Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Boxes of Johnson & Johnson's Janssen COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Florida. (credit: Getty | Paul Hennessy)

An advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declined to vote on the fate of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine Wednesday, likely leaving in place a pause on the vaccine’s use until the committee reconvenes in seven to 10 days.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, expects that the coming week or so will provide additional data and analyses on the vaccine’s potential risks. Until it has more information, ACIP opted to provide no new recommendations on the use of the vaccine.

On the table, however, was everything from recommending against use of the vaccine altogether; recommending that only certain groups receive the vaccine, such as only men or only people over a certain age; or recommending that the pause be lifted and use continue in all adults as before.

Enlarge / These consoles could eventually be large paperweights if Sony doesn't fix a problem looming in their firmware.

Unless something changes, an issue lurking in older PlayStations' internal timing systems threatens to eventually make every PS4 game and all downloaded PS3 games unplayable on current hardware. Right now, it's not a matter of if but when this problem will occur.

This ticking firmware time bomb has been known in certain PlayStation preservation and hacking circles for a while. But it's gaining new attention amid Sony's recently announced decision to shut down the online stores for PS3, PSP, and Vita software. While that impending store shutdown won't impact players' abilities to play and re-download previously purchased software for now, the eventual wider shutdown of PSN servers for these aging consoles could have a much more drastic effect on the playability of a wide swath of games.

What’s the problem?

The root of the coming issue has to do with the CMOS battery inside every PS3 and PS4, which the systems use to keep track of the current time (even when they're unplugged). If that battery dies or is removed for any reason, it raises an internal flag in the system's firmware indicating the clock may be out of sync with reality.