Posts by Jetsetlemming

  • PSN down

    You don't seem to be seeing the difference between defacing a store, robbing the mailman, and actually breaking into the store and having free reign in it. The latter is what happened to Sony. It's also what happened to Gizmodo recently. It's not what No-Steam does. It's not what spying on a retailer is.

    Edit: Imagine Fort Knox. Ok? Super well guarded fortress and US military base, at which the US gold reserves are kept. Famous for high security. No-Steam is like if you put on a Clinton mask, went up to the front gate, and went "Hey I'm totes a legit member of the US government, gimme gold plz" and the dumb guard goes "Well ok, if you say so" and hands you a gold bar. The Visa thing is like if you ambushed a truck full of gold on its way to Fort Knox and robbed it. What happened to Sony is like if you pried up the wood covering a big gaping hole in their outer wall, walked right in, found the safes unlocked, and stole all the gold.

    edit 2: And it took fort knox a week to notice the robbery, at first they just told everyone they were investigating a local gold shortage.

  • PSN down

    Quote from Sentura

    lol this is bullshit. no system is 100% secure, and you always need to assume this. security 101

    I said reasonably secure. It is quite possible to make a website secure enough from the internet side that it's probably not going to be broken into. Nobody has ever gotten into Amazon, Visa, or Paypal, and these would be way higher value targets than PSN. And yes, you always need to plan for "but what if", which is why the personal information should've never been saved in a readable format. Sony had to hire an external security team to "investigate" this issue. When the PS3 was hacked it was discovered that a single malformed encryption key was used for everything on the entire platform and it turned out to be trivially easy to get around every layer of copyright protection and code signing. Do you really think that this was some act of internet nature, unpredictable, and unpreventable? Is that a more reasonable opinion than "Sony's completely incompetent with security and this shouldn't have been able to happen"?

  • PSN down

    Quote from barrakid

    it was really well protected since it could only be accessed trough a black box (the PS3)

    This isn't true. All web services have an IP that can be accessed through a computer at least, and PSN has a website anyway. There's also the Media Go service for downloading Playstation/PSP things on a PC for people who don't have their systems set up to connect to the internet.

    And there's a really big difference between an external exploit, like cracking offline copyright protection, or flooding a server's bandwidth with a million connection attempts, and getting internal access to a website's server and its easily readable data. Nobody has ever stolen credit card numbers from Steam, Amazon, or Visa.

    News has already come out that PSN did not have any dedicated security staff or really knowledgeable IT guys and they had to hire external security to investigate this issue. I can guarantee you that they had some super weak shit going on that the hacker(s) exploited.

  • PSN down

    "Don't store CC numbers" is so totally NOT the lesson here. It is, in fact, possible to make a service strong enough to be reasonably secure from outside intrusions. After the HL2 source code was stolen nobody's ever hacked Valve again. I feel confident with my payment info being stored there. And when websites DO have some dumb exploit to take advantage of so that someone can gain access to it, it doesn't always result in stolen information, as there ARE safe ways to keep data. Remember the Gawker Media thing? The reason that was so bad is because those geniuses were storing passwords as plain text locally. The real tl;dr here is that internet services with anything remotely important to protect need to spend the cash to hire people who know what they're doing to lock shit down properly.

  • PSN down

    Quote from sarge mat

    Did hear a theory that the PSN-Steam thing sent the system haywire, but that was before the weekend so I assume its been some sort of attack. They are also not sure if credit card details have been taken :/

    Big difference between DDOS'ing a website, which would be analogous to blocking the doors of a business, and hacking it, which would be breaking in. They'd actually need to hack PSN to get access to anything like credit card details, and if their goal was profit like that they wouldn't bother with the DDOS. These are two separate tactics with two separate goals.

  • Portal 2

    Quote from Serenius

    Finished it on Saturday. Really fun and hilarious from beginning to end. I never hit a spot that gave me brain cramps like the first game though. Guess they were keeping it easier to make it more accessible.My favorite quote:

    + Achievement!

  • Portal 2

    Just played through coop again with another guy who only typed and used the ping tool, and we were trying to speedrun. Despite the lack of voice coordination we managed to finish in about 80 minutes. Not bad for a first attempt but we think we can get it under an hour.

  • Brink

    The parkour system is still in, in that video you see mantling and wall jumping and sliding. Nothing extremely flashy as the focus as nitty gritty gameplay. Look at the game's other recent footage.

  • Portal 2

    Quote from Mazy

    Played through 3 chapters of the co-op, absolutely loving it. Brilliant level design, and much like the campaign then there were a few bits where we had to stop up to think things through, but the ball usually got rolling fast enough that it didn't get frustrating.

    When my friend and I got to that level, around 4AM, it took us FOREVER to figure it out. We were trying really dumb stuff like using light bridges and physics exploits to try and alter our momentum to get the desired result instead. When I eventually realized the comparatively way more simple solution, we were just stunned.

  • Brink

    The many cuts to black that last two or three seconds between clips got annoying. I hope that was an error with the video (or maybe an abysmally poor choice in style), instead of Splash Damage having some truth in advertising or something

    Gameplay looks damn good though. Wanna parkour through a battle and rez people almost as much as I want Portal 2's SDK.

  • Portal 2

    Quote from dux

    Screen looks fine for 2001. Get your head out of your ass.

    It ok, my problems with Halo are in the art and level design, not in the technical features. Its outdoor areas actually look really good for the time. But that doesn't make HL1 from 1998, back before 3dfx glide stopped being a thing, back before video ram was a thing we really had, back when colored lighting was still a thing, somehow look terrible in comparison... because they're a couple generations apart. Three years before Half-life 1 was Mechwarrior 2:

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/WUWBx.jpg]

    As far as other 2001 games go, I think Return to Castle Wolfenstein beats the pants off of Halo in every way.

    Edit: Three years after Halo:

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/1DFWT.jpg]