There's a giant difference between stopping kids having full reign on what is now essentially the whole world of information - and instant access to strangers, than there is making sure they eat healthy, help out, and don't have bad teeth .... but I'm sure you know that :)
The only difference is in parents who raise and protect their kids without needing a law...and people who want government to be mom and do it for them and are willing to make everyone else suffer for it :)
Yea, I think anyone who grew up at the start of the internet in homes realises just how different it is now, and that teaching your kids about how to be safe online etc is an important part of parenting. But we are at the point where we have some parents who always had access to what it is now, and don't see it as a bad place.
"Stranger Danger" is no longer don't get into a van with someone who promises you sweets kinda thing.
Yep, I bought a separate all-in-one computer that is in the living room, in full view of everyone else, so we can keep an eye on what is going on when they are using it.
We also have pi-hole running that blocks a lot of things, and can turn on and off certain domains (so they can play roblox etc for a short while, then its blocked again) and their devices are pretty locked down
All four of my daughters prohibit my 7 grandchildren from going anywhere near roblox. My grandchildren are currently ages 2-11 but my daughters are so outraged by what happens there that they say their children will never be allowed on roblox until they move out of the house. Apparently it is extremely predatory, lots of bullying, and highly sexualized - and while children are the site's target audience, the site provides no effective oversight.
Whilst I do kinda agree, I was just replying to the parent about what the punishment would probably be :)
But the problem is that people are NOT managing their own kids' shit, and now we have to have things put in place to try and counter that - and end up overreaching.
I'm more than happy to educate mine on how to be safe online, and to come and talk to us about stuff, other aren't, or are not aware they need to.
Perhaps buying internet means you have to sign a waiver saying that if anything happens because of the internet then that is on the parent(s)...
Consider a parent that uses mac address filtering to block access. Easy to implement on routers.
What happens when the parent goes to bed and the kid hard resets the router? Or the parent goes to bed and the kid spoofs the mac of the parent's device?
It's a good outcome! Let the cat and mouse games begin, and the youth will be more tech literate than ever. But I think punishing the parents is a bit much.
It'll probably eventually be like how modern folks treat play dates when they ask the counterparty if there are guns in their house and whether they're locked, etc. but with the internet: Do you have a central device management system with proper safeguards, logging, and ml running for anomaly detection on your network? Do you dpi? How do you prevent your kids from evil maiding you? Is your personal computer locked in a cage, and do you check all your paraphernalia for keyloggers, etc. before booting?
Such a waiver would be equally insane given the fraud and malfeasance that goes on every day it would be like signing a waiver saying whatever happens in the world is your fault for a drivers licence.
Instead how about we simply continue to make reasonable laws regarding behaviour and holding individual people and companies responsible when they violate the law.
Whilst we are at it we can keep content filtering for pre teens and imposed by parents and accept that teens are going to figure out how to get to the real internet at some point.
"Is this overkill for viewing the occasional Imgur image? Probably."
From the last couple of weeks of researching some stuff, it makes perfect sense - I keep stumbling across blogs and documentation that uses Imgur, and it's really quite annoying that I can't see the screenshot or image that is being referenced. It hasn't /quite/ hit the point to put something in place, but this is super helpful for the final straw - when it comes!
It's been eye-opening how far-reaching Imgur really is - for example, some of the images on the Core Devices (the new Pebble folks) website are actually on Imgur.
This simple block is relatively trivial to bypass - but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
> but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
Tale as old as time, long-running forums are graveyards of dead Photobucket, Tinypic and Imageshack embeds. Imgur has lasted longer than most but the cycle will probably repeat eventually, especially since they were acquired by faceless corpos a few years ago.
I've said before that the age of an internet user can be estimated by how many free image hosting services they have seen come and go, like rings on a tree trunk.
The Online Safety Act is clear-cut censorship but that's not why Imgur left the UK. They were facing fines for violating the UKs data protection laws, specifically a set of rules that were introduced years before the OSA was even passed. Their parent company hasn't pulled any of their other services from the UK either, which you'd expect them to do if their goal was to protest or avoid the OSA.
"There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world. TikTok did not abide by those laws." ... "When you sign up you can be targeted for advertising, you can be profiled, your data contributes to an algorithm which feeds content," said the Information Commissioner.
So even before the OSA, the idea was: social media sites using algorithmic feeds must prevent children's access, and just asking "are you over 13" isn't enough. That's a demand for age verification, in practice.
Overkill right now, probably, but the Government seems hell-bent on locking down access to more and more things that we see as completely normal, so I'd say that it's forward planning.
When that happens, most VPN providers will face similar destiny.
Which means that we'll all have to run our own VPNs, possibly masquerading as HTTPS traffic, if that remains viable against government interference (eg. they might ask to re-encrypt all traffic by ISP-level certs, and block any traffic unreadable by them).
also, if foreign servers notice no real loss of traffic because people just circumvent draconian censorship measures from authoritarian regimes, then they can more safely ignore them without real repercussions
the EU seems to be following soon, so it's important that people have readily available tools so the power dynamics change and it doesn't become economically unfeasible to refuse censorship pressures
Since you broached the topic, I've got an open curiosity about projects like that: if I manufactured entirely new assets, completely independently from the source game (possibly not even matching the source; like a different "skin" or "theme"), and then used those assets in a "clone" (in all but assets) of the source game, would that run afoul of IP law? I'm aware that anything can be litigated, but is there some quirk of IP protection for that kind of thing, or would I be able to use the cloned source with completely new assets without really infringing on anything? Does the cloned (re-coded? recomposed? clean-roomed?) source cause issues or create some kind of legal link from the original assets to the unrelated ones?
Again, just idle curiosity. No actual intentions here, so just wondering if anyone has some deeper knowledge on the subject.
Game mechanics are not considered copyrightable[1]. If you had a clean room implementation with your own significantly different assets, it would be allowed.
However, the exact definitions of "significantly different" and "assets" is where things start to get fuzzy. While you could definitely make a very similar RTS game, exactly how similar can you get? EA doesn't own "military-themed RTS", but they probably do own "Soviets vs Allies with about 5 different unit types, air transports, and tesla coils." Getting even more fuzzy, are unit abilities considered assets, or game mechanics? It'd have to be worked out in court.
My gut feeling is these clone engines would probably lose in court. I think the specific expression of the general game mechanics being cloned here probably would constitute infringement. But there isn't much upside to the IP owners to pursue enthusiastic hobbyists cloning a 20+ year old game in a non-commercial way, so they let it slide.
[1] "Although Amusement World admitted that they appropriated Atari's idea, the court determined that this was not prohibited, because copyright only protects the specific expression of an idea, not the idea itself." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_Inc._v._Amusement_World...
I'm sure if EA could undo their release of Red Alert and C&C as open-source, they would.
OpenRA simply downloads a copy that it loads for the purpose of assets, but the engine is completely new, and it is very different from the orignal Red Alert. At this point, I don't think a single unit acts exactly the way it did in the original game. It's endlessly being rebalanced.
IIRC if you make entirely new assets you're good to go. OpenTTD (Open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe) has its own custom made assets, but can also be used with the original if you own them.
Not sure it's ever been proven definitively in court, though. And if you "made" custom assets that were exactly like the original ones only with a 1px color difference or something I'm sure you'd fall foul of it. What counts as different "enough" is always debatable.
It would probably be the usual clean room reverse engineering rules: one guy describes the assets to be cloned, and then another guy who has never seen the originals uses that documentation to create the replacements.
Once you've seen the originals, you're contaminated and no longer suitable for the role of doing the replacement work.
Oh, awesome! Yeah, this is a great example of something that I would have guessed would kind of be "over the line" being that it looks similar enough to be an issue. I'm glad it's not, though! But, either way, it's a perfect practical example of what I was wondering about, so thanks!
Unfortunately I think definitive answers are difficult to come by. No one cares that much about Transport Tycoon so no one is motivated to enforce anything. But if you made a clone of Call of Duty that had models as similar as OpenTTDs are to the original you might find yourself in hot water.
https://freedoom.github.io/ does that for the still proprietary DOOM assets. Though the DOOM engine itself is open source, so a slight different situation than Command and Conquer.
Not a fan of soft deleting, but as I sit here I wonder if using an RLS policy to limit to anything without a deleted field would make the whole “forgetting a where” a bit easier? I’m not sure the performance would be great though
