I am yet to find any official statement from Oculus on this. Am I missing something?
All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
251–260 of 390 posts
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those things aren't cheap for simulators, either - not to mention knock-on costs. "What do you mean - I got the doctors in, which alone took a month of herding cats, and now it won't work, just because?" How low has the SW development bar gone, if "it's okay" now means "at least it's not directly killing people"?
>How low has the SW development bar gone, if "it's okay" now means "at least it's not directly killing people"? It gets that low every time a hospital underfunds IT staff and makes horrible project management decisions and product buying decisions. I've seen that first hand. There's a bunch of corpses at the IT entrance of people who've tried to turn that around.
Hospital...corpses...I have a hard time distinguishing the literal and figurative context here.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonderful, let's just autokill all abandoned software out of laziness. I can think of multiple programs that I use which haven't been updated in years, sometimes because there is nobody to develop them (project was cancelled/company ceased to exist/sole developer got fed up and quit/whatever). What are my options? Get a crappier but new alternative, or nothing - just because someone thinks "old == bad" (Meanwhile, ne…
My browser refuses to connect to a large number of websites, because they're still following the SSL best practices from last week. Apparently this is the reality we've decided to live in.
Firefox and Chrome give me that warning page, but I just click on "Advanced" and it will let me continue to the website. At least for me, it's just a huge warning to be careful but I still have ultimate control.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#254Our VR surgical training startup has been working for the last few months towards a big medical conference this week where we're showing multiple training procedures for multiple customers on Oculus Rift, as well as having our own booth. The headsets all stopped working the morning of the conference. Fortunately one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days.…
Hardly original, kids have been using this to extend the trial periods of shareware since forever. Most Rift users have been using RunAsDate which hooks the kernel's time APIs.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The expiration date is the fallback if you don't have confirmation from the timestamp server that it was signed prior to expiration. The fact that the driver was installed locally before the expiration should be taken as proof that the driver was signed before expiration.
Then you would need an internet connection just to install a driver. It would make getting your network driver installed pretty difficult. You could look at the system clock but that was not designed to be secure for this purpose.
Even then you only need to verify that once and can save a time stamp in case the cert is revoked afterwards. Breaking system that has already been verified is still unjustified.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#256For those affected, Oculus now has a patch to fix the issue: https://support.oculus.com/217157135500529/
> If Windows Defender prompts "Windows protected your PC", click More info and then click Run anyway. > If your antivirus software restricts the file from opening, temporarily disable your AV and continue. Good Patch Procedure, 2018.
The last time I listened to a vendor and turned off my anti-virus to install something, this happened: [Flight Sim Company Embeds Malware to Steal Pirates’ Passwords] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16418837
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#257Our VR surgical training startup has been working for the last few months towards a big medical conference this week where we're showing multiple training procedures for multiple customers on Oculus Rift, as well as having our own booth. The headsets all stopped working the morning of the conference. Fortunately one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days.…
Give the engineer the day off, that's classic side think :)
Well every comment thread on the Internet related to the Rift issue mentioned this as a solution so it probably wasn't his idea.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#258Our VR surgical training startup has been working for the last few months towards a big medical conference this week where we're showing multiple training procedures for multiple customers on Oculus Rift, as well as having our own booth. The headsets all stopped working the morning of the conference. Fortunately one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days.…
Hardly original, kids have been using this to extend the trial periods of shareware since forever. Most Rift users have been using RunAsDate which hooks the kernel's time APIs.
Yup, hardly original to think of a non-obvious security work around the morning of a conference that could potentially make or break the company's future success, while dealing with what must have been insane pressure from the everyone there to figure it out.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#259This one will hopefully be solved quick by the company, but think of what would have happened if this was a piece of technology sold in hundreds thousands pieces by a company now out of business: instant tons of electronic junk that would be instead perfectly useable if there was a law mandating all software/hardware details to be released if either of these conditions are met: IP owner going out of business, company declaring the product obsolete and stopping any technical support or upgrade, product sales plummeting due to competing or new models. The first two are obvious while the third one would allow some of the devices to be repurposed instead of thrown away.
I've saved a good number of old access points / routers from the landfill by installing OpenWRT/Lede where possible o their latest available firmware,pairing them together, adding homemade external antennas (small Wifi antenna enclosed in white PVC pipe plus self bonding tape, silicone sealant and heatshrink, RF240 cable and RP/SMA or N connector: => years exposed to sun, rain and snow with zero problems). I install them at really low prices to customers who need a cheap wifi bridge from point A to B. I would love to do a similar "afterlife" service to old cellphones, but none of them could host a true native Linux install because of how tightly closed the underlying hardware is, and all of them sooner than later are doomed to be thrown away.
The problem lays in the IP. It's considered to be a vital asset so that when a company goes belly up it will survive kept years or decades in a safe by law firms in the hope someone will buy it, or just to make profits through litigation against infringers. Unfortunately this has a deleterious effect on products derived from that IP, the people who bought them and the people living where the unusable products will be trashed.
Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
#260This is not how Windows code signing is supposed to work. Normally you'd get a countersignature from a timestamp server so that the verification process can prove that the certificate was valid at the time of signing. It would appear that Oculus signed their binaries without using a timestamp server, so without a way to verify when signing happened they become invalid as soon as the cert expires.
Something like that. Certificates aren't supposed to stop working just because they've expired! That would destroy all abandoned or poorly maintained software within a couple of years. This problem is deeper than forgetting to update it. It should never have caused a failure in the first place. Just the fact that the device apparently can't function at all without the internet is a problem too.
> That would destroy all abandoned or poorly maintained software within a couple of years.
Some might call this a feature.