarchy in the system. They are not interested in finding friends through prosaic personal ads, but through a big, surreal party where Jesus, Chewbacca, and Nitrous are all on the guest list. To fakesters, phony identities don't destroy the social experience of Friendster; they enrich it.But fakesters aren't hosting this gig. Jonathan Abrams, the 33-year-old software engineer who founded Friendster to improve his own social life, is and he abhors the phony profiles. He believes they diminish his site's worth as a networking tool and claims that fakesters' pictures often images ripped off the Web violate trademark law. Abrams' 10-person Sunnyvale company has begun ruthlessly deleting fakesters and plans to eventually eradicate them completely from the site.

Giant Squid is not alone: Among the "Fakesters" who've signed up for Friendster are Jackalope, God, Beer, Drunk Squirrel, Hippie Jesus, Malcolm X and more than a dozen Homer Simpsons. Just like regular users, they post their photos, blab on bulletin boards and collect friends like so many baseball cards. Some, staying in character, even write gushing testimonials about their friends: What higher endorsement could there be than a few complimentary words from Homer himself? "Better than a cold can of Duff beer ... "But while it may be amusing to invite God himself into your pool of friends and get back the message, "God is now your friend," the founder of the site says that such chicanery only distorts his system."Fake profiles really defeats the whole point of Friendster," says entrepreneur Abrams, interviewed by cellphone as he waited to catch a plane in Los Angeles. "Some people find it amusing, but some find it annoying. And it doesn't really serve a legitimate purpose. The whole point of Friendster is to see how you're connected to people through your friends," he says.

• Should it delete any and all fakester profiles? Should it only do so if users complain about a specific profile, or should it be proactive in removing such profiles?
• How should the company deal with nicknames, rather than a person's real name? How would it distinguish between celebrities and those pretending to be celebrities?
• Does removing fakesters harm some of the fun aspects that brought people to the site in the first place?

• Does forcing everyone to be on the site with their real name lead to less participation from more vulnerable and at risk populations, worried about putting their profiles online?
• How much should web sites cater to emergent behavior, like fakesters, which some users enjoyed and resulted in more usage of the site?
• Are there legal risks associated with allowing fake profiles?

What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion," Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. "We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or 'fan' profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends."

"The issue here is actually about consumer protection," said Kopp. "We do, as a policy, strongly discourage fake profiles. A rogue user hiding behind a Jesus profile, for example, has the potential to abuse the service or users in many ways. In the case of the Anchorman characters, DreamWorks owns the rights to the characters and there is nothing fraudulent about it."

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