Your Sony Store password has been reset
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Received an e-mail tonight indicating that my Sony Store password has been reset. Considering I didn't request this, I immediately assume the e-mail is spam, but after closer investigation it seems to check out... all the links go to the sony website (complete with one of those "enhanced" certificates), gmail confirms it's from sonystyle.com, and the instructions in the email say to call one of two phone numbers if I didn't request the reset, both which check out to be Sony support lines. Now, I hate everything about the company, but they do make pretty good tvs and as such I have a couple, so having billing info associated with the account is a legit concern for me (not to mention they don't exactly have the best track record with this stuff in recent years)
I give the first number a call and get a recording that 'all representatives are busy'. After about 10 mins of this I get suspicious and look up the number on-line, a 3rd party website tells me that it's only open until 6pm ET. I guess programming a recording saying "we are closed after 6pm" is too difficult for the Sony engineers so instead they just prefer to keep customers hopelessly waiting for one of the representatives to not be busy (to Sony's credit, I guess if you waited until 8am the next day you would eventually get someone). I look up the second number and the same 3rd party website claims this one is open 24/7, and behold after a few prompts I get a live person.
After explaining the situation briefly, I'm informed that all this email means is that my account "expired" and I need to manually reset the password. I asked him to repeat this three times just to make sure we both understood what the situation is. So there you go...instead of sending an email that my password has expired and needs to be reset, Sony sends an email that someone has reset my password and I should call customer service if it wasn't me. I'm not normally too paranoid about this stuff, but Sony 1) has my billing info, 2) I typically use a check card for most purchases so even though I may eventually get fraudulent charges refunded, having a $0 bank account for a couple weeks isn't too fun, and 3) Sony store sells online very expensive electronics that are not too hard at all to resell, so imagining someone draining my bank account on the site in a few minutes isn't too hard to swallow.
I would really like to have been in the room when someone decided "no, we can't spare the extra 5 minutes to create a different email template for password expirations, let's just tell people their password was successfully reset!"
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I would say that you display a "reasonable amount of distrust of anything internet".
Companies should be aware of this and make their communications as clear and to the point as possible.
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Its Sony, as you say the biggest problem is they do make some pretty good TVs.
However much you hate their high prices, DRM and strange memory card formats every now and again you find yourself buying a piece of their kit because it has something the others don't, then you hate yourself for it.
I used to do IT support in a large organisation where senior people got whatever they wanted, whoever supports them now is probably being told to buy iPads but back when I was there, it was vaio notebooks.
They always had some particularly strange combination of features or stylish design that the high up types seemed to like, unfortunately this meant I had to deal with Sony's labyrinth of websites whenever I wanted software for them.
BEGIN RANT
Even when I find the site I find that every Sony seems to have a two model numbers, let me just pick one nearby... PCG-FX702 on the front... PCG-9E6M on the back.
Sometimes I would find that a particular model is recognised but there was no software for it, or that there was software but I had to enter the exact serial number to prove that I was worthy of a new BIOS whereas other models would allow me to download all the drivers and utilities in two neatly arranged archives.
I always hoped each time one came my way that it didn't have a warranty covered hardware fault because if I did ever send anything to their service place in France they would ask for a deposit up front, Sony were (and having worked with the average user for many years myself I must say probably justifiably) so confident that their beautiful products could not fail (or more likely that their customers would) that they didn't just charge you for non-warranty repairs, they charged you up front just to be on the safe side.
Whatever the fault, if I did have to send the hardware back then I was in for a wait. After waiting months for a repair I phoned the service centre direct to be told by one of the techies that there was only two of them there.
Given the fleeting fashionable nature of the high end vaios we were buying by the time they came back from repair they were effectively obsolete, no longer fit for the purpose of sizing up to other managers in high level meetings because a newer model had been released.
So the once beautiful supermodel suddenly finds she is replaced by a younger one whilst she is left unqualified for any job in the real world, with no real processing grunt, poor battery life and a weak body not fit to go out into the harsh environments of civil engineering she would be consigned to a desk job.
All around the place you would find menials working at desks on old vaios, their underspecced cooling fans whining in an attempt to pass air through dust clogged heatsinks.
My personal experience with Sony products wasn't much better, having worked with many of their computers since I have often noted that every vaio has a different power connector for no other reason than to obfuscate compatibility with un official spares.
I experienced this when I bought one of their high end MP3 players many years ago, well, I say MP3 player it wouldn't actually play MP3. These days with the rise of the iPod everyone takes it for granted but back before iTunes, Sony beat them to it. You can understand why, what with Sony having interests in the music industry. The thing would only play Sony's own DRM protected format from special 'Magic Gate' DRM protected Sony memory sticks, sure you could import CD and MP3 into the library but that was a painful re-encoding process and I didn't have the storage to re-encode everything I owned. At least I did have the music on my own storage, I dunno what they are doing today but I imagine any current incarnation would be 'cloud' based.
Things got really interesting when the power supply stopped working, a 5.5v power supply. I tried feeding it 5v "Voltage too low", okay 6v then "Voltage too high". Not only had Sony opted for the weird and wonderful power connector they had chosen a non standard voltage and made the device VERY picky about what it would tolerate. A few weeks after the charger stopped working the tiny lipo battery in it decided it had enough of being run hot and wouldn't hold enough charge to get through an album, at this point I decided to cut my losses and learnt to never again buy Sony.
I did buy one other Sony product a few years back though, the last Aibo, Sony where all set to stop producing them and I'd always wanted to have a play with one, knowing I would be letting myself in for more Sony I took the plunge and bought an ERS7, some of the programmable memory sticks and the dev tools.
Firstly the supplied software was shite beyond belief, there is a bug where once docked the thing can't undock itself from the charging station, it often declares "I'm getting up now" and just sits there looking confused. The recognition is poor at best, I'm used to this as I'm British and most products seem to be targetted towards Americans which is odd considering the full range of accents across the whole of the US but I always find voice fired products work between if I speak with a strong Texan accent.
The hardware has its own little flaws too, given the price of the thing its hard to see why Sony skimped on the camera and went with a tiny webcam not much better than a pinhole. When working the object tracking and location works well but the amount of light required is excessive.
Anyway, I didn't really buy it to play with built in software so I get out the magic pink memory stick. The developer sticks are a fraction the size of the original, being Sony you can't just use any old memory stick, it has to be the right kind and they limit the size of the dev sticks so that there is no chance you could develop better software than their own.
This wasn't a major problem as the ERS7 has wi-fi and you can telnet into it and basically run it and all its sensors by remote control, thus I could develop software for it on the PC. Only problem with that is that the wi-fi only supports WEP encryption, not being willing to downgrade my network I had to setup a second network just for the aibo.
I did eventually get a system working where the bot could scan continually with its range finder and thus effectively map out solid objects and by continually doing this as it moved around house, map out the layout. Of course without the addition of opposable digits, although it can find the fridge it can't bring me a beer thus rendering it pretty useless.
The aibo sits in a corner now, sometimes turned on to amuse children but not for long as the lipo battery went the way Sony lipo batteries always do far too quickly.
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@EncoreSpod said:
I'm used to this as I'm British and most products seem to be targetted towards Americans which is odd considering the full range of accents across the whole of the US but I always find voice fired products work between if I speak with a strong Texan accent.
I'd like to hear what a Brit sounds like speaking with a strong Texan accent.
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@joe.edwards said:
@EncoreSpod said:
I'm used to this as I'm British and most products seem to be targetted towards Americans which is odd considering the full range of accents across the whole of the US but I always find voice fired products work between if I speak with a strong Texan accent.
I'd like to hear what a Brit sounds like speaking with what they think is a strong Texan accent.
FTFY. Not to bash--I'm nobody'd mistake my British accent for the real thing.
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Hell, I'm American with a weak regional accent and Google's voice recognition doesn't often work for me. ("dəfaɪn"? You must mean "the find", not "define"!)
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I'm not exactly sure that Sony makes good TVs. I recently tried to play a movie I had on my hard disc on a Sony Bravia.
First attempt: Let's simply plug in a USB stick!
Problem1: It's not recognized. You have to format it with FAT32 (with the corresponding consequences for file sizes...)
Problem2: It doesn't recognize the movie. After a bit of digging: Only MPEG1 is accepted over a direct USB connection. So, that's out.Second attempt: Let's stream it from a DLNA server!
Problem1: Only MPEG2 Transport Streams (TS) are accepted. I'm not too keen on having to transcode everything beforehand, so let's try the DLNA servers which transcode on the fly, shall we?Third attempt: Only some movies actually play. Others don't. I don't see neither rhyme nor reason as to which movie that would be. And that's with the one DLNA server which actually plays some movies. Others only play the first seconds and then begin to stutter horribly. If at all.
Final solution: Hook up my Galaxy Nexus through MHL->HDMI and then play the movie from network share through a movie app on my phone...
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I consider myself lucky. I'm an unabashed Sony fan - Discmans, WEGA TVs, Bravia TVs, Playstations, DVD Players (including the monsterous 400 disc jukebox), Home Theatre receiver, a Viao for the wife, an A55 DSLR camera, tablet, car stereo. With one exception, all have worked flawlessly for me. Last I checked, 5 years ago, my PSOne still worked.
The one exception was my Grand WEGA HD LCD RPTV (and a partridge in a pear tree) where the colours started going in certain spots. In my case, it was a purple band along the bottom. It was a wide spread issue in those models. Sony offered to sell me a brand new 46 inch flat panel for about $400, and I got keep the old TV, which I sold for $200, despite the defects.
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@Rhywden said:
My Samsung TV, as half-assed as it is (as most Samsung is), plays divx-encoded AVIs and MKA files just fine, off an USB stick, and off a HDD. I don't know if it supports ExFAT, though. Funny that a Samsung BR player bought at the same time could not play the same MKA movie off USB (format not supported).I'm not exactly sure that Sony makes good TVs. I recently tried to play a movie I had on my hard disc on a Sony Bravia.
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@Nexzus said:
I'm an unabashed Sony fan - Discmans, WEGA TVs, Bravia TVs, Playstations, DVD Players (including the monsterous 400 disc jukebox), Home Theatre receiver, a Viao for the wife, an A55 DSLR camera, tablet, car stereo. With one exception, all have worked flawlessly for me.
Liar.
There is literally no way that is true.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Nexzus said:
I'm an unabashed Sony fan - Discmans, WEGA TVs, Bravia TVs, Playstations, DVD Players (including the monsterous 400 disc jukebox), Home Theatre receiver, a Viao for the wife, an A55 DSLR camera, tablet, car stereo. With one exception, all have worked flawlessly for me.
Liar.
There is literally no way that is true.
The one exception is that they didn't work.
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I'm pretty sure this WTF was implemented by looking up users whose passwords are older than a certain number of days, and using an existing method to change the password, presumably the same method that would be called when the user actually changes the password themselves. Yes, a WTF, but meh...
What I really can't help but wonder, though, is what they change the password to. If they do something like set the password field to null, so that it simply doesn't work, then that's so-so... But what if they change it to some magic value that represents to a password someone could actually use? If that were the case, when the PSN gets hacked again in the future, it'll be even easier to crack more users' passwords as all the expired passwords will be the same.
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@LoremIpsumDolorSitAmet said:
What I really can't help but wonder, though, is what they change the password to. If they do something like set the password field to null, so that it simply doesn't work, then that's so-so... But what if they change it to some magic value that represents to a password someone could actually use?
No; they just set the "password reset required" flag in the database. They can't erase the existing password hash because they need it to confirm your old password while you're changing it. How else could it work?
@LoremIpsumDolorSitAmet said:
If that were the case, when the PSN gets hacked again in the future, it'll be even easier to crack more users' passwords as all the expired passwords will be the same.
PSN is already awful enough without having to make up hypothetical ways it could be slightly more awful.
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@LoremIpsumDolorSitAmet said:
What I really can't help but wonder, though, is what they change the password to. If they do something like set the password field to null, so that it simply doesn't work, then that's so-so... But what if they change it to some magic value that represents to a password someone could actually use? If that were the case, when the PSN gets hacked again in the future, it'll be even easier to crack more users' passwords as all the expired passwords will be the same.
If (ha ha) they do things the right way, the password itself isn't reset; instead it's marked as expired or needs to be reset before next logon, which is how Windows (for example) does it.
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I hope you're both right about that expired password flag. However, I didn't see anything in the OP that suggested he could still log in with his old password in order to change it. I assumed he would have to use the forgotten password feature. If so, my hypothesis still stands.
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@blakeyrat said:
PSN is already awful enough without having to make up hypothetical ways it could be slightly more awful.
Oh come now. There's still plenty of scope there to throw in a few tricks they missed. What about making it possible to register multiple accounts with the same login ID so you can never be sure which one you're actually using?
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@Nexzus said:
I'm an unabashed Sony fan - Discmans, WEGA TVs, Bravia TVs, Playstations, DVD Players (including the monsterous 400 disc jukebox), Home Theatre receiver, a Viao for the wife, an A55 DSLR camera, tablet, car stereo.
I've got a Data Discman just sitting here gathering dust. Any chance you'd like to add it to your collection?
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@joe.edwards said:
@EncoreSpod said:
I'm used to this as I'm British and most products seem to be targetted towards Americans which is odd considering the full range of accents across the whole of the US but I always find voice fired products work between if I speak with a strong Texan accent.
I'd like to hear what a Brit sounds like speaking with a strong Texan accent.
i read somewhere that peter sellers was supposed to play major kong as well, but could not get the accent right.
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@joe.edwards said:
I'd like to hear what a Brit sounds like speaking with a strong Texan accent.
Seen "Walking Dead" yet?
(although I'm unsure of where Rick Grimes hails from.
Edit: Kentucky. Quite removed from Texas)
