By BeauHD from
Slashdot's strong-words department:
dryriver writes: A number of pay-to-win microtransaction FPS games, including Dirty Bomb and the $60 Star Wars Battlefront II, have drawn the ire of legislators in countries like Belgium and the United States. Not only are advanced characters like Luke Skywalker and Dart Vader and various weapons and abilities in these games "locked" -- you pay for them in hard cash, or play for them for dozens and dozens of tedious hours -- the games also feature so called "Loot Boxes," which are boxes that contain a random item, weapon, character or ability. So like playing slot machines in Vegas, each time you can get something good, something mediocre or something totally crap. You cannot determine with any certainty what you will get for your real-world dollars or in-game achievements. Angry Reddit users recently downvoted a blundering statement by EA on the topic with a whopping 249,000 downvotes -- an all time downvote record on Reddit, shocking EA into retreating from its pay-to-win model and announcing unspecified "changes" now being made to Star Wars Battlefront II. Legislators in a number of countries have also sharply criticized "Loot Boxes" and "microtransactions" in games, with one legislator in Belgium vowing to have the sale of such games banned completely in the EU, because children are essentially being forced to "gamble with real money" in these games. Forbes has written a great piece about how EA is now essentially stuck with a $60 Star Wars game that cost a lot to make but probably cannot be monetized any further, because there is considerable risk of all games with loot boxes, microtransactions and "pay to win" monetization models being completely banned from sale in a number of different countries now. The morale of the story? Maybe people should not pay a game developer any more than the $40-60 they paid when they thought they "bought" the game in the first place.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's thou-shalt-not-pass department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo News: Mindgeek may be the most powerful company that you've never heard of, or at least, a company you'll claim never to have heard about in polite company. It's the conglomerate that owns some of the world's most visited porn sites, including Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn. Far from simply being a popular and free way for people to consume adult content, it may soon have a powerful political role in the UK that will ensure its dominance for decades to come. That's because, within the next year, Mindgeek may become the principal gatekeeper between the country's internet users and their porn. In April, the UK passed the Digital Economy Act 2017, legislation that mandated that any website showing adult content must verify the ages of its visitors. It was pushed through in response to concerns that children were being corrupted by easy access to and exposure to adult content at an early age. Section 15(1) of the bill requires that "pornographic material" not be published online, on a "commercial basis," unless it is "not normally accessible by those under 18." The bill has several flaws, not least the number of vague proposals it contains, and the ad hoc definition of what pornography actually is. Section 17 of the same act outlined the creation of an "age-verification regulator," the digital equivalent of a bouncer standing between you and your porn. This gatekeeper will have the right, and duty, to demand you show proof of age, or else refuse you access. In addition, the body will be able to impose fines and enforcement notices on those who either neglect or circumvent the policy. [...] The Open Rights Group believes that the BBFC will then hand over the actual mechanisms of the age verification platform to a third party in the private sector. Mindgeek has had several conversations with officials and is currently pushing its own age verification platform, AgeID. If selected, this platform could become the principal wall between Britons and their pornography -- giving Mindgeek enormous power in the market.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's other-side-of-the-world department:
Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic: The continuing desecration has taken an immense toll on the mental health of people like Colton, a director at Coral Reef Alliance, who have devoted their lives to studying and saving these ecosystems. How do you get up and go to work every day when every day brings fresh news of loss? "Are we going to lose an entire ecosystem on my watch? It's demoralizing. It's been really hard to find the optimism," she says. "I think Miss Enthusiasm has gone away." There was a time, just a few decades ago, when this crisis seemed unimaginable, when reefs seemed invincible. This catastrophe has unfolded slowly. [...] But she also recognizes that she and other scientists are privileged. They care about reefs, but they're not like the 450 million people around the world who rely on reefs for tourism revenue, food from fish, and protection against storms. For them, the losses are a daily reality. The last time Bette Willis, from James Cook University, went out to the Great Barrier Reef, the woman who ran her boat "would alternate between rants and depression," she recalls. "She's out there several times a week. She knows each coral. She could see her whole livelihood go down the drain." Everyone I spoke to talked about becoming very good at compartmentalizing -- at acknowledging the scale of the tragedy, but also putting it aside to focus on their work. "I don't find it productive to be angry or depressed all the time. It's corrosive, and it isn't going to solve the problem," says Knowlton. She is perhaps the poster child for ocean optimism, having created a movement called ... Ocean Optimism.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's security-woes department:
Paul Karp, reporting for The Guardian: The Department of Social Services has written to 8,500 current and former employees warning them their personal data held by a contractor has been breached. In letters sent in early November the department alerted the employees to "a data compromise relating to staff profiles within the department's credit card management system prior to 2016." Compromised data includes credit card information, employees' names, user names, work phone numbers, work emails, system passwords, Australian government services number, public service classification and organisation unit. The department failed to warn staff how long the data was exposed for but a DSS spokesman told Guardian Australia that the contractor, Business Information Services, had advised that the data was open from June 2016 until October 2017. The data related to the period 2004 to 2015.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's end-of-an-era department:
The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29,000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's better-than-nothing department:
An anonymous reader shares a report: In many parts of the world, like North America, using Wikipedia is taken for granted; hell, there are even Twitter accounts to track government employees editing the internet's free encyclopedia while on the clock. But in other places, like Turkey or Syria, using Wikipedia can be difficult, and even dangerous. To make using Wikipedia safer for at-risk users, former Facebook security engineer Alec Muffett has started an experimental dark net Wikipedia service that gives visitors some strong privacy protections. The project is unofficial; for now, Wikipedia isn't involved. So it's a bit janky. The service uses self-signed certificates that may trigger a security warning in Tor, so you have to manually white-list the addresses, which takes a couple minutes.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's real-heroes department:
If you venture over to Battle For the Net, which encourages internet users to call Congress to advocate for the preservation of net neutrality rules, you'll find something peculiar: Several of the top sites that direct calls are Phish-related. From a report: As someone on Twitter pointed out, the traffic from phish.net -- which describes itself as "a non-commercial project run by Phish fans and for Phish fans" -- appears to be coming from a pop-up message that greets visitors to the site. The same pop-up, which directs to www.battleforthenet.com, appears when you visit the site's forums and setlist pages. So, it appears that Phish fans, while in the midst of discussing their favorite extended noodling sessions, are leading the charge to save us from our impending telecom-dominated hellscape. Thanks, guys!" Phish.net sees over 400,000 unique visitors each month, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In July, the website served over one million unique visitors.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's tussle-continues department:
Peter Bright, writing for ArsTechnica: Belgium's Gaming Commission has ruled that loot boxes -- in-game purchases where what you receive is randomized and only known once you open the box -- are gambling. The country's minister of justice, Koen Geens, has said that he wants to see them banned Europe-wide, reports PC Gamer. Amid outcry over the use of loot boxes in Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront 2, the Belgian Gaming Commission decided last week to look into the issue, with Commission Director Peter Naessens specifically saying that the combination of paying money and receiving something "dependent on chance" prompted the investigation. Rather swiftly, it seems, the Commission has made its decision. In October, the US' Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rejected calls to classify loot boxes as gambling. It told Kotaku that since players receive some reward from opening the loot box -- even if it's useless or unwanted -- that it's not gambling. As such, loot box games will receive neither ESRB's "Real Gambling" nor "Simulated Gambling" labels, the former of which automatically gives a game an "Adults Only" rating. Many retailers refuse to sell A-O games, so giving every title that uses loot boxes such a rating would likely be harmful to their sales. The question of whether loot boxes are gambling may see some new scrutiny in the US. Hawaiian Democratic State Representative Chris Lee has described loot boxes as predatory behavior.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's horror-at-every-corner department:
Greg Bensinger and Robert McMillan, reporting for the WSJ: While the massive data breach at Uber didn't happen under the watch of its new chief executive, more than two months elapsed before he notified affected customers and drivers of the incident (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled), people familiar with the matter said. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi learned of the breach, which Uber said happened in October 2016 and affected some 57 million accounts, about two weeks after he officially took the helm on Sept. 5, one of the people said. Mr. Khosrowshahi said he immediately ordered an investigation, which he wanted to complete before making the matter public. About three weeks ago, though, Uber disclosed the investigation and the broad outlines of the breach to SoftBank, which is considering a multibillion-dollar investment in the ride-hailing company, according to other people familiar with the matter. Uber officials, including its chief security officer, knew at the time of the breach that personal information had been accessed. Uber only informed customers and drivers on Tuesday.
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