Words with Sony

I recently pointed out the ease with which a child could bypass the Playstation 3 parental controls and the incentive for them to do so.

But simply pointing that out here doesn't really accomplish anything, so I sent an email to the head of Sony UK; sadly he was Out of Office until yesterday, but he's obviously passed it on as I had a personal rather than stock reply from someone one rung down, which I was kind of impressed with.

The short answer was 'You're right - you can't upgrade, but your points are appreciated and I'm forwarding it on for review'

So who knows maybe (soon even) it will be possible to upgrade accounts.

The way around this seems to be to set up a normal account by lying to Sony about his DOB and then setting a PIN on the parental controls for that account. In theory this should restrict him as to what he can see or play, but ironically perhaps not what he could buy (i.e. rent an 18 certificate film from the Playstation Store, but not be able to watch it) or spend.

Annoyingly this could still be deactivated by reseting to factory default which resets the PIN to 0000; though that would be highly obvious.

Still a ridiculous situation that I even need to think about how to do this.