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All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

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Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#361

Post by konschubert »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #188
konschubert wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said it's a surgical training startup so I think it would have been fairly okay.

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"?

The GP was suggesting that this could kill people. I simply implied that it wouldn't, and compared to killing people, I would say a lost day is "okay".

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#362

Post by opencl »

dmix wrote: post #334
legitster wrote: post #6

They let their certificate expire, essentially bricking all of their devices. And now the app running it won't start, so they can't push an update. Just recently picked up a Rift. I love the hardware and their exclusives are top notch, but this confirms my suspicions that their backend is super goofy. They sell Rifts at Best Buy and want to pretend that it's a consumer-ready product, but here's why I am recommending…

> It sounds like they are moving their efforts towards "lighter" experiences. Can you explain what this means in practice? I'm not super familiar with Rift but I'm curious.

Probably referring to the Oculus Go, which is basically one of those phone VR headsets with the phone built in for 200USD.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#363

Post by Filligree »

stryk wrote: post #122
Filligree wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTC is close to releasing a wireless module for the Vive. Combine that with their next-generation headset, with the screen-door effect mostly gone and much higher resolution, and I think we'll have something. Still need the sensors, but those aren't that large.

You're forgetting the $1200+ PC to plug it into (that's @ MSRP, if you were to build it today it's more like $2k)

The Vive is targeted at gamers, who by and large will already have that system.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#364

Post by Angostura »

crowbahr wrote: post #242
boobsbr wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

"May have caused" is disingenuous ass covering at best. They soft bricked every single headset worldwide. "Oopsie we may have caused you inconvenience" vs "We're sorry for the damage"

In fact, I cocked up my correction. It should be phrased: "Our teams apologize for the inconvenience this caused you"

Get rid of the may entirely. I don't know what I was thinking.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#365

Post by Filligree »

CaptSpify wrote: post #325
SkyPuncher wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how many companies build technologies off of walled gardens - especially in Healthcare.

Although you are correct, I don't see how that really matters. Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it a good idea.

What's the alternative they should have been using?

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#366

Post by MayeulC »

agar wrote: post #315
MayeulC wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am sorry to have to disagree on this. This is no rocket science, and the software support isn't that different from any standard monitor/gamepad combo. That's for the architecture, at least. Of course, latency requirements are higher. But the differences stops here. Face it, today's VR headsets simply are monitors that you wear on your face (Head Mounted Displays). Anyone thinking otherwise is simply lying to…

Argument: A modern VR stack is much more complex, and does much more, than just displaying images on two screens. Counterargument: The 16 things that happen other than just displaying images on the screen aren't relevant, have been done before, or has equivalent complexity to other systems. Well OK. I just can't argue with that. "A modern CPU SOC is no more than a souped up 6502." That's true, if you ignore the integ…

I would like to apologize for my previous post, I feel that it is unnecessarily long, and a bit inaccurate/exaggerated.

Let me be clear: I pretty much agree with everything you said. Only your original statement was what I felt a bit of a stretch:

> The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today

After reading a bit more into it, I feel that Oculus took the correct software approach to bring up its hardware on Windows. What happened appears to have been more of an oversight, one that most people probably could have felt for.

Custom (in-kernel) drivers are indeed probably a necessity to achieve the best possible experience, with the lowest attainable latency. However, they are not actually needed for basic support [1], which is where I think our misunderstanding comes form.

I realize that a tremendous amount of work has gone into making VR as realistic as it could get, and I am not trying to lessen it at all, which is what I think you wanted to point out with your original remark.

As much as I would like to have a go at implementing that kind of feature (and experiment with VR headsets in general), I don't really have the hardware nor the time to do so, unfortunately :)

--

[1] I don't know the latency involved with userspace-based USB libraries, but it seems to be low enough that Valve is using it to support the vive, at least on Linux (and for now).

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#367

Post by seba_dos1 »

Filligree wrote: post #365
CaptSpify wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although you are correct, I don't see how that really matters. Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it a good idea.

What's the alternative they should have been using?

Anything based on OpenVR or OSVR? It's not like Oculus is a monopolist in this space, it's just one of the popular options and it's known to be the most locked up.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#368

Post by josteink »

ryanlol wrote: post #356
josteink wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to Windows code-signing in general, not drivers in particular. This kind of problem affects regular customer-facing applications too, and that's where I've worked hard to minimize the issues caused by the need for timestamping, while still doing things properly. (That is, if timestamping fails, the build SHOULD fail)

To me it hardly sounds like a problem for code-signing in general either. You presumably don't need to sign your binaries during development, so you'll only be signing them when pushing updates to prod. I don't know how often and how urgently you usually do that, but it sounds like a small delay in pushing out prod builds caused by a timestamp server issue wouldn't be much of a problem to most orgs.

It’s often a nesting/dependency problem which is hard to solve after the fact.

A website may depend on libraries, which depends on other libraries. They must all be signed. They are all interlinked against a known version during build, and signing them after linking may not be an option.

The website may offer a download, which is probably a setup file of sorts, which must be signed. It will of course contain binaries, which must be signed too.

The website itself may also be something packaged in another setup file, which too must be signed.

Now how do you “just” sign something like that before releasing to prod? You don’t.

Signing (and time stamping!) must be a intergrated part of every step of the build process.

It takes more work than you would expect to get this done properly, systematically and reliably for every part of your build process. It does take effort and expertise.

That said, for certain build-types (like pure CI) we disable things like timestamping. We’re not crazy :)

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#369

Post by freeone3000 »

superkuh wrote: post #338
WillPostForFood wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers are necessary for the rift to function, and certs are necessary for drivers to function.

This is why half of the blame lies with Microsoft for following the rest of the industry into making software for grandma's protection at the detriment of software freedoms. An enterprising user can turn off these driver signing enforcement settings but it's quite a song and dance and first you have to even be aware of it.

I'm not going to blame the world's largest desktop operating system, primarily used by the least technical users, for optimizing security over developer ease-of-use.

Besides, this is a false dichotomy - On your own comp you can self-sign the driver cert! The CA just has to be in a driver trust store.

The only people who lose out are those trying to distribute drivers to computers they have no control over and who cannot convince the user to install a certificate.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#370

Post by freeone3000 »

MayeulC wrote: post #306
agar wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (…

Well, I am sorry to have to disagree on this. This is no rocket science, and the software support isn't that different from any standard monitor/gamepad combo. That's for the architecture, at least. Of course, latency requirements are higher. But the differences stops here. Face it, today's VR headsets simply are monitors that you wear on your face (Head Mounted Displays). Anyone thinking otherwise is simply lying to…

The certs are for drivers, not an internet connection.

Internet connection is required for updates, for instance, in case you forgot to countersign your drivers against a timeserver.

Whoops.

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