Apple made good on its promise to address the location tracking concerns of its users last week, as we discussed here. This update claims only to do those things.
This update contains changes to the iOS crowd-sourced location database cache including
- Reduces the size of the cache
- No longer backs the cache up to iTunes
- Deletes the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off
The update is available for all devices that can run iOS 4.
Hook up to iTunes and hit the update button.
A bunch of recent news tidbits from console-land worth mentioning. First a few price drops. The Wii will be dropping to $150 and include Mario Kart with a wheel starting May 15th. Not all that surprising since it seems that the Wii has finally hit its ceiling after running away with the console sales race and all the news swirling around about the Wii 2. Not sure who was holding out on the Wii because of the price, but hey, cheaper stuff is good, right?
Secondly, you’d have to assume an Xbox 360 price drop is imminent, probably around E3 time, as many retailers, including Amazon are selling all flavors (including Kinect bundles) of the 360 with a [amazon_link id=”B003O6JLZ2″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]$50 gift card as well as a $20 Microsoft point card[/amazon_link].
Not to leave Sony and the PS3 out, but PSN is still down, Sony Online Entertainment (MMO games division) was also hacked, with mostly non-US info and credit cards stolen. Don’t worry though, DC Universe Online players will get free Batman masks for their trouble. Most everything else in wait-and-see mode when PSN comes back online this week sometime. Don’t forget to change your password when it does come back.
Next up, I wanted to briefly mention the Red Faction: Armageddon demo up on XBL and eventually PSN at some point. After enjoying Red Faction: Guerrilla a bunch, I was eager to check out the direction Armageddon was going in. I hadn’t really followed much press coverage on it to this point, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The demo offers about 30 minutes of game play and retains a lot of the destructive abilities of the previous game. While Armageddon still is played from the third person, it takes a more over-the-shoulder perspective, like Gears of War, than Guerrilla’s Grand Theft Auto pulled-back style. Still, it seems to work pretty well. In the demo you get to use some unique weapons like the magnet gun and something that shoots mini-black holes. Also, there is a new gameplay mechanic in that you can actually repair some of your destruction, that kind of reminded me of the TMD from Singularity. It was really hard to get an overall feel for the game in the demo, but it seems like it will end up a bit less open-ended than Guerrilla. If nothing else, the demo left me interested enough to look and see what sales are available for the game’s preorders. [amazon_link id=”B003P9C6QY” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Amazon is doing a $10 credit for a future THQ game[/amazon_link] (an unusual restriction for Amazon preorders) along with a free download of Red Faction: Battlegrounds; a top down car combat game that gets mediocre reviews. Amazon’s deal applies to the console versions only.
Our own Suibhne points me to this great video, related to Armageddon:
Last up, a deal for Portal 2 that can’t be passed up. [amazon_link id=”B002I0JIQW” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Amazon is offering Portal 2[/amazon_link] for $30 on the PC and $35 on the consoles. A great price for one of the better games to come out this year so far.
Mass Effect 2 has been out for well over a year now, but just last month, Bioware dropped some fresh DLC to supposedly bridge the gap between ME2 and ME3. At the ME standard DLC price of $7, the question is, is it a piece of must-have content for a ME fan, filling in important story lines, or is it completely avoidable? Probably more of the latter and less of the former.
Let me start off by saying this DLC mission can be played through in probably one and a half hours, so it’s one of the shorter DLCs available for ME2 — definitely shorter than the great Overlord or Lair of the Shadow Broker add-ons. Without going into the story for the spoiler-sensitives amongst us, Arrival only provides a couple mission scenarios heavy on combat. Expect lots of corridor shooting, with a few areas to explore a bit for some extra research items, credits and resources. Did I mention a lot of shooting? You shoot lots of dudes…a lot. Some mechs too, and there’s a short but satisfying sequence where you can control your own LOKI Mech. It’s also worth mentioning that you’ll be fighting solo, you can’t bring any of your team along to help out, because the mission is super secret…or something.
The story is decent but not great, and doesn’t really feel like it’s critical to the story arc. It makes sense and fits in with the end of ME2 and what we know about ME3, but didn’t feel all that important — more like a footnote. That’s probably the best approach, and true with all of the ME2 DLCs; totally avoidable to those who just want to play the main games, but offering more to those who just want more Mass Effect stuffs.
So, who should get this DLC? If you’ve played the other DLCs and still want some more ME2 action to hold you over, then you’ll enjoy it enough. It’s merely average, but you’ll be somewhat satisfied. If I wanted to nitpick, I’d say it’s not really worth $7, it’s probably more like a $4 DLC if I had to put a value on it. If you’re looking to take a look at some ME2 DLC for the first time, skip this one and take a look at the Overlord, Shadow Broker, or even Katsumi (if you’re looking for a new member and a new loyalty mission that’s actually pretty good) before this one.
The Arrival DLC is available on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 (when the PSN store comes back online) for $7. More info here.
Embeded below is the Arrival trailer:
Assuming you’ve jumped off the Sony bandwagon given everything that’s happened and how it was handled, what would it take to get you back on board? Sony says it will evaluate compensation options after they get PSN back online, so now is a great time to give them some suggestions. When Xbox Live went down for a couple days around the holiday season 2 years ago, Microsoft gave everyone a forgettable XBLA game. Of course, the PSN downtime and the fallout from that is much more catastrophic.
In discussing the issue with various friends, family and colleagues, the question came up, what would it take to turn this negative into a positive? Obviously, the answer would be different for everyone, with some people actually defending Sony to the bitter end. I’d call those people foolish, but to each their own. Anyway, let’s take a look at some ideas Sony could use to “win back” and even earn some loyal customers.
From what I understand, some US states actually require companies to pay for a year (or even two?) of credit monitoring when personal data is stolen. So an easy one would be to provide this service for all of their customers. This should be a no brainer. ArsTechnica has already posted some reports of credit card fraud that could be linked to the Sony breach, but in actuality, there is no way to verify those claims. Whether it’s true or not, expect to see more stories like that for months and years to come. At least Sony offering monitoring services will help quell customer complaints and provide an nice PR image boost for them, as a gesture of showing they care. That last bit is important, since the general perception, valid or not, is that Sony does not care, as implied by their poor communication and perceived tone taken in their updates.
Other options that people will look for is some sort of financial compensation and/or free content. Giving users free PSN games, or even going as far as giving everyone a free year of Playstation Plus should be fairly easy for Sony to do, would quiet most of their customer base and allow many to quickly forget this whole unpleasant experience. Current Playstation Plus or Qriocity subscribers should most definitely get some sort of partial refund, no question.
While the options I’ve listed so far are nice, when you boil them down, they are just PR stunts to help boost a tarnished image. The one area I feel that Sony could really make a difference and go a long way into (re)building a loyal fan-base is to take this experience and use it to become a champion for customer privacy and security. They would do their customers a great service by taking the lead in providing customers greater control over their own data. Let customers delete and permanently purge their accounts from Sony’s system, if they choose to do so. Let customers permanently delete their stored credit card data from PSN. Lead the industry in system security and privacy by having users opt-in to data gathering services that are currently in place. Ditch the arcane and purposely confusing EULAs and provide clear language agreements. By becoming a dominate player in consumer rights, they can start to build a reputation of a company people can trust, and gain customers who will fiercely loyal.
While I’m on my soap box, since they are rebuilding PSN from the ground up, fix the painfully slow PS3 update process that is way too frequent and often provides no new features. Don’t forget that the past few months we saw numerous firmware updates all to bolster the security of the PS3 & PSN in their seemingly pointless war with hackers. In the end, it was their customers who got caught in the crossfire, not to mention the inconvenience of loading 30 minute updates on their consoles before they can even start to use it.
Is this all pie-in-the-sky over optimism? Probably. But that’s how I’d answer the question. Sony would win me back and keep me as a customer if they proved they were serious about security and privacy, let users control their own data, and throw a few freebies our way for good measure. What other ideas do you have that Sony could do to make things right?
Apple today posted a Q&A piece on their website, outlining exactly what location information the iPhone stores and how it is used. The short version is that the iPhone maintains a cache of wifi hotspots and cell towers in the area to help better assist apps that use location services. This allows your phone to find your location much faster than if it used GPS alone. So even though the tracking is no where near as invasive and sinister as many media outlets have incorrectly reported, Apple will be making some changes in an update in the near future. They will no longer store a backup of this cached data on your computer and fix the supposed bug that when you turn off location services, the location data cache will be permanently deleted.
Highlights:
Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested.Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.
So, I totally acknowledge that we’ve done nothing but Sony/PSN stories for close to a week now, but this unfolding saga has been dominating the news. I figure one more post on the subject was important, more from a public service announcement standpoint.
Sony finally admitted that during a security breach last week, an outside source gained access to all PSN usernames, passwords, email address, mailing addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and most likely, credit card data. That’s pretty much the worst case scenario picture I painted last week. We already know that Sony has handled this crisis totally wrong, as detailed here, which is further exacerbated by waiting a whole week to notify their customers that all their personal data had been exposed. On their blog post, they even go as far to recommend users continually check their credit reports and provide info on how to do that.
At this point, the footnote to the story is that PSN will be up in about a week. The real story is that this was a complete and total failure by Sony. A few recommendations: If your PSN username/email and password combo is used on other sites (i.e. you’re one of the many who reuse the same password with different sites) now is a good time to change passwords to at least some of your most critical sites like email accounts, banking accounts and anything else that is super-sensitive. Using a browser plugin and mobile app like LastPass is great for managing passwords and generating unique passwords for each site. It is less convenient to have different passwords for all your sites and services, but Sony has taught us a valuable lesson: your data is not safe with anyone. Also, it should go without saying that you should closely monitor your accounts for any anomalous activity. Plus, now’s not a bad time to start looking in to enabling two factor authentication on sites like Google and Facebook — something that’s automatically enabled on Steam now.
To wrap up my words on the Sony issue, I wonder where it leaves consumer support on current and future Sony products. While security breaches can happen anywhere and at anytime, Sony’s complete mishandling of this major incident will be hard to forget. Do I want to reward a company by continuing to purchase their products and services who not only lost my data, but at first lied, then delayed telling me about it? Not really. That doesn’t mean I’m throwing out my PS3. That won’t accomplish anything. Sony already has my money and the data is long gone, but it will be hard to support that or future Sony platforms going forward. How about you? Has Sony made your “must avoid” list as a consumer or has this debacle left you unfazed?
So it’s all over the internet about how the Playstation Network has been down for 4 days with no indication as to when it will come back online. Some may not express much concern about it, by just dismissing it as some whiny gamers not being able to play online, and state the fact that PSN is free compared to Xbox Live…what’s the big deal?
It’s actually a fairly large deal, if you look at the whole picture. No PSN has lots of ramifications. Let’s start with the easy ones. No PSN means that the heavily-used-by-many Netflix app is completely useless. The MLB.TV app, much like Netflix, refuses to work unless you are signed into PSN. Other services like the oddly named Qriocity music service is unusable, not to mention a fair amount of games that require a PSN sign-in just to play single player or local co-op. If you bought into Sony’s marketing tag lines that the PS3 just does everything, you are probably shocked and dismayed to learn that without PSN, the PS3 doesn’t do much of anything. One could make an argument that being locked out of these subscription services could warrant some sort of compensation for lost time — and definitely would seem appropriate at least for Playstation Plus subscribers.
But what about other, less obvious problems this has caused? Consider the developers who released games on the Playstation Store this week. Developers and publishers usually pick specific release-date windows and rely heavily on first-week sales for revenue. It’s hard not to imagine it negatively affecting sales dollars for these games like Telltale’s Puzzle Agent, or Fancy Pants Adventures, made by an indie developer and published by EA. Then there’s free Easter weekend promo Q-Games’ had planned to celebrate a big update to Pixel Junk Shooter 2 that had to be canceled. Also don’t forget Valve’s PSN to Steam integration for Portal 2, the new Mortal Kombat and the PS3 exclusive new SOCOM, all released this week. Will Sony be compensating these developers?
While Sony has vaguely placed blame on hackers in their latest update, the amount of communication has been stunningly sparse. Many people do understand that problems happen, but being kept in the dark about the issues and no rough estimate of service restoration is not good PR. With this outage beginning to reach epic proportions and the apparent nonchalant attitude in what few updates Sony has given on the issue will lose good faith with end users and developers. And then there is the unknown. If PSN has been fatally breached, what type of information has been exposed to these nefarious hackers? Credit card data, names, addresses, usernames, passwords and emails could all be potential targets. Of course this is all worse case scenario, and I hate to start fear-mongering, but things like that are very real possibilities, especially when an outage lasts this long. However, at this point, can we really trust what Sony says? First they started off by saying it was maintenance. Then they changed that and said they were investigating it, which later became an “an external intrusion.” Would Sony admit their own internal maintenance went wrong and ended up in days and days of downtime? They’d have a lot to answer to from customers, developers and content providers if it was their fault. Even if it was nebulous internet hackers, I’m startled that a billion dollar international company who supposedly specializes in internet entertainment delivery cannot recovery in less than 4+ days from a breach.
For Sony to save face, they’ll need to have a lengthy description of what went wrong, what data, if any, was compromised, and what they’re doing to prevent it from happening again. Also, I think they’ll need to offer their customers something of a peace offering. Maybe it’s not direct financial compensation, but something along the lines of free content that Microsoft offered when Xbox Live went down for just over a day a few years back. Something to help restore faith in all parties involved in the PS3 platform.
Some good noteworthy deals worth passing along:
First off, you can get 25% off of orders over $19.99 at Direct2Drive when you use coupon code “bunny”. While you’re at Direct2Drive, Crysis 2 is even a bit steeper discount at 30% off, today only.
Also, if you’re looking for a little iOS gaming, be sure to check out Dead Space HD for the iPad, as it’s on sale for the magical price of $0.99. This game has been optimized for the iPad 2 (although still compatible with the first iPad), so it’s a great game to show off what the new iPad can really do — it rivals and even surpasses the current gen of consoles. As a nice throw-in / cross-over, playing the iOS version of Dead Space will unlock some stuff in Dead Space 2, in case you needed additional incentives.
If you’d rather get the iPhone version, Dead Space for the iPhone is also $0.99 for a limited time.
Ah, Sony. As if annoying us with frequent, slow as molasses updates that provide no additional functionality wasn’t enough, they give us vague explanations as to why PSN has been down, and nonchalantly tell us that it’ll be down another “day or two.” Yeah, you read that right. The “hacker group” Anonymous claims they played no part in this recent outage, and had previously vowed not to attack any Sony services that would effect end users, so something else is going on over at Sony HQ. Good thing there wasn’t any new releases this week that Playstation users would want to play, except for Portal 2, the new SOCOM and the new Mortal Kombat.
While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.
Source: Playstation Blog
Amazon is up to their dealing ways again today, with another all video game gold box event today. These gold box events are usually a mixed bag, and many times are just a way for Amazon to try and offload less desirable games. A few hints point to possibly Bulletstorm and Dragon Age showing up today. Also note that Star Craft II is the deal of the day at $20 off of MSRP, a good price for a game I enjoyed a lot even though I’m not an RTS player. Also, if you forgot to get [amazon_link id=”B003O6E3C8″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Portal 2[/amazon_link], their deals on that game will run out very soon. Hit the link below for the deal goodness:
Amazon Video Game Gold Box Event