Got to love the code choice. Highlighted below. :)


http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-http-451-error-code-for-censorship-is-now-an-internet-standard

The HTTP 451 Error Code for Censorship Is Now an Internet Standard

The 451 HTTP status code is now official in the eyes of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the independent organization responsible for many of the internet’s operating standards. Now, when an internet user hits a web page that has been blocked for legal reasons (read: censorship), they may be presented with a 451 error instead of the more generic 403 “forbidden” error. This is a win for transparency.

The 451 code has been on the table for two years now, having been first been put forth by software engineer Tim Bray in 2013, who was in turn inspired by a blog post by security thinker Terence Eden. Eden’s call for a censorship error code is clear enough:

My ISP have recently been ordered to censor The Pirate Bay. They have done so unwillingly and, it would seem, have complied only with the letter of the ruling. Their block is, for now, trivial to circumvent. I am concerned that this censorship will become more prevalent. As network neutrality dies, we will see more sites ordered to be blocked by governments who fear what they cannot understand.

So, Eden proposed a code and Bray ran with it, using “451” in reference to Ray Bradbury’s censorship dystopia Farhenheit 451. Web standards are, however, not changed overnight.

In a post published on Friday, Mark Nottingham, chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group, explains a bit more. “Initially, I and some others pushed back,” he writes. “HTTP status codes are a constrained name space; once we use everything from 400 to 499, for example, we're out of luck. Furthermore, while 451 met many of the guidelines for new status codes (such as being potentially applicable to any resource), there wasn't any obvious way for machines to use it -- i.e., this was something you could do in a header or the message body of a 403, so it didn't seem to justify expending a status code.”

Sites began to use the code anyway on an experimental and unsanctioned basis, and Nottingham and co. received more and more feedback from administrators in favor of the code. Crucially, advocacy orgs Lumen and Article19 expressed interest in having a machine-readable flag that could be used to spider the web in the hunt of censored websites. That’s just what a new HTTP status code could offer.

Finally, the support was there. Some technical details still need attending to, but the code is ready to use immediately. What can it actually do?

“By its nature, you can't guarantee that all attempts to censor content will be conveniently labeled by the censor,” Nottingham explains. “Although 451 can be used both by network-based intermediaries (e.g., in a firewall) as well as on the origin Web server, I suspect it's going to be used far more in the latter case, as Web sites like Github, Twitter, Facebook and Google are forced to censor content against their will in certain jurisdictions.”

There’s still nothing stopping a government from forbidding the code’s usage, however, which is a serious but perhaps unavoidable limitation.

One of the video blogs that I like is the EEVblog. It's about electronic engineering.

Should be pretty nice & techy, right?

Wrong.



Like... FFS... I can't take a piss without being bombarded by this all the time.

I'm not knocking buddy there. He does an awesome job.

What ticks me off is that the surveillance is so prevalent that you can't eat breakfast without having it drop a pile on you.

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The video is about printers that waste ink to print identifiers.

I've got some DC credits to spend, so if anyone wants to post a way to get around that silliness, go ahead and I'll reward you for it. (This is really low hanging fruit -- it's not hard to get around.)

This is an interesting article where a game developer argues for regulation in the gaming industry against psychological warfare techniques used in ads and customer management.

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/12/13/hi-im-from-the-games-industry-governments-please-stop-us/

Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us.


This may not be popular, but its how I feel. First, some background and disclaimers. I run a small games company making games for the PC, strategy games with an up front payment. We don’t make ‘free to play’ games or have micro transactions. Also, I’m pretty much a capitalist. I am not a big fan of government regulation in general. I am a ‘get rid of red tape’ kind of guy. I actually oppose tax breaks for game development. I am not a friend of regulation. But nevertheless.

I awake this morning to read about this:

*** see link for graphic ***

Some background: Star Citizen is a space game. Its being made by someone who made space games years ago, and they ‘crowd-funded’ the money to make this one. The game is way behind schedule, and is of course, not finished yet. They just passed $100,000,000 in money raised. They can do this because individual ships in the game are for sale, even though you bought the game.  I guess at this point we could just say ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, but yet we do not do this with gambling addiction. In fact we some countries have extremely strict laws on gambling, precisely because they know addiction is a thing, and that people need to be saved from themselves.

Can spending money on games be a problem? Frankly yes, and its because games marketing and the science of advertising has changed beyond recognition from when games first appeared. Games ads have often been dubious, and tacky, but the problem is that now they are such a huge business, the stakes are higher, people are prepared to go further. On the fringes we have this crap:

And one snippet:

This is not market research, this is not game design. This is psychological warfare.

More at the link.

I encourage you to read the entire article as it gets a lot better with some pretty shocking stuff if you're not already familiar with the industry inside.

FWIW - I've been doing a lot of work in the gaming industry for a long time, and I get to see some of the dirt, but certainly not all of it.

I know some other DCers are knowledgeable in Big Data and can help shed light on the subject. Hopefully they'll chime in.

The tl;dr is that gamers are massively outgunned by marketing departments with bots and Big Data.