Month: December 2021

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

If comedy equals tragedy plus time, this one is hilarious: Microsoft is now selling $25 "premium posters" to commemorate the "Red Ring of Death," a systemic hardware failure in early Xbox 360 consoles that cost the company over $1 billion to fix.

It may be a funny story a decade and a half after the fact, but in mid-2007, the RRoD error was incredibly expensive and damaging for the then-young console and brand. Microsoft's stopgap solution to the problem was a three-year warranty extension that was said to cost between $1.05 and $1.15 billion dollars (closer to $1.5 billion in today's dollars). The red-ring error was caused by heat issues and "a badly designed graphics chip," and it wasn't fully addressed until late 2008, when a new console revision with a redesigned motherboard and cooler-running chips was released.

In an interview in 2015, then-Microsoft VP Peter Moore said that the warranty extension, while expensive, was a "Tylenol moment" that helped the company prevent irreparable damage to the Xbox brand. He also credited then-CEO Steve Ballmer with the decision to spend more than $1 billion to fix the problem—"I always remember $240 million of that was FedEx," he said. "Their stock must have gone through the roof for the next two weeks."

Enlarge (credit: Liu Guanguan/China News Service)

Thea-Mai Baumann had posted to Instagram using the @metaverse handle for nearly a decade when her account was disabled on November 2.

“Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else,” the app told her. 

Baumann wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, but the timing was curious. The account block came just days after Facebook had announced its new name, Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the name reflected the company’s new focus on its vision of the metaverse, a virtual world meant to facilitate commerce, communication, and more. Baumann’s @metaverse handle was suddenly a hot commodity.

After decades of purely black consoles, the PS5 stood out upon release for its use of striking, white faceplates. Now, more than a year after release, Sony is announcing a line of replacement faceplates in black and four other colors, alongside matching colored DualSense controllers.

The console covers are listed for $55 on the PlayStation Direct shop and come in options fitted for both the standard console and the disc drive-free Digital Edition. Colored controller options are listed for $75, a small premium over the $70 white DualSense controller.

The new console covers, announced this morning, will arrive in 23 countries in two waves. "Midnight Black" and "Cosmic Red" colors will be released starting on January 21, 2022, and "Nova Pink," "Galactic Purple," and "Starlight Blue" will follow in the first half of 2022. Each console cover can be removed and replaced easily without tools, as outlined on the PlayStation site (and this old teardown video).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As the world is beset by Log4Shell, arguably the most severe vulnerability ever, one of the biggest payroll processors is reporting a ransomware attack that has taken its systems offline for at least the next several weeks. So far, it's not saying if that vulnerability was the means hackers used to breach the systems.

The company said on Sunday that services using the Kronos Private Cloud had been unavailable for the past day, with the attack taking down Kronos' UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, and Banking Scheduling Solutions services.

“At this time, we still do not have an estimated restoration time, and it is likely that the issue may require at least several days to resolve,” Kronos representative Leo Daley wrote. “We continue to recommend that our impacted customers evaluate alternative plans to process time and attendance data for payroll processing, to manage schedules, and to manage other related operations important to their organization.”