Eighty years ago a generation came together across 51 countries to fight fascism and put an end to a genocidal regime bent on conquering as much territory as it possibly could.

And then their children handed it all over without a fight over the next several decades in exchange for some trinkets and the promise of carrying their social and economic power to their deathbeds. What a fucking waste.

Is it actually a free speech issue, though?

It’s not as though SCOTUS is trying to rule on whether to ban short-form video or content from particular person. The allegation in regard to TikTok isn’t ‘dangerous speech’, it’s the platform’s collection of user data and the manipulation of available content via an algorithm that they claim is a tool of a hostile foreign entity. Neither of those issues constitute ‘speech’ whether related to a foreign or domestic company.

It seems to me like this is being framed as a speech issue to protect other vendors with hostile algorithms. If Google were forced to stop pushing AI and paid results to the stop of its searches, would that be a free speech issue? If Facebook were forced to put more weight on users’ choices about what shows up on their feed rather than pushing dodgy political posts and paid advertisements, would that be a speech issue?

Honestly, deciding that toxic algorithms are protected speech seems like a much more dangerous precedent to me than coming to a conclusion that a company that’s beholden to a foreign entity that may be forcing it to engage in hostile intelligence operations and soft power can be restricted.

If someone made a piece of malware that ropes your PC into a botnet and uses it to perform DDOS attacks, would banning it be a speech issue if it happens to come in the form of a blogging platform? A chat client? A music sharing service?

Just having speech on a platform doesn’t mean everything that platform does qualifies as speech and requires first amendment protections.

I’m a little confused by this. It seems like the question here itself is Anglocentric. These games presumably are being discussed if they’re big, just, like, in the places where they’re big. Japanese games are only discussed in the US because we have typically had a ton of ports of Japanese games. We do a lot of business with Japan, and many of our console game studios and even the consoles themselves are and were Japanese.

Nintendo, Sega, Sony, even Neogeo were all Japanese consoles. Other than Xbox, it’s tough to find an American console that was relevant in the US more recently than Atari and Colecovision. We had a lot of American computer games, cabinets, and developers for Japanese consoles, sure, but it’s not really surprising that Japan is featured prominently in the minds of American gamers.

Why would games that were released to markets that don’t port games to the US or advertise here be known here or discussed?

I’d imagine that Indian gamers very much see Indian games as part of their gaming history. Same with Vietnamese gamers and Vietnamese games, etc. Presumably they’re also better known in nearby countries and other places with overlapping languages or trade deals that involve localizations of their games.

There’s definitely some bias toward particular types of games getting attention vs not, and some of that is certainly rooted in sexism, but I’m not sure Americans mostly talking about games they actually have access to is quite the scandal this article wants to frame it as.

I’d certainly be interested in seeing some ports from countries that we don’t see many games getting much attention among gamers in the US and other primarily English speaking countries.

404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.

So like, how about these big tough military guys stop hand-wringing and do something about it. Fulfill your oath and defend the fucking constitution.

It seems like a lot of people who do that don’t understand that there’s an inverse relationship between devs soaking up all the emotional labor that comes with being the target of end users’ ire and having the energy to get the actual work done. Especially when it comes to open source stuff, they could literally be spending the time they’re spending shouting at a dev to do more dev things like… learning to fix it themselves and submitting a commit.

I feel like we’re on that part of the roller coaster when you’re juuuuust getting over the peak of the big hill and you feel that initial momentum. Gravity will kick in eventually. History doesn’t lie.

I needed that. <3

You know what seems like a really good idea when we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions? A bunch of new satellite networks. We could get, like, one of the least trustworthy people on Earth to launch thousands of the things and then get everyone else to launch their own because he can’t be trusted. Literally just blot out the sun with them. No biggie.

There is a world of difference between being excluded from spaces where you’re marginalized (such as society on the whole) and creating spaces where you aren’t marginalized. Does that make sense?

Cool, another paywall.

I miss the old Internet.

I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.

Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.

It’s good to hear that soon the NHS will be capable of launching cyber attacks again.

It astounds me that people legitimately assume that the other animals on this planet don’t feel pain. It seems incredibly obvious to me that they would, or that we should at least be assuming they would.

How would the industry even under-staff further in the first place? They seem to try to run on skeleton crews wherever they can as is.

Did this person really just typify Thatcher as defending her country from male aggression from elsewhere?

A lot of what’s said here makes sense but… seriously? Thatcher? That’s who we’re pointing to as a good example? Yeesh.