• 0 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle


  • The standard I recall being established back in the nineties as to whether strong encryption was even legal in the US was “substantial non-infringing use” or similar. It’s been awhile.

    The problem with key-escrow or anything similar is that any proscribed circumvention is also available to the “bad guys”.

    I think Telegram’s stance would be that they can’t moderate because of strong end-to-end encryption. Back in the day the parallel would have been made to the phone system or mail.

    Of course this is all happening in France, so I have no idea what the combination of French and EU laws will have on this, but I would still broadly expect that if a parallel can be made to mail or phone, Telegram would be in the clear. The phone company and mail service have no expectation of content moderation.

    I guess we’ll see.













  • The developer of another game distributed by WB, Fist Puncher, commented on the Ars Technica story about this.

    Found it, it’s the “Promoted Comment” now.

    therealmattkain I’m one of the creators and developers of Fist Puncher which was also published by Adult Swim on Steam. We received the same notice from Warner Bros. that Fist Puncher would be retired. When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators.

    This is incredibly disappointing. It makes me sad to think that purchased games will presumably be removed from users’ libraries. Our community and our players have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which will all be lost. We have Kickstarter backers who helped fund Fist Puncher (even some who have cameo appearances in the game) who will eventually no longer be able to play it. We could just rerelease Fist Puncher from our account, but we would likely receive significant backlash for relaunching a game and forcing users to “double dip” and purchase the game again (unless we just made it free).

    Again, this is really just disappointing. It seems like more and more the videogame industry is filled with people that don’t like and don’t care about videogames. All that to say, buy physical games, make back-ups, help preserve our awesome industry and art form. March 7, 2024 at 12:51 am

    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/its-kind-of-depressing-wb-discovery-pulls-indie-game-for-business-changes/