GLaDOS rebooting ?

 

Valve launched today what i consider to be one of the most successful virals lately. The speculation is that it's about either Portal 2 or Episode 3, my money is on Episode 3 that will feature elements of Portal. All in all it's probably the same world.



Anyway - what is it all about ? Well yesterday Valve released a ninja patch to the Portal gamer for Steam users that had only one line in the patch notes :


"Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations"



Curious stuff right ? It gets MUCH better as we go on. After starting up portal you can now find 26 radio receivers scattered all around game world, each of them receiving a part of encoded transmission consisting of beeps, tones, muttered words and static.


The community jumped in and started to decrypt shit. First and easiest thing was to get the Morse code translated. The solution reveled some kind of system startup messages. Then some radio enthusiast noticed that the tones and beeps in the sound files resemble what is called  SSTV transmission.

The images reveal series of keys on a keyboard and blacked out BBS addresses and other weird shit. And guess what ? After some trials and errors people ACTUALLY MANAGED to modem themselves onto a real working BBS.

Another obstacle poped out here - the login and password - but thanks to the clue in welcome message of the server it was quickly cracked as "backup/backup".

After succesfull login BBS starts to post a series of ASCI art images showing some more weird stuff. And better version here.

Thats about it at the moment, but im sure theres more to that riddle, so stay tuned for updates.

People are looking into a theory that you could use the ASCII arts as some kind of command language to run something somewhere but i have absolutely no clue how and where and what...


Very impressive if you ask me.


Weird day for gaming... first the apocalyps3, then Activision Blizzard firing hey Infinity Ward figures and now this. Also supposedly the Chille earthquake moved the axis of the earth and now the days are shorter, says NASA.

PSN Fixed.

Either the magical date of 2nd march did it or Sony did a good job. Either way everything is working again.

Playstation 3 internal RTC faliure.

Tonight during date transition from 28th of February to 1st of March internal Real Time Clock of PS3 units other than 160GB, 250GB Slim, and one series of 80GB Fat, suffered a major failure resulting in a system failure.



Basically what happened is that the internal clock of your PS3 thought its a leap year and tried to set the date to 29th of March 2010. This caused something like a mini-millennium bug and hell broke loose.


The affected consoles are reported to be unable to connect to Playstation Network. In addition the savegames and trophies seem to have been wiped, the access to a trophy based games is blocked even in offline mode, and any DRM based content you might have is also blocked at the moment.


How bad it really is should be known at about midnight tonight as the 1st/2nd of March transition might fix the problem by itself. If it does not there is a possibility of a real hardware failure where opening the console might be required.



Officially sony claims to have a fix ready in the following 24 hours, which as i see it is buying time to see what happens tonight.


For those of you technically enabled there's a fix that seems to be working as we speak and requires manual reset of the RTC clock. If at this point you have no clue please just wait. If you know how on the other hand - take the battery out for 10-15 minutes et. voila!