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Joined 10 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.