Posts by Heff

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Cruft

revolutionary ideas can only be provided by peop,e who fulfill the following criteria :

a) those who understand the current SOA

b) those who can deviate from the track that the current SOA has laid.

its no different from railroad days : bar the massively high barrier to entry. You created Strata of engineers based on undertsanding, when maybe look at the undergrads that are yelling "why dipoles?" or "why not tantalum?"

these recs, of course, are subject to billion-dollar whims, so adventurousness in the marketplace is... oh, wait. a corroborating factor against ingenuity.

Sysadmin's £100,000 revenge after sudden sacking

"we need to do a full test of the fire system"

"A full test?"

"Yes"

"That's a lot of Halon"

"A- what?"

"Well In the Data Ce-"

"I dont want your excuses. A full test"

Yes, Mein Kapitan. #justfollowingorderssir #godblesstheorgchart

How Microsoft will cram Windows 10 even harder down your PC's throat early next year

When you're not billing us, you're billing someone else.

I'd rather be your customer, not your merchandise.

GFY.

Another death in Apple's 'Mordor' – its Foxconn Chinese assembly plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-climb_paint

Fixed this for you. (seriously : stop them from getting on the roof. good grief)

Obsolete – and IP-baring – Anon tool linked to feminist blog DDoS

Re: Self-victimization

If you're applying Occams razor to "are there technologically stupid fedoratards out there with access to LOIC, or is this a Quinnspiracy?" and you're coming up with Qui- I mean, Conspiracy,I think your Fedora is too tight.

Im just saying, maybe back up that really obvious bias you have there, just a little.

Amazon to create 5,000 UK jobs in Kindle Fire hire

Re: Good start...

I was going to say : 5000 jobs is pretty good for a tiny company based in luxembourg with no UK assets or sales to speak of.

but then I remembered what reality was. apparently half of them are going to be temp jobs too, so that's pretty swell.

Hipstamatic axes most of staff to focus on art, creativity

We havent been making enough money!

No, because Insta said "here's Hipsta, for free" and completely destroyed your ability to grow, and while they ballooned like a cancer in your marketplace you did absolutely nothing.

I feel sorry for the engineers and designers being subject to the failure and incompetency of this kind of management, but hey; better off out of it.

Bitcoinica sued for $460,000 by 'out-of-pocket' punters

Re: Caveat emptor

Bitcoins : for when you absolutely, positively have to piss money away into the aether. In many ways its the ideal analogy for unbacked currency; you could use it as a model to explain to kids why governments have deficits and banks lend more than their assets and the whole stock market doesn't just disintegrate when someone says facebook is worth a billionty dollars.

but there the analogy ends. real currency exists in the real world. its backed by the markets; not just the existence of currency exchanges and governments, but that starbucks will take your dollars, euros, and yen without so much as a blink. Anyone who says they have assets of half a million dollars in bitcoins knows that what they really have is a promise of half a million if they dont destabilise the market : by doing something silly like attempting to get half a million dollars out of it. Its tulip bulbs all over again. A million tulip bulbs! Im rich enough to buy the earth... unless I flood the market with a million bulbs. huh. confusing. illiquidity in the market, including the lack of large transfers is the only thing propping it up, along with the confidence trick of lawsuits like this claiming that some dodgy brokerage or bank owes them big money. It doesnt. It owes them bitcoins.

I dont get why these people dont just invest in the stock market. Its not difficult to figure out where trends are going. Read the FT. Read New Scientist. invest all your money in tantalum for 5 years. ta da. Sure, you're being a shitbag futures investor inherently driving up the cost of a commodity on everyone elses dime, but at least it makes sense.

Apple's iPhone 5 connector said to be a control freak

err

Dont they **have** to give it a micro-usb compat in order to sell it in the EU? wasnt there a big ISO kick-off about phone chargers and whatnot a while back, or am I drunk again?

YouView: You're delayed - Sugar

Re: Alan Sugar / Amstrad quality control department?

Im confused whenever he's linked to tech these days. Why are we acting like the man is a CEO Tech genius after the utter clusterfuck that was him ploughing Amstrad into the ground over the emailer? Its all a bit Walter Mitty, isnt it? I mean, arent successful business tycoons... you know. business-ing, rather than doing pointless TV shows?

everytime I hear of him burrowing into the BBC like a tick looking for blood I wonder who the hell buys into his particular brand of "Im a genius, innit" logic.

LightSquared founder Falcone steps aside on creditor's orders

must be nice to be sitting at the helm of a hedge fund, investing billions of dollars of someone elses money into your own little business that also pays you a wage.

nice work, if you can get it.

Freed Facebook hack Brit vents fury at $200k cleanup claim

Re: Cleanup costs

the bug bounty system on FB is no more than a PR stunt to infer that they're serious about soliciting outside fixes, If you have the power or nous to seriously embarass, or the work that you'd have to do exceeds their terrible payment sums* they arent interested, which just leaves the door open for large-scale, clever blackhat hacks. Im not terribly sympathetic to the guy either, but he's very pragmatic about what happened by all accounts, and regardless of the attitude Im glad, as we all should be, that he's not on a flight to the US right now to be another subject of their for-profit incarceration machine.

*might be better now, they were frankly laughable when they were implemented

TL:DR : Glad he's not stateside, glad taxpayers arent paying for a pointlessly long jail time, Kudos to the guy for being pragmatic and mature about the outcome.

Revealed: Inside super-soaraway Pinterest's virtual data centre

Re: 2 billion dollars deal?

or Yahoo! AMIRITE. <3

Ten... digital adult toys

Re: Magic Wand

I like it when people review sex toys but dont actually use the sex toys. "we took this to the pub and all had a good laugh!" unless you're reviewing a stand-up comedian that does pub tours, you're doing it wrong.

Good job; honestly it must be nice to be paid to not do your job, getting a paid gig as a reviewmonkey isnt easy, but to get paid for reviews when you dont actually use the product? That's almost like... marketing. Maybe I should write a review for enterprise servers by taking them out of their shipping crates and go "colour is nice, and doesnt clash with other blades in the rack, but seriously, no bubble wrap to pop or free candy in the box makes me give this a solid 60%"

US Navy preps railgun for tests

yup

railguns, they work great, once. either the whole thing has to be a rather bizarrely extended discarding-sabot affair or you need coughfrictionlesscough rails. still, its a nice stepping stone to coilguns.

Kodak heading to Chapter 11

good grief

The crime here isn't just the legacy of the firm that's being pissed up the wall, the sadness of a passing brand that we've grown up with, that you can find stencilled on buildings, or the eventual sad shelving of quality hardware (cant get the parts) its the jobs. Kodak could have held onto its chemicals business and turned out first rate analog chemical film for enthusiasts : not a billion dollar earner, but a respectable top-tier product, and gone balls-deep into imaging, digital processing, and the like, and planted their 'anchor' in IP aquisitions just like every other oversized, inflexible tech company in existence.

It didn't do those things, and now the 6 million dollar man gets to shrug and carry on living the life of riley while a company full of engineers in a field that's being relegated to history can look foward to what? a pinkslip because their CEO was incompetent and got paid anyway?

I can only hope their retirement plans werent invested in the company. Poor bastards.

NotW didn't delete Milly Dowler 'false hope' voicemail

Oh for gods sake

I hope you didnt pay for this one, reg, Its being debunked live on the news with nothing more than an infant-school level of applied math. Voicemails are deleted with 72 hours. Voicemails went missing before that. QED....

'Devastating' protocol flaw could paralyze Bitcoin system

Non-fiat currency backed by no assets, being traded in blocks.

Its like the digital version of tulip trading only there isnt any bulbs. Its the stupidest damned thing ive heard of.

OCZ exposes bulging solid disk for 2012

4 year product life != Mean Failure time

Frankly a lot of the "new" MLC/TLC drive arrangements coming out simple dont have good sampling data for MFT, or if the drive slowly dies with dwindling usable space or if it grinds along with its ECC doing more and more work and eventually just falls down dead. I dont think they're that trustworthy for enterprise and for home users it _still_ looks like running a little SLC boot drive and traditional platters for your archival/storage stuff too.

WTB good MFT statistics, but then by the time you could puslish a spread there'd be a new tech generation out there. unfortunate situation.

Secret US 'Jedi' ghost-copters kept out of bin Laden raid

err, what?

We're taking DoD info from a hollywood scriptwriter, are we now?

WHAT IS THIS, THE MIRROR?

Best Buy UK spent £200m on failed megastores

Well, as long as they've learned their lesson

hand over a billion dollars over to shareholders, employ a few hundred people, and then decide its not worth it. but hey, as long as central office is learning a lesson, right?

poor fucking BB Employees, merry christmas :/

Facebook dangles cash rewards for bug reports

Waste of time

Considering their recent problems with URL shortening and any links that refer back to imgur, it's almost impossible to tell the difference between their 'admin actions' and a legit bug; and when you do find something broken, stepping around their "whoops doesn't work" auto replies and actually trying to get someone to pay attention is a nightmare not worth bothering with. Facebook aren't interested in security, privacy, orbasic business ethics; stick to referral worms; if you have the skill do you really want to use them to make Facebook "better?"

I mean, this is a company where if you're interested In Keeping shit professional you need to subscribe to an external websites RSS just to keep abreast of what new, retarded feature has just been enabled by default this week.

Trollface, because this articles gotta be trollin

Heat sink breakthrough threatens ventblockers

wow

Im very keen to put a large, presumably heavy and necessarily sharp edge spinining flywheel right next to my graphics cards. on top of my chip. next to my ram.

several thousand RPM, you say? That's... thats astounding. like a chainsaw, then?

--

In all seriousness it sounds like a good idea, but the market is increasingly moving away from fanned systems to either passive-cooled radiators in massive tunnelled racks for business, and sealed-system liquid coolers in home units. personally I still want a total-immersion/submersion cooled beastie at heart. With lights! and bubbles! anything to seal the box, really.

Humans are dirty, and there's no way to avoid crud and the associated thermal problems with crud unless you make the computer a sealed unit (with a rad on top. or machine the entire backplate out of copper, mebbes)

Elpida aims to issue $1bn of paper to fund re-tooling

"worried about share dilution"

indeed, a valid concern when a business is looking down the barrel of a gun. lets keep share value nice and high right up until we go into administration.

Diary of a cameraman at the last shuttle launch

I remember, as a kid

watching a shuttle launch on the TV from up close, and then learning that because of the H/O fuel mix : NASA literally made it rain immediately following a launch.

You can argue about cost to create and run, and the practicality of it in the 2010s but I dont think you can argue that its been a positive force in science, and on the minds of kids. The space program was iconic of my view of the world when I was little : that if you worked hard enough, if you were smart enough, you could literally LEAVE THE PLANET AND STAND ON THE MOON.

for me, this feels like another door closing on that part of being a kid, and Im going to miss it.

Google+ disk space cockup creates notification spam-storm

Still amazing stuff

Social network site admits to technical failure, opens line of dialogue, states problem, and apologises?

what the hell is that? Take me back to the goodold days where shit would just randomly stop working and start working with no transparency from the provider at all. I mean, ffuuu, if they carry on down this route of conversing with users, who knows where we'll end up?

ARM daddy simulates human brain with million-chip super

Ethics

XGCU Grey Area (apt, no?)

I once had a great chat with an AI -focussed prof about the ethics of creating a parallel human mind incapable of forgetting mistakes, of unlearning the pain sensation and merely storing it as "bad". Good brainfood times.

whilst you can probably simulate 1 billion spiking neurons with this array, whats the time-frame? I can simulate a protein folding on my graphics card, but a couple of nanoseconds of modelling takes a few hours of compute time : are we simulating 1% of a human brain at 1% of the speed, or are we simulating 1% at 1:1 speed ratios, or are we doing 1% at faster-than-human levels?

The point : a million monkeys can write shakespeare idea : what if you had a monkey (this 1% brain model) and just ran it a million times faster than a monkey?

TL:DR : if its quick, does it have to be vast?

Verizon Wireless ends unlimited data plans

Thats a cool story bro

when you're done downloading angry birds and a kanye west ringtone, get back to me when you need to do business on the move. 'k?

Thanks!

oh come _ON_

why is there never a coverage for the high-end data client? unlimited always means "up until we decide you're abusing out good graces", and when they finally abolish that, there's never a premium unlimited option. $80 for 10gig. great. can we have $150 for unlimited and stop counting bandwidth like its magic goddamned beans already?

Apple MacBook Airs to get new, superfast 19nm Flash

Err, what?

Not a comparable pair

one ultraportable thin laptop versus one mongrel dell gaming machine*. you may as well compare the air with some cheap and cheerful EEE netbook or something that only weighs a kilo.

cost is likewise irrelevant : buy to task, and if you'rte too dim or too peer pressured to do that, get whicher makes you happier and stop crying about depreciation : its hardware; its the same as a car. you pull it out of the wrapped or drive it off the forecourt, it suddenly loses 40%. big whup.

*im not getting into how asinine gaming laptops are.

Pacific rare-earth discovery: Actually just gigatonnes of dirt

It'd make an interesting change to roadsweepers

I know the paper doesn't seem worth much, but if you look at it on a nice-to-note-for-the-future basis, its awfully handy. If someone comes along and says "oh, how about you make, I don't know, some kind of giant hoover, that ducts straight into this seawater-filled, magnet-lined centrifuge*, and that takes your mud from 2000ppm to 200,000ppm, and also we get to squirt off a bunch of other high-concentration-of-x mixes then we're good.

the thing about ore mining, and processing, and all that primary-producer malarkey is you can run a very successful business on a very narrow profit margin : if you shift enough material. What the report says is "the material is here. lots of it. fucking bajillions of tons, right here" whilst the current "wash it with fuckloads of acid" doesnt really appeal for now, a lot of scientific and industrial progress isnt made in a straight line; its a game of engineering hangman, where the blanks get filled until someone realises that MON_Y is only lacking one letter, and then they win the prize.

a bloody big, rare-metal siltbed is a letter. a couple more, and you might just see a new industry flourish out of bloody nowhere.

*people with more Engineerspeak can come up with a better lie here.

Glasgow cammer not thrown in slammer

'unable to secure a prison sentence"

GOOD. leave prison to violent offenders and criminals with a proven intent to do harm. jailing the dude for camming makes as much sense as jailing people for persistant noise complaints or littering.

Panasonic TX-P65VT30 65in plasma 3D TV

its a 4 and a half grand telly

you pay a pro the 200 extra quid to either cut out the studwork and build a mount box into the wall (frequently done in bathrooms for wall-mounted bogs) or you mount directly into the studs : assuming they're placed at happy distances.

either way, you dont mount something this heavy, and this valuable, by yourself unless you know what you're doing. serious: Im surprised it comes with built-in speakers : who the hell uses built-ins if they're spending over 2k on a screen?

Im not disagreeing with your criticisms, but you're judging this as a regular TV. its not a regular TV : its a massive unit that costs more than a second hand car. If you're shirking from the price of having someone install it, then you shouldnt be spending 4.5k on a TV this big anyway, IMO.

Blighty gets gold-dispensing ATM

so let me get this straight

you're valuing your non-fiat currency alternative in fiat currency?

If you're going to advocate from the diversion of equity to a non-fiat source, then you need to advocate for a source with more intrinic, barterable worth. Gold is just another fiat currency, its just backed by your lizard brain going OOH SHINY. You cant eat it, you cant forge it into anything useful cos its too fucking soft. you cant make clothes out if it.

Gold is the epitomy of the tinkerbell effect.

New anti-corruption offences come into force today

awesome

new laws and regulations to incorporate into the cost-of-doing-business model, to be lackadaiscally enforced and then appealed down to minor fines.

Moderatrix kisses the Reg goodbye

do not go quietly, into that good night

Tits or GTFO wins again.

Much <3 and good luck out there.

US Supremes dump violent video game ban

federal oversight

its basically an industry protection measure; The fed states it has the authority, not individual states, to regulate the videogame industry, which means Rockstar only has to tweak a Europe/Germany/Australia/USA version of GTA, rather than potentially 50 separate versions for each state. considering allowing individual states to legislate content would effectively balloon the cost of developing and publishing, and drive piracy through the roof as people in the more restricted states turn to clandestine downloads to find the "directors cut" of the game they want to play, protecting production under the terms of free speech is the most pragmatic move available.

you can argue that its semi-pointless anyway, as the XBOX, Playstation and nintendo platforms refuse to licence games without ESRB certification, and still further refuse to licence games that recieve AO certifications. Fun times; Protecting developers from localisation hell is only part of the problem.

German chemical giant depending on biscuit-based security

solution in need of a problem?

its easier to line a cardboard box with felt and bubblewrap (and probably cheaper, too)

why use a faraday cage when you can put the phone in a dark box with no sound? mics on phones are bullshit and always have been (thankyou, designed-to-task!) but if you're going to get paranoid into the corporate espionage game, then you already have a corp. whitelist for phones, and/or you just have someone collect up the units and they sit outside the meeting in a safe at admin goon X's cubicle.

I fail to see when faraday cages were ever made necessary.

Dungeon Siege III

Dragon Siege 3?

its not a spiritual, or real successor to either of the Gas Powered Games wonders. the control on PC are ghastly, and the casual/frenetic combat style has been replaced by a horrible kludged together and unresponsive pseudo-tactical farce.

If you didnt like dungeo- sorry dragon siege 2, and you thought the features that set it apart from the other RPGs of its time were annoying and distracting, then this is the game for you' in short, its all the features that could be regarded as annoying and distracting, ported to a new game.

Space Siege followed by this? and Supreme commander 2. Oy. Gas Powered Games, how you have fallen, how your mighty works lay prone, etc etc :(

FBI fat-thumbs data centre raid

bloody hell

between this, and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/18/fed_domain_seizure_slammed/ and the 141 / Kentucky bullshit Im amazed there isnt a massive re-education program in place for the US Justice departments.

seriously, can you imagine this sort of shit going down in a bank? "we have no idea which deposit box. Take em all" "we know the first 6 digits of the laundering account, so freeze all of them starting with that"

someone needs to slap the fuck out of whomever approved the warrant to empty out 3 enclosures.

Wee teacher, cos someone in the DoJ chain clearly needs a tech lesson.

Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade

err, what?

how are they going to "roll back" trades? I thought the whole Bitcoins-be-awesome point was untraceable, irreversible transactions?

It is nice to see the bitcoin thing learn one of the fundamental rules of commerce and economics, though : all currencies are based on the concept of barter, of a thing _representing another thing_ you can say "a bitcoin is worth $17" but unless there are daily trade and investitures of bitcoins to establish that as a worth, then all you have is your word, which makes it as shaky and pointless as IPOs on pre-profit web companies. E.G : your bank account is not a statement of some box somewhere in a vault with some money in it. its a statement of how much money you have loaned the bank. the bank invests this, buying and selling with it, on its own behalf, and agrees to gives you services, or interest on your loan or both. Bitcoins aren't.

Scarcity != worth : by the sounds of it the majority of bitcoin 'users' are sitting on large quanitites of this 'currency'; (how is it generated? real currencies suffer inflation by producing more currency backed by governments borrowing against themselves through a variety of means, and back the worth of this inflation through, effectively, fiscal promises) What are bitcoins promised on? This is 'money' that isn't invested in the economy, isn't backed by a government and isn't a market-valued promissory. Its a broken model : considering so many geeks are involved in its creation and administration, Im amazed none of them can do basic math. Wheelbarrow of 'papiermarks', anyone?

I'd use the genius icon, but I dont even have a degree in this shit and it seems painfull obvious that its an accident waiting to happen.

Woman puts shout-out for hitman on Facebook

<3

Engish!

Nintendo: no DVD, BD playback for Wii U

I think the guy is on the level

If you were ever going to get a DVD player, you already have one. Blu-ray will, in all likelihood be the last physical disk system for movies; netflix and On-Demand systems are in explosive growth. Iwata wants to put a console forward into that market, and can either sell to the market now (expensively) or prepare for the market of 2, 3 or 5 years time, and do it cheaply.

prop. discs make piracy harder (though it'll still happen), and avoid nintendo paying out patent rights to other companies, something which its never been keen on to start with. most families I know, as their kids moved rapidly out of the "lets play jump around games with mum and dad" to "mum and dad suck, imma mope in my room" have used their Wiis less and less as gaming hubs and more and more as netflix boxen, and it seem Iwata is looking forward and preparing for changes to come.

yes, seriously. I dont see any obvious flaws in the logic or the method.

Man says he lost $500,000 in virtual currency heist

guy's a dipshit

you pay your bank fees, your visa card rates etc not just because they want to turn a buck (and employ people, too)* but also for insurance. you pay your 8-25% interest so that when some nobjocket honks off with your card and buys a bunch of rolexs in harrods and flogs em on ebay you can hop on the phone and not have to pay for it. likewise your bank covers you for bank robberies and things like the FDIC cover you for bank failure.

so sure, stick all your money in bitcoins**, just take out insurance on that investment, otherwise, like this dude, its just digital money under the mattress as opposed to the papery stuff, and you've nobody to blame but yourself when it goes for a walk.

*yeah, yeah. big evil credit giants, holding the little man down. I get it. money under your mattress employs zero people and doesnt work in the marketplace.

**if its decentralized, how does that even work? one big hard drive failure could have wiped out his "stash" too, right? If there's a system for transfers, then there's a transfer log. this makes my head ache.

LulzSec claims responsibility for CIA.gov outage

...weird target list

and then chased it up with CCP, minecraft, and... the escapist?

the DDoS stuff is kids play, and its kids play to guard against for any company big enough to take its own hosting/web presence in-house. I dont understand the intent, though. you push over a couple of soft targets and the site pops back up after a reset. maybe a long rest, as admins everywhere go "hey, while we're offline, can we just pop a few pieces of code in and swap out some drives, maybe do a little rack maintenance...."

I dont get it. DDoSs arent the wrecking balls they used to be, and going for the CIA using something like LOIC is just going to result in loners, misfits, and 13 year old kids getting the no-knock warrant treatment whilst the crafty 'lets just fuck with people' goons with the STORM clusters just sit there and giggle.

seriously. whats the point?

Duke Nukem flack eats words over threat to reviewers

Jeff Gerstmann, Macro Level

ta da, right there is the reason that potals and sites which only deal in games only every give out 80% reviews as a "bad score", and this sort of crap will continue hilever there are kids that cant discern between a rehashed press packet and an actual review. which seeing as the kids in question are 8-14 year old, is prettymuch never.

this is like the story about google and facebook playing dirty tricks with PR companies. the content itself isnt the story. the story is that Redner group is so fucking incompetant as to put it out there on display.

Duke Nukem Forever

oh, and for what its worth?

Im basing all of this off my experience of the PC version. I have a nice screen, I have my settings maxed out, and its dated, kludgy, poorly designed, IDK who these other gonks are yelling about how its actually enjoyable on PC, but given the state of the industry Im inclined to call sock puppetry, or perhaps these people havent played anything between DN3D and DNF and arent aware that you know, _magic_ is possible.

I keep bitching about this too

getting pretty tired of coming to a PC-centric site to read console reviews which I can get anywhere else on the bloody internet.

this review is bullshit too : 40% is too high; you can argue 'well, they couldnt do that well with all the backwash of data to sift through blahblahblah' um, no. They're charging $60, the same as any other AAA title, so it would have been nice if, I dont know, they'd grown a pair, bought a UT3 dev kit and knocked it out. Its not that that its graphically stuck in the early 2000s, its that Its so disjointed and poorly realised it feels like they just parcelled out levels to coders, didnt try for a theme or story arc, kludged together some textures and community assets, wrapped it all up and called it good without testing.

its a fucking _awful_ game. I dont care how long I had to wait. when indie devs with licensed engines can turn out low-priced little wonders, Im left wondering why such a festering sore was foisted upon us.

EA angers fans over Battlefield 3 pre-order exclusives

right, because only kids play games.

Its a competitive, online versus game. DICE took time to set up a balance, roll out some form of upgrades, levelling, etc etc etc. and then EA went and tipped the scales. Its a shit thing to do to your devs, and its a shit thing to do to the customer.

Its not about 16 year olds having a rant, its about EA failing to understand the point of competing in a level playing field.

seriously, do you play games at all? Imagine you looked forward to the release of a single-player racer (for instance) How would you feel if EA said "pre-orders will receive an unlock which will prevent the controls from randomly steering you into a wall during races" or "buy it on amazon to receive a copy that doesnt randomly freeze, or at gamestop.com for a copy where savegames dont become corrupt"

Its a bullshit plan; it doesnt respect the product. Trollface, cos you gotta be trollin.

Sony hack reveals password security is even worse than feared

really? kids, lets me say that again KIDS used weak passwords?

Im flabbergasted. shocked. amazed. you want strong passwords or other multi-level security to work, either bundle a security dongle with the device (especially if you're going to take the stance that the device remains yours, fuck you sony, thankyouverymuch) sure, you have to replace dongle and open a tech support center for kids that cant seem to find their ass with both hands and a flashlight, but at least you have security.

As for everyone else; you want password security? generate a random 20-character string, print it out and tape it to your monitor. all you have to do is remember which site/program its for. job done.

again, I'm shocked that 8-year olds don't give a toss about security and just want to play games. Baffling shit. but I'm sure Sony took reasonable steps like binding the device using GEOip or something similar, so someone attempting to log in from Russia into some Kansas kids account would be stopped by a bunch of bullshit, right? right.