Brain Assassin

The PS3 error code 8001050F is wreak­ing havoc on the Playsta­tion Net­work. Appar­ently, this prob­lem is caused by a bug in the clock func­tion­al­ity and affects mod­els other than the new slim PS3 (120/​250 GB mod­els). Accord­ing to some reports in a num­ber of forums some “fat” PS3s have worked ok.

If you are affected, date and time set­tings have been re-​​set to Jan­u­ary 1st, 2000.  This pre­vents you from sign­ing in to PSN with the error mes­sage “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlaySta­tion Net­work (8001050F)”. Your tro­phies will also not dis­play cor­rectly or fail to sync.

You can’t fix it. Sony prob­a­bly stores some form of date in UTC for­mat, then mod­i­fy­ing it accord­ing to your time­zone to get what­ever you see on your on-​​screen clock. If it won’t fix itself, we’ll need a firmware update which we will prob­a­bly have to install man­u­ally from USB stick (I don’t really think so but always expect the worst). Chang­ing the sys­tem date man­u­ally won’t change any­thing at all.

What did Sony have to say about the issue? Not much but they do advise us to “not use the PS3 sys­tem, as doing so may result in errors in some func­tion­al­ity, such as record­ing obtained tro­phies, and not being able to restore cer­tain data”.

Inter­est­ingly enough, I first encoun­tered this error late at night on Fri­day, Feb­ru­ary 26th, prob­a­bly around 23:20. I didn’t want to mess with it and since restart­ing the PS3 didn’t change any­thing I let it be. It worked fine on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day so I for­got about it. Until 18:30 today when I wanted to play Call of Duty: Mod­ern War­fare 2 with a friend.

You think that’s bad? No, it’s not because it only gets worse. The PS3′s 8001050F error is a very good exam­ple of the dark side of the ‘always on’ net con­nec­tion. Ubisoft, for instance, has recently intro­duced anti-​​piracy coun­ter­mea­sures that require you to be online to play the game. Unlike Valve’s Steam, there will be no offline mode. Most upcom­ing Ubisoft PC games will use that scheme.

Now, what hap­pens if you lose your inter­net con­nec­tion for what­ever rea­son? Right, you can’t play the game you spent your money on. At least they promised to patch the games if they ever scrap the sys­tem. I for one will not sup­port such meth­ods. Right now, I’m quite agi­tated and I’d love to vent my anger by play­ing MW2 just to calm down – but I can’t!