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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • That couldn’t have been the point.

    Companies use (read: abuse) IP to keep an artificial, government-sanctioned monopoly they use to extract money from users. Add to that skins, microtransactions, lootboxes, yearly releases and all the other vilest shit you can find in a modern videogame and you’ll see it isn’t about the studio staying afloat - it’s abuit the publisher raking in the $$$.

    People who are creatives take it as a point of pride when their work is spread, remade and remixed. What they do not like is if that remaking and remixing is done by a soulless company in the vilest and most soulless way to generate profits. Oh, and except for thise with the best deals, IP stays with the company.

    It’s not about cratives “not being paid enough” so they need IP protection - it’s the very same companies whose IP is protected who don’t pay their workers enough. IP doesn’t bring money to workers directly nor does it protect workers from anything since again - the IPs are owned by the studio/publisher.

    Call it “personal feelings”, but it’s how the world works.




  • Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.

    But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.

    I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.

    WhatsApp doesn’t let you send documents if you don’t give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don’t do anything but this is Facebook we’re talking about.

    The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can’t even send a photo if you don’t give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn’t need just to send a single picture.

    Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that’s pretty low-priority but I’d still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it’s worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams (“send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone” type bullshit mostly).

    Revoking WhatsApp’s contacts permission will not show peoples’ nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn’t block it outright when it’s an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.

    All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don’t work in cyber security so it’s clearly just incoherent rambing from me.



  • Depends. According to the GDPR for any processing of PII you need consent from the data subject or a reasonable basis why you have to act upon the data (your servers communicating with an IP adress is neccesary for your service to function). Saving the adress isn’t, so you need consent or other legislation under which you’re required to store it that trumps the GDPR. That’s the so-called “overriding legitimate interest”. It doesn’t mean “interest = money”, “data = money” therefore “data retention = overruling legitimate interest”.

    Keeping leaked data or scraping it from public sources is still problematic since you do nees consent.

    If you’re approached as a 3rd party by someone with data who sells them to you you are obliged to make sure the data you’re given has been aquired with consent. Often times checks aren’t in place, and ultimately, if you’re given “bad data” by the intermediary you cab always claim they kenw they should’ve notified you but didn’t.

    If you’re scraping leaks, well, there’s no one between you and the data subject who can take the fall. You’ve knowingly collected “bad data” unilaterally.






  • Is such a strategy really feasible? Adding legislation that a game has to be made operable in a reasonable manner after the publisher discontinues support for it in no way influences this strategy.

    If someone wanted to do such elaborate botnet defamation attacks in hopes of getting the game playable on 3rd party servers they could’ve done that already without legislation.

    Bots making the game unplayable is a problem, but opening the servers in general would help the problem as private servers can implement harsher requirements for players than official ones usually do, opting to rather make a huge bot-filled cesspool as you’ve already said.

    However, this proposal isn’t a general “all games must have FOSS self-hostable servers” proposal. It’s just a “if you kill a game it still has to be alive afterwards” proposal. Whether publishers open servers or not before they shut theirs down is their decision without the proposal as much as it is with it.


  • was Israel not attacked?

    If you’re attacked, you don’t have the right to escalate the situation however you please, especially if it’s against international law.

    I genuinely have issues trying to discern the propaganda from the facts.

    Sure, it’s hard. It isn’t easy sometimes for me either. You just have to take in information and draw your own conclusions. Of course, depending on the information you get your view will ve skewed. In my opinion it’s impossible to be biased, but you have to at least try to siniff out the propaganda and lies, which I commend you for doing.

    from what I gathered, I believed that Israel just took some land on which other people were living ~70 years ago, displacing these people.

    That’s true, sort of. Israel was given part of the land after WWII by the UN as a result of wellmeaning intentions. However, a conflict arose, culminating in the First Arab-Israeli war. Next was the Six-day war some 20 years later, followed by other conflicts. Then 5 years later, the Yom Kippur war. Other than that there have been other conflicts with the Palestinians, notably in 2007, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Finally there’s the current conflict which started last year.

    Of course, some of this was justifiable by Israel, but the problem is the way Israel treats Palestinians. There’s a good chance that if they weren’t treated as 2nd class citizens none of the later conflicts would’ve happened.

    Most notably, Palestinians were rsther explicitly forced out of Israel during the Nakba, itself a breach of International law. Nowadays, Palestinians are living under an apartheid regime: they are scrutinised much more closely during security checks, thir homes are appropriated by Israeli settlers, mkre often than not under the protection of the Israeli government. They don’t have the same civil rights as Palestinians are tried in miliary and Israeli citizens in civil courts. Military courts generally don’t offer the same legal or human rights protections, punishments are mlre severe, there’s limited legal representation of the defendant and no confidential communication with lawyers, and Israel isn’t an exception to this.

    Regarding escalation: the Palestinians are rutinely, and often violently opressed in a systemic manner.

    They can’t get building permits. They get kicked off their land by settlers. They get retaliated against indiscriminately.

    If you systematically opress someone like this, of course the desperate people will fight back in their desperation. What is unnecessary escalation is the disproportionate response of mass murder via starvation and bombing, as well as the systematic opression during the 70 years you mentioned.

    None of this would’ve happened if Israel just came to some land, holy or otherwise, planted a flag and fairly enforced their laws according to basic principles of human rights


  • Since the game is at EOL it cannot generate any profits

    Releasing server side source code opens up a route for abusing the game studio making the game

    If, as you said, as the game is EOL it doesn’t make profits, then it can’t cause losses either. Otherwise it’d have to be kept alive.

    Since if some 3rd part wants to profit off of running private servers of that game, all they have to do is make a flood of bots in-game and on the game’s communication platforms (eg discord servers, communities on Reddit or even Lemmy)

    Uh… If they’re 3rd-party servers then hosting isn’t paid for by the publisher. Additionally, game publishers don’t pay for hosting of Discord/Reddit/Lemmy communities. And even if they did if the game is EOL they’d axe that too if it induces any cost.

    This coupled with finding as many in-game exploits as possible can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the studio.

    It absolutely can’t. The game is DEAD. It causes no profits or losses. Nothing aboit the game matters to the publisher anymore except for brand/reputation for a possible sequel.

    forcing them to release server side source code, which the corpos can then grab and monetize the crap out of

    Nothing explicitly forces release of source code, any reasonable server application wpuld suffice, open-source or otherwise.

    The “corpos” usually make the games. The monetization concern is minimal since a server for a game isn’t anything a corporation couldn’t make on its own if it wanted, nor is it something groundbreaking.

    Since the bot flood can be made nigh untraceable by having them operate out of an unfriendly state (say, Russia or China)

    The bots would attack servers nit owned or operated by/for the publisher.

    and there’s no studio acquisition necessary to get server side code, this would be a perfect extortion method that’d fly under the radar of antitrust legislation

    What does any of this have to do with antitrust legislation? If anything, this would curb the publisher’s monopoly over the game servers although that in and of itself isn’t even an illegal monopoly.





  • British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

    U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

    the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

    Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.


  • British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

    U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

    the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

    Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.