Those of you with Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) systems can now once again use your system. As I had reported in my blog post Monday morning, the Sony PS3 was bricked(when technology is rendered completely inoperable by a system crash or bug) by what Sony confirmed to be a leap year bug where at midnight on February 28,2010 the system clock updated to February 29,2010. Because 2010 is not a leap year there should be no February 29th. This bug prevented users from using their PS3 system at all - even if they don’t use the system online.

The problem stems from a pre year-2000 based method of calculating valid leap years. There is a nice description of the problem if you CLICK HERE that is not too technical.

Some users of the PS3 are being extremely critical of Sony with statements such as “They should fire the programmers!” and “We should get free games for the inconvenience!” The users don’t realize that Sony did everything that can be expected of a responsible manufacturer in that situation: They quickly acknowledged the problem, they communicated when resolution was expected, they advised users what to do in the meantime, and ultimately delivered the solution within the promised time frame.

Though this bug happened in a gaming platform, there are some important lessons to be learned from it that apply to our business users:

• Even high tech devices (like the state of the art PS3) can be effected by Y2k glitches
• An application can never be tested too much
• No matter how thoroughly an application is tested, glitches can and will occur
• When bugs do arise in our systems, we need to measure the developers more on the timeliness of their communication and resolution, not in the fact that a bug was allowed to occur

-Paul
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Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115

Here in Massachusetts, Personal Information is required by law to be protected. Since most of the technical concerns we are now hearing about are regarding portable media and laptop computers, the industry focus in Massachusetts has been on encryption technologies. The new data protection regulations, effective March 1, require portable devices and storage media be secured by encryption.

Encryption of data can be done with simple desktop tools available now, the software is easy to use and doesn’t really necessitate much of a change in how you use your computer. Once encrypted, data cannot be read by anyone, even if a hacker were to bypass your password protection.

This prompts some additional questions that will be addressed in future blog entries…

› What is the difference between password protection and encryption?
› Isn’t encryption software expensive to deploy?
› Do I really need it?

If you need answers right away, Centrend is helping businesses with answers to these questions. Each business is different, so I’m inviting you to contact me directly for answers to questions about encryption for your unique situation.

- Bill

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Bill Bowman
Senior Technology Advisor
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x135
bbowman@centrend.com