Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Garden Of God

from the like-it's-1923 dept

Last week, we looked at one of the two titles that tied for the Best Visuals category in our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. This week, we're shining the spotlight on the other winner in that category: The Garden of God by DreadRoach.

As I mentioned last week, any game made in 30 days will need to be creative and cut a few corners if it's going to feature engaging visuals. Where last week's Chimneys and Tulips did that with a minimalist approach focused on color and typography, The Garden of God does it by building on a strong foundation: the graphic sprites and convenient capabilities of RPG Maker MV, the most popular tool for making JRPG-like games. But sprites are just one piece of a game's visual puzzle, and DreadRoach used that pre-made palette to paint some excellently designed environments:

Based on a 1923 novel by H. De Vere Stacpoole, The Garden of God is a short, linear narrative experience that tells a simplified version of the first portion of the story, and manages to very effectively capture some of its key characterizations and emotional beats even as it reduces chapters of text to a few lines of dialogue. The story is short enough that it's not worth trying to summarize — just take a few minutes to play it through — except to say it's about a crew investigating something at sea:

In addition to the skilled map design and use of sprites, the game employs a few nice little scripted sequences as characters interact, with occasional bits of background activity. Most of the actual story is conveyed by dialogue, but there are also objects in the world to be examined for more clues about what's happening, in the style of an adventure game. Though it's all pretty simple and straightforward, it was one of the only games that aimed for an ambitious and robust visual aspect, and that caught the eyes of all our judges. You can play The Garden of God in your browser from its page on Itch, and don't forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, public domain, video games

Sites Warn EU Users Of Just How Bad Article 13 Will Be

from the speak-up dept

As we mentioned, a bunch of websites started protesting yesterday in the lead up to next week's vote on Article 11 and Article 13 that will fundamentally change the nature of the internet. The main ones were various European Wikipedia editions, which completely blacked out and posted a warning message. Here's the one in Germany (with automatic browser translation -- the original, obviously, is in German):

Different sites are doing different things -- and for some it depends on whether you're visiting from the EU or not, but it's good to see so many sites coming together on this. Reddit, as explained in a blog post on its site, are telling any EU Redditor who tries to post something new that it's blocked:

Lots of others have stepped up as well. The ever popular online streaming site Twitch is warning people in a variety of ways, including creating a video about its concerns:

And has also put the message all over its social media:

Patreon, the very popular website for helping creators get paid has warned its creators that under Article 13, it may need to block their content:

Others who have spoken up include Creative Commons and the Internet Archive:

Another site that joined in -- which we'll refrain from screenshotting -- is the most popular porn site on the internet, Pornhub.

Between all of this, the question now remains: will the EU Parliament ignore all of these voices? Ignore all of the over 5 million people who signed a Petition against Article 13? Will it ignore all the companies who have said that Article 13 will put them at a disadvantage compared to Google? Will it ignore of the content creators who rely on platforms like Twitch and Patreon?

Filed Under: #saveyourinternet, article 11, article 13, censorship, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, filters, intermediary liability
Companies: creative commons, internet archive, patreon, reddit, twitch, wikipedia

FBI's 'Clothing Match' Expert Changed Testimony To Better Serve Prosecutors, Co-Chairs Nat'l Forensic Committee

from the when-scientific-rigor-meets-streamlined-prosecutions dept

A little more than a month ago, we covered the ultra-weird offshoot of FBI forensics spearheaded by Richard Vorder Bruegge. Vorder Bruegge claimed mass-produced clothing like jeans were as unique as fingerprints and DNA. According to his forensic "expertise," a match could be made using only low-res CCTV screengrabs and whole lot of arrows.

This peculiar strand of FBI forensics is still in use. Vorder Bruegge, rather than being laughed out of the FBI forensic lab, has risen to a position where he can pass on his dubious expertise to others. ProPublica continues to dig into the FBI's questionable forensic programs and has found that Vorder Bruegge is now sitting near the top of the nation's forensic organizational chart.

Today, Vorder Bruegge is one of the nation’s most influential crime lab scientists. He serves on the Forensic Science Standards Board, which sets rules for every field, from DNA to fingerprints. He’s a co-chair organizing the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting this week in Baltimore, a gathering of thousands of crime lab professionals, researchers, lawyers and judges.

This has happened due to Vorder Bruegge's testimonial quantity, not quality. ProPublica quotes a 2013 law review article that refers to him as the "most ubiquitous" expert witness. A quality job it isn't. But given enough opportunities, Vorder Bruegge has managed to turn unproven claims about the uniqueness of clothing into years in prison for people he's testified against. His track record shows he's willing to change his expert opinion if it better serves the prosecution.

In his report, Vorder Bruegge wrote that John Henry Stroman and the robber had similar “overall shape of the face, nose, mouth, chin, and ears.” But Vorder Bruegge stopped short of declaring a match, saying the video and pictures were too low resolution for that.

Nevertheless, prosecutors said in court filings that if Vorder Bruegge took the stand, he would testify that “the photograph is of sufficient resolution to definitively state that the robber is John Henry Stroman.”

[...]

It wasn’t the first time, nor the last, Vorder Bruegge’s lab results said one thing and the courts were told something different. Court records and FBI Lab files show statements by prosecutors or Vorder Bruegge veered from his original conclusions in at least three cases.

This is what happens when you care about convictions but not all that much about science. Vorder Bruegge's background as a geologist certainly didn't prepare him for a future of staring at grainy photos of shirts worn by suspects. But none of that mattered to the FBI which found him to be a useful champion of pseudoscience who could be used to lock people up.

The entire report is a fascinating, if disheartening, read. Jurors and judges are easily swayed by FBI experts, even after cross examination exposes mathematically-impossible levels of certainty or, in at least one case, Vorder Brugge's admission he worked backward from the conclusion prosecutors wanted him to reach.

Work like Vorder Bruegge's is exactly why a prominent federal judge resigned from a forensic committee in 2015. Judge Jed Rakoff recognized the DOJ did not want to fix its forensic problems. It only wanted to give the appearance it cared for as long as it took to sweep the embarrassment under the rug. The DOJ has too much invested in half-baked science and self-made experts to actually clean house and add more actual science to its forensic methods.

Filed Under: clothing matching, fbi, forensic science standards board, forensics, vorder bruegge

Independent Musician Dan Bull's New Song, Robocopyright, Warns Of The Dangers Of Article 13

from the for-the-artists dept

You know how supporters of Article 13 keep insisting it's "for the artists?" Well, successful independent musician Dan Bull has just put out his latest song and video: Robocopyright, calling out all the ways in which Article 13 will harm him as a creator:

The key message: Article 13 and its requirement for filters (and, yes, it requires filters) will mean more gatekeepers, more censorship, and less freedom for creators. Algorithmic policing of content does not work as it cannot take into account context. It fails in both directions in blocking legit content and failing to block infringing content (which will only open up platforms to even greater liability). In short, to anyone who understands technology, it will be a huge mess.

Go watch it and then let the EU Parliament know not to pass Article 13.

Filed Under: article 13, copyright, dan bull, eu, eu copyright directive, music, robocopyright

MEPs Realizing How Bad Article 13 Could Be, Begin To Back Away From EU Copyright Directive

from the but-more-is-needed dept

The online protests around the terrible Article 11 and Article 13 only began yesterday. This weekend there are expected to be significant in-person protests as well, leading up to the big vote next week. Already the protests are having an impact. MEP Julia Reda passes on the news from Polish MEP Michal Boni that the major Polish political party, Civic Platform (or Platforma) has said they will not vote for the EU Copyright Directive if it contains Article 13:

That's a big win for the internet, and people should go thank Boni for that. However, many others in the EU Parliament have not yet said how they will vote and need to hear from people in the EU. The future of the internet -- and whether it's an open platform for all, or a closed platform for gatekeepers, depends on it.

Filed Under: article 13, censorship, civic platform, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, filters, michal boni, platforma, poland

CBP Detains 9-Year-Old US Citizen For 36 Hours, Accuses Her 14-Year-Old Brother Of Sex Trafficking

from the safest-border-ever dept

Today's example of the government's ugliness comes to us courtesy of Customs and Border Protection. There's a crisis at the border if the latest national emergency is to be believed (it isn't), and the only way to stop it is to ramp up enforcement. If this means tossing a 9-year-old American citizen in the clink, so be it.

A mother and her 9-year-old daughter were separated for 36 hours after the child fell into U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody because agents at the border didn't believe she was who she claimed to be, a mother says.

This debacle started the way something like this usually does: with US citizens engaged in activity they engage in every day. In this case, mother Thelma Galaxia's children were being driven from Tijuana to the border crossing in order to attend school in San Ysidro, California. This was the normal state of affairs for her 9-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.

Traffic was heavy at the crossing so her friend told them to walk across the border to make sure they got to school on time. Both children were questioned by CBP officers. These officers decided 9-year-old Isabel Medina didn't resemble her passport photo. They accused her of actually being her cousin, Melanie.

That wasn't enough for the CBP. It also decided to terrorize her 14-year-old brother, Oscar, by accusing him of being a criminal.

Galaxia said officers made Oscar Medina sign a document that said his little sister was his cousin.

“That is not true,” Galaxia said. “She is my daughter. He was told that he would be taken to jail and they were going to charge him for human trafficking and sex trafficking.”

The intimidated 14-year-old signed the document, thus making the CBP officers technically correct in their assumptions. They now had a paper signed by a human trafficker family member stating that Isabel Medina was actually someone other than the person she actually was.

Galaxia's children might have been detained longer if she hadn't gone to the press. NBC7 reports the Mexican consulate contacted the station while Galaxia was being interviewed by journalists, saying the children were being released to her. Presumably, the station's requests for comment from the involved government agencies got the wheels rolling on her daughter's case. The CBP, meanwhile, has refused to comment on this detention, claiming it's still in the middle of investigating this incident.

It seems like one of the CBP officers might have tried to contact the children's parents to straighten this out. But I guess it's a lot easier to intimidate children into false confessions when there are no other adults around standing up for their rights or contradicting the CBP's assumptions.

Filed Under: cbp, children, immigration, isabel medina, overreaction, thelma galaxia, us citizens

Daily Deal: Hacksaw Academy

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Hacksaw Academy is an interactive elearning platform that is divided into easily digestible programming projects that get you mastering key programming tools, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Each project is split into 30-minute sprints and takes place inside an interactive editor that you can jump in and out of at any time. From landing pages to portfolios, Hacksaw's projects will help you develop invaluable skills. It's on sale for $49.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

EU Commission Refuses To Explain Why It Published Medium Article Mocking The Public's Concerns Over Article 13

from the moving-along-now dept

As you may recall, last month, the EU Commission published -- and then unpublished -- a bit of horrifically misleading propaganda, in favor of Article 13, mocking those who criticized it as a "mob" whose strings were being pulled by an evil dragon (apparently Google) to "slay a knight" (apparently valiant copyright). The article can still be found via the Internet Archive. This wasn't from a politician or bureaucrat who had officially come out in support, but from the EU Commission's very own Medium account. It was certainly an insult to the European public. After some outcry, the article was removed, but the "apology" that was put up instead was similarly insulting, saying that it was removed because "it has been understood in a way that doesn't reflect the Commission's position." Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. It was just that crazy mob who "misunderstood" you calling them a "mob" for pointing out that the poorly drafted law might create all sorts of problems.

Anyway, some in the EU Parliarment were reasonably concerned about the EU Commission acting this way, and sent some questions. European Parliament Member Tiemo Wolken has tweeted out that they've finally received some "answers" even though it took way longer than normal and the "answers" don't actually answer the question. Also of note, is that Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Commission himself was the one who sent these non-answers. As Wolken notes, it's "very rare" that Juncker himself would answer such questions. Wolken posted the questions and answers as a screenshot, but I am doing my best to translate them via typing them all into Google Translate. I believe these translations are pretty accurate, but they may not be perfect. Let's start with question and answer one:

Who authorized the publication of this entry, in which the EU citizens, who exercise their democratic right to protest, have been labeled as a "mob" and the dissemination of the article through the EU’s official Twitter account?

The Commission published a blog post on the proposed Copyright Directive on 14 February 2019 on the "Medium" platform.

Hmm. Um. Look, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I recognize that when you are asked "who authorized" this article, you're supposed to actually say who authorized it. Responding by just restating the fact that everybody already knows that the article was published... is not answering the question. At all.

How will the Commission ensure that such a disrespectful tone regarding the EU citizenry is never used again in publications?

Concerns and possible misinterpretations should be dispelled with this article. This was not intended to attack people who disagree, and especially those who are democratically involved in the legislative process

Right, so... again. This is not answering the question. The question is how will the Commission make sure it doesn't publish such an insulting and disrespectful article, such as calling its own citizens a "mob". And rather than answer that Juncker just responds that it "was not intended to attack people who disagree." Right, but it did. And the question is how do you prevent it from happening again.

Given that the EU Commission and Juncker can't even bring themselves to admit error and apologize, apparently the answer is that it has no plans to prevent such insulting articles from being published again, because it can't even recognize when it's disrespecting the public. Incredible.

How will the Commission ensure that its official publications are not biased, but that they provide European political information in a neutral and non-judgmental manner?

The Commission has acknowledged that language and title are not appropriate, apologized and deleted the blog post. It attaches the utmost importance to a respectful public debate and also applies this standard to its own communications.

I realize that baseball is a mostly American pastime, but hopefully those in the EU understand what I mean when I say "strike three." This comes nowhere near actually answering the question, and is a bit of historical revisionism. The EU Commission did not acknowledge that the language was inappropriate and apologize -- rather it complained that the mob mistook the EU Commission calling the public a mob as meaning the EU Commission thought they were a mob, and passive aggressively blamed the public for forcing it to remove the article over the mob's misinterpretation.

But, more importantly, nothing here answers the actual question of how will the EU Commission make sure that the EU Commission's own publications are neutral, rather than political, in nature. Indeed, this kind of response is nearly as insulting as the original article -- completely disrespecting the public and their concerns about why the EU Commission decided to lobby for one version of a proposed Directive.

Filed Under: aritcle 11, article 13, copyright, eu commission, eu copyright directive, insults, jean-claude juncker, tiemo wolken

Facebook Screws Up Again

from the please-make-it-stop dept

Another day, another Facebook privacy scandal.

This time around, a "senior Facebook employee" has informed security expert Brian Krebs that Facebook has been storing the passwords of "hundreds of millions" of Facebook (and Instagram) users in plain text (aka unencrypted). This is a fundamental security error that no company should ever make, yet it's been a pretty common occurrence for tech companies where security and privacy are commonly seen as an afterthought. According to Krebs, the passwords were accessible to around 20,000 Facebook employees for the better part of the last decade:

"The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. The source said Facebook is still trying to determine how many passwords were exposed and for how long, but so far the inquiry has uncovered archives with plain text user passwords in them dating back to 2012.

My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords."

On the "plus side," this latest scandal is slightly less terrible than past scandals like the Cambridge Analytica fracas. In those instances, the scandals made it clear Facebook routinely viewed consumer privacy as a distant afterthought as it looked to monetize every brain fart of its userbase. In this case, insiders told Motherboard that this does appear to have been a bug, and that the majority of Facebook passwords are usually encrypted:

"A current Facebook employee told Motherboard that "it sucks."

"Obviously we don’t store them in plaintext ‘normally,’" the employee, who has a technical role, told Motherboard. "Logged in plaintext in some unique weird cases we found and fixed and are talking about." Motherboard granted multiple sources in this story anonymity to speak more candidly about a security incident.

"It should’ve never happened," they said.

Still, given Facebook's resources and the volume of security talent they have on staff, the fact that it happened at all is grossly embarrassing. The scandal comes right on the heels of Facebook's other recent scandals -- like its cavalier sharing of user health and real estate data -- and is only compounding a scandal-ridden 2018 for the company. Krebs stated that as many as 600 million of the company's 2.7 billion users could be affected by the company's latest screw up, though, thus far, Facebook has yet to notify any of the impacted users.

Facebook was quick to issue a blog post amusingly entitled "keeping passwords secure," before confirming that Facebook failed to do precisely that. Throughout the post Facebook's Pedro Canahuati downplays the scope of the threat, while remaining somewhat murky on how many people were actually impacted:

"To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook predominantly used by people in regions with lower connectivity."

Given that this data was available to 20,000 employees over a period of roughly seven years, the claim that they've found "no evidence" of abuse should be of cold comfort. The company, meanwhile, continued to insist that consumer privacy is among its top priorities:

"In the course of our review, we have been looking at the ways we store certain other categories of information — like access tokens — and have fixed problems as we’ve discovered them. There is nothing more important to us than protecting people’s information, and we will continue making improvements as part of our ongoing security efforts at Facebook."

At this point it's fundamentally obvious that has never actually been true. And while that may be true now that the company is staring at looming regulation and mammoth fines all around the globe, at this point Facebook would need to be able to go a week without a major privacy scandal before any sentient being would take those claims at face value. In the interim, if you're not using a decent password manager and unique passwords on every website you visit, you might just want to get on that.

Filed Under: passwords, plaintext, privacy
Companies: facebook

A Century Ago We Killed The Radio Commons; Don't Let The EU Do That To The Internet

from the a-history-lesson dept

As the EU gets set to vote on the EU Copyright Directive, it seemed like a good time for a little history lesson. Many people don't know this, but in the early days of radio, it was not just considered a broadcast media. It was considered an open commons for anyone to use. The airwaves were the public airwaves, and the public was free to use them:

It’s easy to forget that the broadcasting airwaves are—and once were treated as—a commons, owned by citizens, not powerful media companies.

At the dawn of the broadcasting era, the free market prevailed. The government set no rules. The 1912 Radio Act authorized the federal Commerce and Labor Department to issue radio station licenses to U.S. citizens upon request. Which it did...

Admittedly, as that article notes, this created some amount of chaos, mainly because the spectrum got too crowded, and there was widespread interference between different signals that made the whole space a mess. Over time, laws were put in place to "regulate" the wild west, but what happened was we turned what had been an open commons into a locked up space where only giant media companies could prevail. The US, at the very least, decided that the way to deal with this wild west was to treat spectrum as a property right that could be "licensed." And in doing so it set things up such that large broadcasters could collect many licenses and dominate markets.

What had been the open spaces of the public to use for a variety of creative endeavors turned into a locked down space for giant corporations.

While there are some notable differences, the attempt by the EU to pass Article 13 is truly an attempt to replay this unfortunate scenario nearly a century later. There was a good rationale for radio regulations in the past -- dealing with all of the interference that made using radio difficult -- and as one 1927 academic so succinctly put it: "highly annoying and almost destructive."

But, of course, we lost something when we went from an open radio system for the public to use to one that was locked up among just a few corporations. And the wonderful thing about the internet was that we didn't have the same limitations. There is no "interference" like there is with more limited radio spectrum. And while there are reasonable questions about companies dominating parts of the internet, others are not completely locked out as they were in radio.

Unfortunately, the entire design of the EU Copyright Directive is an attempt to do the same sort of thing to the internet: to lock it down. The EU Copyright Directive -- in particular Articles 11 and 13 -- are designed to make the internet a bland corporate broadcast medium dominated by a few giant companies. This dismisses the roots of the internet as a commons-based communications medium that anyone can use.

The very structure of Article 13 makes this clear. The demand that everything must be "licensed" on internet platforms makes no sense. Do you "license" content in order to communicate with your friends? Do you license a song to sing? Do you license it when you quote from a book? Licensing is not necessary for communication -- it is only necessary for "broadcast." This is the core problem that the legacy gatekeepers have with the internet. It's a communications medium, and they come from the broadcast era. Their entire structure is built off of licensing to broadcasters. And rather than recognize that everything has changed, their only play is to try to shove the internet into a similar broadcast structure.

We killed off the open commons of radio nearly a hundred years ago. Hopefully the EU chooses not to do the same to the internet this year.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, broadcast, commons, communications, copyright, creativity, eu, eu copyright directive, eu parliament, gatekeepers, radio