Monday June 13, 2005

I was one of the hundreds lining up at my neighborhood Best Buy to snap up the Sony PSP (a.k.a the Playstation Portable). I would have loved to be at the official launch party at the Sony Metreon or the main one in New York City. Well, at least the weather in San Jose is much nicer this time of the year than SF or NYC! Now I must admit that when it comes to handheld gaming consoles, I'm a newbie. My experience has been limited to watching my 7 year son showing off his Pokedex on his Game Boy Advance SP.

But a recent trip to Tokyo, Japan changed all that. I was fortunate to have time to visit the Sony Building in Ginza. For a gadget freak like me, I thought I was in heaven! The very latest technologies- in some cases- technologies that the rest of the world- outside Japan- may not see for months, or years.

One such gadget was the PSP. At that time the PSP- had only been launched in Japan and sold out almost overnight. The US launch was still a month away. But the console just blew me away. The quality of the 16:9 format screen was a work of art- the videos were flawless, the games engrossing. And it had built-in Wi-Fi , which meant I might even be able to use it to browse/email at my neighborhood Starbucks!

Fast forward to the present. While the PSP has lived up to much of its hype for video and gaming, Sony has still kept the PSP largely a restricted proprietary device, whether its internet access, or using the "universal media disks". Of course, some folks quickly figured out a way to use a built-in browser in one of Sony's own games- Wipeout Pure to surf the web using the built-in Wi-Fi. Isn't it interesting though that that's its not so much a PSP hack, but a well known DNS hack - record spoofing, which is both very old and very common.

All you have to do is to setup a DNS server serving the "hacked" resource records and get a DNS resolver (read browser) to somehow point to it. In this case, of course, you are telling your resolver you want that alternate DNS resolution! The PSP resolver still makes a DNS request for www.scea.com as before and it thinks its fetching the address record for www.scea.com, but of course its not! Its getting the IP address where you setup your own website! Unfortunately these types of attacks can be minimized but not entirely eliminated until DNSSEC allows all DNS servers to have cryptographically signed records. (The BIND 9 DNS server, newly available in Solaris 10, has some helpful features such as no automatic glue fetching, random id pool, ability to create "split" views of your namespace, and so on.)

So what next for the PSP platform and handheld gaming in general? Based on purely anecdotal data and speculation, I believe that handheld consoles will continue to "grow up" as baby boomers and much of the "developed" world ages. The traditional handheld market already appears to be declining rapidly and Sony itself exited from this segment in most worldwide markets. This means the Sonys of the world will put more non-gaming functionality into these types of consoles. After all, the past ten years have been characterizted by vendors putting Wi-Fi into PDAs, bluetooth into cellphones, PDAs in phones (or vice-versa), cameras into phones, GPS into PDAs, gaming consoles in phones and so on. However in my opinion this has been akin to throwing darts and seeing which ones stick, than any real movement towards convergence and ubiquity. The next decade could see some real convergence emerge with functions customers like to see on the same device coming together, while the ones not particularly interesting falling back to smaller, niche markets. The only question is what will those functions be!