As reported by TechCrunch:
Someone at Oculus screwed up pretty badly today [Wednesday]: An expired certificate appears to have soft-bricked all of the company's Rift VR headsets, with users still unable to fire up software on the devices and no word of an incoming fix from the company yet.
Issues were first reported several hours ago on Reddit, where a post on the topic has already garnered hundreds of comments. The problem seems to have resulted from Oculus failing to update an expired certificate with the update, which is now leaving users with an error message saying that the system "Can't reach Oculus Runtime Service."
If it must phone home, it is not yours. Words to live, and die, by.
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Awkward! All of Oculus's Rift Headsets Have Stopped Working Due to an Expired Certificate
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Friday March 09 2018, @01:27AM (5 children)
Alas, most will get angry at the device, and not get the lesson.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 09 2018, @04:27AM
What about the practice of using kill dates, without any graceful degradation? Go from working perfectly one second to dead, snuffed it, turned toes up to the daisies, like Monty Python's dead parrot, in the next second. Shouldn't that get some of the blame? Haven't we seen enough troubles from needless certificate and password churn? This is what now, over a dozen incidents in which a major website, even of supposedly technically savvy owners such as Microsoft and Google, has embarrassed themselves by forgetting their cert was about to expire?
There's a reason why forcing users to change passwords every month was quickly abandoned. That's brain dead, rigid security. Scaling back the forced change to once every 6 months or year didn't help.
Okay, car analogy time! Abrupt certificate expiry is like your car's engine going dead at midnight of the last day its annual license and/or inspection is valid. There you are, driving along, and bam! your engine stops, and neither you power steering or power brakes are powered any more. If you don't wreck, you end up stranded at the side of the road.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tonyPick on Friday March 09 2018, @06:56AM (3 children)
Much as I hate them, this isn't a "phone home"/always connected style flaw.
The certificate expiration just means that the driver won't load past a certain date/time since the signing certificate used by the driver has expired. This happens when the time rolls forward, connected or not.
This was referenced from Ars, showing the step they missed:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb931395.aspx [microsoft.com]
(Of course, self expiring drivers where nobody is left/willing/able to re-issue the driver with a new cert would be as bad as phone home IMO, but the two issues aren't necessarily related)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 09 2018, @11:48AM (1 child)
Interesting. Is there a workaround for the end user? Can you add an exception, set the system date back or self-sign the driver somehow?
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Friday March 09 2018, @03:14PM
You can't self sign the driver, but according to the Ars story
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @05:17PM
you're missing the point. the point is if you act like a slave, you will be treated like a slave. you buy slaveware like a groveling piglet and you will get treated like bacon.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 09 2018, @01:36AM (10 children)
Some engineer is quickly putting the final touches on a time machine to warp back to the best possible time to sneak as a passenger into a certain roadster on a trip to far far away...
What? Go back two days to renew a certificate on time, or at least far enough to buy stocks or cryptocurrency last year? Would you actually expect that level or rationality, from the kind of mind who made the Rift fail to operate if a certificate expired, and then didn't get the certificate renewed?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 09 2018, @01:49AM (9 children)
This is why being an early-adopter is retartet. Shit, you still have motherfuckers standing in 2 mile-long lines and camping out in front of stores to pay a grand for a piece of iTrash that's more redundant and proprietary than ever before.
Early adoption should come with a free dev kit and free or significantly discounted gadget with unlimited replacements for a year or two. Code-monkeys can fix firmware bugs, but hardware bugs are more elusive and some revisions of boards are just fucked beyond rework or repair. Oh, to be a fly on the wall and watch the hardware and firmware engineers squabble and play the blame-game all day.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Friday March 09 2018, @02:02AM (2 children)
FTFY. Now it makes sense.
retarted - like in "being hit with a tart/pie in the face again - usually because of not learning the lesson in the past".
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @02:06PM (1 child)
Now it both makes sense AND is spelled correctly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 09 2018, @02:40PM
Not only boring, but insultingly boring.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday March 09 2018, @02:14AM (5 children)
Reasons not to be a VR early adopter:
1. High cost.
2. Not enough content available.
3. Tethered high-end headsets instead of wireless.
4. 100-110 degree field of view, instead of ~200.
5. You could just use your smartphone to do it with a $5 piece of cardboard, and upgrade later.
6. Lower resolution and frame rate.
7. Worse internal and discrete GPUs than what will be available later.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 09 2018, @02:25AM (3 children)
Holy shit, only 100-110 with a 200 degree cap? Man, am I doubly glad I never even considered going that route. How the fuck can you have full and fast spherical rotation in gaming with such poor specs with VR headsets? Not saying that VR should be even close to that standard, but much more could be done with an optical link and a local graphics card(s) doing the heavy-lifting. Well, I guess 100-110 degrees is okay if the ϕ axis has a similar range of rotation.
Well, it is what it is. VR is a do-or-die application and turning your head quickly and seeing a blank screen with
Is unacceptable compared to your garden-variety flatscreen monitor porn vid watching.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday March 09 2018, @03:07AM (1 child)
Eye tracking headsets can lower detail in the places you aren't looking at, decreasing the necessary specs.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/22/12260430/nvidia-foveated-rendering-vr-graphics-smi-eye-tracking-siggraph [theverge.com]
200 degree FOV is able to cover most of the FOV humans can see if they move their eyeballs in their sockets.
I actually haven't put on a damn VR headset despite talking about it so much, but I expect 100 degree is worse for immersion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @03:16PM
> I actually haven't put on a damn VR headset despite talking about it so much, but I expect 100 degree is worse for immersion.
In my experience (with both the DK1 and the Vive), you adapt to it very quickly (i.e. don't notice you can't see peripheral).
The screen-door effect is more noticeable because it affects what you are looking at directly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @01:14PM
What the heck does FOV have to do with rotation latency?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @06:54AM
Fuck headsets that require proprietary software and online activation to use.
I want a goddamn VR headset that I can use anywhere, any time, and ideally has a fallback mode for use as a regular 1080p monitor if the device it is plugged into doesn't actually have VR support (meaning support for warping the image on the displays so the lenses work correctly with unmodified framebuffer content.)
I had heard the Razer headsets were aiming to do that, but then they stopped releasing content and started pushing a 'buy our headsets then resell modified versions' angle, along with not releasing source code or promised hardware documentation.
Has anyone made a serious attempt at another open hardware headset since Razer? I've seen a bit about drivers and a bit about headsets, but neither seem to have made it into either a salable product, nor into a end-user manufacturable form, whether as a kit, premade interface board for a cheap and easily available screen, or other packaged/unpackaged product.
Why can't we start moving towards a REAL cyberpunk future and get the hardware/software base for these things open and competing on fit and finish, rather than on proprietary platforms?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Friday March 09 2018, @01:47AM (16 children)
Sure, your computer monitor doesn't have eye tracking, accelerometers, etc. but there should be no need to connect to the Internet to use the device. And we don't need to see game exclusivity for Oculus, Vive, etc.
Certainly there are privacy concerns, since a top application will be VR 360 DEGREE PORN.
Blast from the past:
Facebook to Buy Rift Maker Oculus VR for $2bn [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday March 09 2018, @02:01AM (4 children)
> a top application will be VR 360 DEGREE PORN.
Reminds me I need to buy more hospital shares, and find a good fund based on chiropractors' revenues.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 09 2018, @02:04AM (3 children)
Keeping the spine mobile usually results in a lower need for chiropractors.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by beckett on Friday March 09 2018, @05:38AM (2 children)
Evidence based practice largely eliminates chiropractors within the field of allied health professions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday March 09 2018, @05:49AM (1 child)
While true, that's not relevant in today's world context.
Proof: chiropractors exist in non-trivial amount and they do earn a living on the (literally) back of those who call for their services.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by beckett on Friday March 09 2018, @07:13PM
i disagree; evidence based practice is not only relevant, it's essential in today's world context.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Virindi on Friday March 09 2018, @02:08AM (2 children)
Coming soon: "smart" computer screens with a builtin mic and camera that only work when connected to the internet. The fact that it phones home for permission to operate is to ensure the best customer experience, you see. The nonsmart models? Oh, we stopped making them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @03:04AM (1 child)
The word you are looking for is monitor. Not TV.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Friday March 09 2018, @05:11AM
MY monitor has a TV tuner built in as well, or is it my TV also functions as a monitor.
"You got peanut butter in my chocolate...", said Officer Reeses
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 09 2018, @03:26AM (5 children)
Fuck those goggles and fuck POV porn! Let me know when there's neural recorder/playback implants like in either Forward The Foundation [wikipedia.org] or Prelude To Foundation [wikipedia.org] (damned if I can remember which), where full immersion of lived experience by actors takes the place of movies.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @06:30AM (3 children)
But wouldn't the actor know he was acting? And cloud your experience with the fallout of that?
Also his head could still only look in one direction, and his eyes focus at one focal depth... so no freedom to look around. Enjoy randomly staring at the ceiling during the "don't look down while i wizz" scene.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 09 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
OP mentioned porn. What could possibly be better porn than actually *feeling* (hearing, seeing, touch, smell, taste) such an encounter.
Right, because porn actors today don't know they're acting and it's impossible to tell. Please.
Read the novels. It's actually (IIRC) the first chapter of one of the novels I mentioned.
Or don't.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @06:39AM
That actually sounds like the fastest way to make people stop watching porn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @05:19AM
The extent and manner to which an actor "knows" they are acting in some part depends on whether or not they're a method actor. Anthony Hopkins required therapy after Silence of the Lambs, and I think we all remember Heath Ledger.
"Good acting" often owes a lot to how well the actor ISN'T particularly aware of their role as an actor and instead is immersed in the character.
But yes, it'd never be 100% pure. Afterprocessing could go a long way to cleaning that up though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @01:27PM
See also Strange Days [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:14AM (1 child)
For when you get so bored looking at the action that you'd rather turn your head to look at the guy yelling "CUT"...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 09 2018, @12:53PM
Suddenly, more camera jobs go to nude women.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @02:12AM (4 children)
from the.support FAQ:
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @02:23AM (2 children)
thinking about it now would be a good time to release a crypto mining malware named OculusPatchMarch2018.exe but I am not motivated enough by monetary gain blame the cheap abundant Canadian pseudo legal weed...
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 09 2018, @02:34AM (1 child)
Reminds me of that time I illegally stole a barebones keylogger written in C++ and with source code easily Googled. With it was probably 20-30 lines which included writing all keystrokes to a text file. Place in startup folder, rename it "svchost.exe," and you're good to go. By the way, the program was too dumb to be detected by antivirus. I was really smart back then, smart enough to figure that out. But geniuses probably stole it and made it send emails and everything. Those guys are really smart.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @01:35PM
Anti-viruses are so good today they will detect blank executables (ie no CRT loader stub) and an entry point that calls ExitProcess right away as malware. Actual malware? They will still not detect any of that.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 09 2018, @02:27AM
Well, you are required to connect your high-end computer to the internet to operate the hardware...
Didn't you know that the Rift only needs the equivalent of a Radeon 5850 to run?
I'd be a shame if anything prevented the ETH miner from installing properly.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday March 09 2018, @03:49AM (3 children)
You kids are still ficking around with "VR"? It's been over hyped since the 1990s and you still somehow think it is new. Yea, DOOM was a huge breakthrough for consumer equipment, but really, do tell me what you think you are going to DO with it besides play games? Ok, so all you want to do is play games, fine, it seems to me like these gadgets are too technologically cumbersome and this intentional design fuckup proves it. Get off my GRASS1.LMP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @01:31PM
VR headset + drone-mounted camera = first-person flight
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @03:35PM
I remember these atrocious VR things that were all over malls in the 90's, and then the trend just tanked entirely. But like "3D" and smell-o-vision they dig this out every 20 years and hope it sticks this time around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @05:24AM
Companies are playing with VR for improved virtual meetings, as they're finding it can convey more non-verbal cues more fluidly than traditional videoconferencing.
Beyond that, porn. It'll probably beat out gaming by quite a bit once the technology ramps up, as the games require quite a bit of development work, while the porn just requires cameras and a source of people willing to show off on them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @04:00AM
We have an internal app that is not on the app store, and once a year all devices need to have the app reinstalled to pick up the updated Apple developer signature.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @04:28AM
I haven't seen ANYONE propose a solution to the problem. You call yourself nerds?
I proposed this solution Wednesday evening:
1) Set up internal NTP server with wrong time. Point server infrastructure at NTP server. Servers now think certificate is good.
2) Compile client-side software that a) synchronizes client clock against Oculus NTP server so that client now thinks that certificate is good, and b) downloads and installs new certificate.
I heard this morning (Thursday) that Oculus had published a solution to customers.
I'm not saying I solved the problem but if I did it would be nice if Oculus cut me a check or helped me find work as a PKI administrator, seeing as I just saved their bacon.
~childo
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday March 09 2018, @11:31AM (1 child)
What?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @12:32PM
"If it must phone home, it is not yours."
"If the gold is in someone else's vault, it is not yours."
"If your cryptocurrency key is under someone else's controls, it is not yours."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @12:05PM (3 children)
Reality imitates art, once again.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday March 09 2018, @02:47PM (2 children)
I am not modding it up because I wanted to reply to tell people that this is funny!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @10:41PM (1 child)
Here where news is people, you can... post and mod in the same thread! Amazing technology! Welcome to 2018, my friend.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday March 21 2018, @05:04PM
whoa I never tried that!
I am so used to the restraints of the overlords of other forums that... I must now go into my refuge and RTFM to redeem myself..