Blaming video games for social or moral decline might feel like something new. But fears about the effects of recreational games on society as a whole are centuries old. History shows a cycle of apprehension and acceptance about games that is very like events of modern times.
From ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, historians know that the oldest examples of board games trace back to the game of senet around 3100 B.C.
One of the earliest known written descriptions of games dates from the fifth century B.C. The Dialogues of the Buddha, purport to record the actual words of the Buddha himself. In them, he is reported to say that “some recluses… while living on food provided by the faithful, continue addicted to games and recreations; that is to say…games on boards with eight or with 10, rows of squares.”
Despite the Buddha’s concern, chess has not historically raised concerns about addiction. Scholars’ attention to chess is focused on mastery and the wonders of the mind, not the potential of being addicted to playing.
Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the cognitive, social and emotional benefits of play – rather than its detriments – and even viewing chess and other games as teaching tools, for improving players’ thinking, social-emotional development and math skills.
A die among other playing pieces from the Akkadian Empire, 2350-2150 B.C., found at Khafajah in modern-day Iraq.CC BY-SA
Games and politics
Dice, an ancient invention developed in many early cultures, found their way to ancient Greek and Roman culture. It helped that both societies had believers in numerology, an almost religious link between the divine and numbers.
More often than not, the concerns about games were used as a political tool to manipulate public sentiment. As one legal historian puts it, statutes on dice games in ancient Rome were only “sporadically and selectively enforced … what we would call ‘sports betting’ was exempted.” The rolling of dice was prohibited because it was gambling, but wagering on the outcomes of sport were not. Until of course, sports themselves came under fire.
The history of the “Book of Sports”, a 17th-century compendium of declarations of King James I of England, demonstrates the next phase of fears about games. The royal directives outlined what sports and leisure activities were appropriate to engage in after Sunday religious services.
In the early 1600s, the book became the subject of a religious tug of war between Catholic and Puritan ideals. Puritans complained that the Church of England needed to be purged of more influences from Roman Catholicism – and liked neither the idea of play on Sundays nor how much people liked doing it.
In the end, English Puritans had the book burned. As a Time magazine article put it, “Sport grew up through Puritanism like flowers in a macadam prison yard.” Sports, like board games of the past, were stifled and the subject of much ire in the past and present.
Retro Report explains the pinball-machine bans of the mid-20th century.
Pinball in the 20th century
In the middle part of the 20th century, one particular type of game emerged as a frequent target of politician concern – and playing it was even outlawed in cities across the country.
That game was pinball. But the parallels with today’s concerns about video games are clear.
In her history of moral panics about elements of popular culture, historian Karen Sternheimer observed that the invention of the coin-operated pinball game coincided with “a time when young people – and unemployed adults – had a growing amount of leisure time on their hands.”
As a result, she wrote, “it didn’t take long for pinball to show up on moral crusaders’ radar; just five years spanned between the invention of the first coin-operated machines in 1931 to their ban in Washington, D.C., in 1936.”
New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia argued that pinball machines were “from the devil” and brought moral corruption to young people. He famously used a sledgehammer to destroy pinball machines confiscated during the city’s ban, which lasted from 1942 to 1976.
An early pinball machine, before the innovation of flippers to keep the ball in play longer. Huhu/Wikimedia Commons
As far back as the Buddha’s own teachings, moral leaders were warning about addicting games and recreations including “throwing dice,” “Games with balls” and even “turning somersaults,” recommending the pious hold themselves “aloof from such games and recreations.”
Then, as now, play was caught in society-wide discussions that really had nothing to do with gaming – and everything to do with keeping or creating an established moral order.
Building on San Francisco's first-of-its-kind ban on government face recognition, California this week enacted a landmark law that blocks police from using body cameras for spying on the public. The state-wide law keeps thousands of body cameras used by police officers from being transformed into roving surveillance devices that track our faces, voices, and even the unique way we walk. Importantly, the law ensures that body cameras, which were promised to communities as a tool for officer accountability, cannot be twisted into surveillance systems to be used against communities.
As Cagle points out, San Francisco was the first city in the nation to ban use of facial recognition by city agencies. Oakland followed closely behind. And all the way on the other side of the country, Somerville, Massachusetts became the second city in the US to enact a facial recognition ban.
This statewide ban will hopefully lead to others around the nation. The tech multiple companies are pushing government agencies to adopt is unproven, at best. The rate of false positives in live deployments is alarming. Just as alarming is the flipside: false negatives that allow the people, who law enforcement agents are actually looking for, to slip away. Despite this, everyone from the DHS to local police departments thinks this is the next wave of acceptable surveillance -- one that allows government agencies to, in essence, demand ID from everyone who passes by their cameras.
The resistance to facial recognition's seemingly-unchecked expansion is finally having some effect. Axon (formerly Taser) has temporarily halted its plans to introduce facial recognition tech into its body cameras and Google is stepping away from its development of this tech for government agencies. Unfortunately, Amazon has shown no desire to step away from the surveillance state precipice and is continuing to sell its own brand of facial recognition to law enforcement agencies as well as co-opting citizens' doorways into its surveillance network with its Ring doorbell/cameras.
It's a solid win for residents of the state. The ban blocks the use of facial recognition tech by state law enforcement until the end of 2022. It also blocks the use of other biometric surveillance tech and prevents law enforcement from using existing biometric data to feed any predictive policing tools agencies might be using or planning on implementing. With more states and cities willing to at least undertake serious discussions of the implications of facial recognition tech, it's unlikely California will remain the odd state out in the biometric surveillance race.
A Devon hospital has apologised after a caller’s voicemail, containing personal patient details, became the hospital’s answerphone message for more than seven hours.
During that time the caller was inundated with calls from patients giving details about their health problems believing they were ringing North Devon District Hospital in Barnstaple.
Somehow, through the magic/convolutions of business phone systems, the message a woman left while calling to set an appointment for her husband somehow became the message greeting callers who were unable to reach a live human being.
Adding inconvenience to possibly tortious injury, the hospital somehow managed to route a number of inbound calls to the person whose message it had accidentally co-opted, resulting in the person (who had yet to discover her personal information had been compromised) fielding phone calls from other patients, who ended up sharing their personal info with a complete stranger.
The woman, who asked not to be named, said: “I didn’t think any more of it until an hour and a half later an elderly man called our home phone talking about his private parts as he had a problem and had to have an operation.
“I said to him, ‘I’m ever so sorry but I don’t know what you’re talking about?’. He replied, ‘they have given me your number’.
The hospital's explanation for this incident isn't very reassuring. It places the blame on outdated equipment. Unfortunately for people who don't want their personal info handed over to complete strangers, there's no telling how many public and private entities could make the same claim about their phone systems.
She said: “The phone lines were redirected and I was told it was completely human error because some parts of the hospital are still using old answer machines."
And yet old answering machines are operated all the time without turning a message someone left into a voicemail greeting. Sure, it's not impossible. But good god is it ever unlikely.
Stupidity before malice, as the saying goes. There's no conceivable reason the hospital would want to generate this kind of press, so it would be irrational to think someone did this to deliberately harm this person. But harm was done nonetheless, and the combination of the UK's Data Protection Act and the GDPR could result in a pretty hefty fine for the hospital. The going rate is "4% of turnover [gross revenue]" -- something that has seen maximum fines rise from £500,000 (the amount charged Equifax) to £183 million (levied against British Airways).
Since the Devon hospital is unlikely to replace its hardware immediately, the risk of repetition still remains. Considering it's apparently never happened before, the risk is low -- but certainly not nonexistent. Adding humans to outdated tech will sometimes result in errors that aren't easily replicated. Given that we've heard nothing comparable to this in the many years this blog has been running, this hospital's inadvertent use of patient's sensitive message as its own answering machine greeting is likely to remain a data breach unicorn.
Blizzard has found itself trying to navigate its self-made storm over the past several weeks. It started when a professional Hearthstone player relayed a message of support for the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, leading Blizzard to issue a 1 year ban and pull back prize money for that player. With many eSport and IRLsport leagues either being directly confronted by the regime in Beijing, or simply self-censoring in fear of such a confrontation, the whole ecosystem of eGaming has felt the effects of Blizzard's actions. And, while Blizzard eventually did lighten the punishment it had initially doled out, the company also thumbed its nose at the principle complaint in the protests: that Blizzard was kneeling at an altar constructed of the Chinese government's thin skin.
American University Hearthstone players who recently held up a sign calling for Hong Kong’s freedom during a livestream have been officially disciplined by Activision-Blizzard. In a Twitter post today, team member Casey Chambers stated that the team has been banned from competitive play for six months.
When a punishment from Blizzard to similar to Blitzchung’s was not forthcoming, the team voluntarily dropped out of future tournaments. Now, they’ve been officially banned for half a year.
Interestingly, the American University team appeared to be trying to make a very specific point by getting banned. The team clearly saw inequity in the punishment for Blitzchung being both swift and severe, while their actions went unpunished at first. To that end, the team voluntarily dropped out of competition, it appears as part of its call to protest Blizzard generally. When the punishment eventually did come down, team member Casey Chambers tweeted that he was pleased it did.
Happy to announce the AU Hearthstone team received a six month ban from competition. While delayed I appreciate all players being treated equally and no one being above the rules. pic.twitter.com/mZStoF0e0t
He later responded to someone claiming that Blizzard was violating its own call for "every voice to matter" with the ban by stating, "Nah bro. We knew what we were doing."
All of which is entirely besides the point. When Hearthstone competitors have reached the point of trying to get themselves banned to make a point, never mind actively calling for a boycott of Blizzard, it signals that the company is losing the PR war in America. What Blizzard now has to decide is what the math is on the value of pissing off the American public versus keeping Beijing happy.
Based on this most recent 6 month ban, it looks like the company thinks it can thread a needle that I'm not sure actually exists.
In the name of securing the homeland, Congressional reps are tossing around the idea of regulating online speech. This isn't the first effort of its type. There's always someone on Capitol Hill who believes the nation would be safer if the First Amendment didn't cover quite so much speech. But this latest effort is coming directly from the Congressional committee that oversees homeland security efforts, as the Hill reports.
Civil liberties and technology groups have been sharply critical of a draft bill from House Homeland Security Committee Democrats on dealing with online extremism, saying it would violate First Amendment rights and could result in the surveillance of vulnerable communities.
The whole thing sounds a bit innocuous. At first. The bill would create a bipartisan commission to develop recommendations for Congress to address online extremism. The committee would have to balance these recommendations with existing speech protections. But it's easy to see how certain inalienable rights will become more alienable if this committee decides national security interests are more important than the rights of the people it's securing.
When you get into the details, you begin to see how this isn't really about making Congress do more to address the problem. It's about regulating online speech via Congressional action. The end result will be censorship. And self-censorship in response to the chilling effect.
The government-appointed body would be given the power to subpoena communications, a sticking point that raised red flags for First Amendment advocates concerned about government surveillance.
A source familiar with the legislation told The Hill they were immediately concerned that the subpoena power could be abused, questioning whether it would unintentionally create another avenue for the government to obtain private conversations on social media between Americans.
The draft bill would require companies to "make reasonable efforts" to remove any personally identifiable information from any communications they handed over. But that provision has not satisfied tech and privacy groups.
This isn't about moderating public posts on social media platforms. It will likely end up affecting those eventually, but the draft bill appears to allow the committee to target personal communications, which are usually private. Whether or not there are robust protections in place to strip identifying info doesn't really matter. A Congressional committee with the power to subpoena the communications of people not actually under investigation by the committee isn't the sort of thing anyone should be encouraging, no matter the rationale.
Social media platforms have been doing more to address concerns of online radicalization, but their efforts never seem to satisfy political leaders. The efforts have routinely resulted in collateral damage, not the least of which is the removal of evidence of criminal activity from the internet.
Moderation at scale is impossible. The imperfections of algorithms, combined with the human flaws of the thousands of moderators employed by social media platforms, has turned online moderation into a mess that satisfies no one and does harm to free speech protections. Any Congressional rep with the ability to perform a perfunctory social media search can find something to wave around in hearings about online radicalization and internet companies' unwillingness to clean up the web. It doesn't mean they're right. It just shows it's impossible to satisfy everyone.
In this case, the Congressional committee appears to be targeting white nationalist extremists. Just because the target has shifted to homegrown threats doesn't make the proposal any less dangerous. Even if it never results in the subpoenaed harvesting of communications, it could still encourage the federal government (and the local agencies that work with it) to expand existing social media monitoring programs. These also utilize imperfect AI and flawed humans. And they will also result in the over-policing of content. Unfortunately, these efforts will utilize actual police, so it's not just the First Amendment being threatened.
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We live in such fascinating times. We've had some posts concerning people getting (rightly) angry about Blizzard banning a top player who supported the protests in Hong Kong. In order to make the company feel more heat, apparently some pissed off players have been plotting to weaponize the GDPR and flood the company with data requests. This started with a Reddit post directly telling users that if they're upset about Blizzard's decisions regarding Hong Kong, to hit back with a GDPR request:
I know a lot of people, myself included, are upset by Blizzard/Activisions spineless decision to ban Blitxchung. After personally uninstalling all of my Blizzard games, I thought, "what else can I do?". The answer, is GDPR requests. Let me explain.
Under EU law, you're allowed to request all information a company has on you, along with the purpose of this information collection. What most people don't know, is that these requests are VERY hard to comply with, and can often take a companies legal group 2-7 days to complete PER REQUEST. If a company doesn't get you the information back in 30 days, they face fines and additional issues. In extreme cases, a company can request an additional 2 months to complete the requests if there is a large volume, but suffice to say, if a company gets a significant amount of requests, it can be incredibly expensive to deal with, as inevitably they will have to hire outside firms/lawyers to help out. So, if you want to submit a GDPR request, and live in the EU, you can use the following form letter....
I've actually been in the middle of investigating a different story about a possible weaponizing of the GDPR, but the details there have been a bit murkier, so it's fascinating to see things laid out so clearly here. To be clear, there does appear to be some cleverness here, though, it's true that such requests are a pain in the ass to comply with and can be costly and resource intensive. And while it may be fun and cathartic to use that power against a company like Blizzard as a way to punish it for its ridiculous stance, be clear that these kinds of weaponized GDPR requests are likely to be used against many others as well, including companies you might actually like.
This is yet one more reason why, even if you support the overall goals of the GDPR, you should be very, very concerned with how the law is actually implemented.
For years we've talked about how the broadband and cable industry has perfected the use of utterly bogus fees to jack up subscriber bills, a dash of financial creativity it adopted from the banking and airline industries. Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate -- then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. Despite this being false advertising, regulators have chosen to look the other way for decades.
Last week, a new study highlighted how nearly 25 percent of your cable bill is comprised of bullshit fees, netting $28 billion annually from such surcharges. This week, AT&T is under fire for a new wrinkle on an old game. The company has started raising its customers' broadband prices by as much as seven percent to help offset the company's property taxes. In this case, customers who thought they were signing up for fiber broadband at a fixed, locked rate were suddenly informed they needed to pay 7% more to help pay off AT&T's tax burden:
Effective October 1, 2019, there will be an increase in the AT&T Cost Assessment Charge used to recover AT&T property taxes. The monthly rate will change from 2.92% to 7.00% of your total AT&T Business Internet, Phone and/or U-verse TV monthly charges. This charge is not a tax or fee that the government requires AT&T to collect from its customers.
Again there are several problems here. One, advertising one rate then charging something else is false advertising. Two, AT&T's property taxes are the cost of doing business, and should be included above the line. Three, these users were locked in at a "fixed, guaranteed rate," then AT&T simply ignored the promise.
AT&T has been charging the property-tax fee to business customers since at least mid-2017. An AT&T business DSL customer in Oklahoma complained about it on Reddit at the time, saying the then-new fee was 1.08% of the monthly bill.
In January 2019, an AT&T customer complained in a DSLReports forum that the property-tax fee was raised from 2% to 6.69%. "So I gotta ask—did their 'property taxes' increase by 335%?" the customer wrote, noting the greater-than-three-fold increase.
In a functional market either competition would kick in to punish companies for this kind of behavior in the form of subscriber exodus, or a regulator would step in to, at the very least, warn the company away from such misleading predatory behavior. But this being the United States, where the FCC just effectively neutered itself at lobbyists' behest, based on entirely manufactured justifications, and vibrant competition remains a pipe dream, we get neither option. Enjoy.
At long last, it appears the UK government's porn blockade has been sunk. The government missed another deployment window in April of this year. Karl Bode reported the government was considering saying the hell with it it all a couple of months later.
But even that report suggested the UK might still try to make its stupid porn blocking plan work. It claimed it just needed an indefinite amount of time to bring its porn filter into compliance with EU law -- something it had years to do but apparently only took into consideration at the last minute.
The porn filtering system was to be deployed by ISPs and porn sites. Age verification would be needed to access porn from paid sites. This information would be stored for government perusal by third parties, generating a tempting honeypot of personal information tied to sexual peccadilloes that could be exploited by anyone who had to access it. You know, in addition to anyone in the government who had access to it… like criminals.
In its partially-instituted form, the filtering system was alarmingly easy to circumvent. When it did work (by which I mean, when it was turned on), it didn't, resulting in over-blocking when it wasn't being beaten by a single Chrome extension. Almost completely useless. And all in a package that required UK citizens to queue up at the online porn box office and state affirmatively their desire to access pornographic content.
After a half-decade of not happening, the UK government has officially ditched its porn filtering program, as Rory Cellan-Jones reports for the BBC.
The government has dropped a plan to use strict age verification checks to stop under-18s viewing porn online.
It said the policy, which was initially set to launch in April 2018, would "not be commencing" after repeated delays, and fears it would not work.
This was the plan to force porn providers to deploy government-approved age verification processes. Those that did not would be blocked by ISPs, which apparently would be providing this vetting service to the government free of charge. Ignored in all of this were sites that did not sell access to porn, like Twitter, Reddit, and other sites where adult content is accessed freely. So, the children the government was so worried about would still have plenty of options even if this plan had worked.
The Porn Blockade is dead! Long live the Porn Blockade?
Digital Secretary Nicky Morgan said other measures would be deployed to achieve the same objectives.
Hope springs eternal in the halls of the UK government, where impossibility can be legislated into possibility, kicked around for 48-60 months, and abandoned when it finally becomes clear to the people whose careers depend on misunderstanding the problems finally being forced to confront reality.
Having mishandled everything about its end of the deal, the UK government is now leaving it up to porn sites to keep kids out. It appears to be voluntary, but the kind of "voluntary" where the person asking expects you to do it and will find some way to punish you if you don't.
In a written statement issued on Wednesday, Ms Morgan said the government would not be "commencing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 concerning age verification for online pornography".
Instead, she said, porn providers would be expected to meet a new "duty of care" to improve online safety. This will be policed by a new online regulator "with strong enforcement powers to deal with non-compliance".
The only entities truly upset by this turn of events are those that expected to tap into a new government-created revenue stream. OCL, one of the firms hoping to be the vendor of choice for age verification tools, expressed its "shock" that the UK government would abandon its plan to protect children from porn and, presumably, enrich OCL in the process. But nearly everyone else saw this scrapping as inevitable, considering the oh so many unworkable aspects of the filtering program.
I'm sure UK citizens are thrilled the government spent nearly five years allowing its Porn Blockade to drift into the rocky shoals of reality. Since other people's money funded the losing battle, the government spared no expense and will presumably continue this spending until it has abandoned another two or three attempts over the next decade or so.
