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orclev

@ orclev @lemmy.world

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641
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3 yr. ago

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven't looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn't meet the requirements. There's also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to "verify" your age).

    Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • I don't know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn't show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.

    Also I should clarify it wasn't specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I'd guess there's someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • That's what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn't include the stuff that was removed later on.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • It's a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can't actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • They're trying with GNU Taler, but it's pretty much a pipe dream at this point.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • The main reason is that the credit industry isn't in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there's literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn't happen more I'd say is just the optics of it.

    Ultimately what's needed is a digital payment system that's at least somewhat anonymous, but that's an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I'm still incredibly skeptical that there's any real anonymity there.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we've got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they're exploring other options, but they couldn't at this time.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we've got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we've got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.

    It's also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were "refusing legal transactions", rather what they're doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn't implement censorship that they're happy with. It's a subtle but important difference and they've never denied that's what they're doing.

    Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don't restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn't denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it's illegal in.

    Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I'm not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are "illegal transactions". In theory Steam does have age gating, but it's the same "are you over 18?" easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.

  • ‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone battled Comedy Central over showing Trump’s genitals, refused to blur his penis

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  • Ooph, that is both an incredibly subtle but also amazingly scathing burn. Some real murdered by words content there. I love how this works in multiple contexts at once.

  • "Tea" app - user database leaked today (incl. drivers license & IDs). Daily reminder not to give your ID to online services [THEY DO NOT PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION]

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  • Uh... What's the tea app?

    Edit: from what I can gather based on the last link attached to this post it seems to be some kind of app for women to talk about men they've dated. Why that needs drivers license uploads is a whole other question and definitely should have raised some massive red flags for anyone thinking about using it.

  • Trump ‘clearly furious’ that summer victory tour has been swallowed by Epstein saga

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  • If it was staged I'm absolutely certain Trump didn't plan or know about it, he'd never sign off on anything that risked his life or required him to be even slightly injured. It's unlikely but the only conspiracy scenario that makes any kind of sense would be something like a CIA operation carried out under the orders of Vance or a senator that kept Trump in the dark.

  • Alternative Ergonomic Ref-counting RFC

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  • My initial thought on this is that it's treating a symptom not the problem. Ultimately I think the mistake was overloading 'clone()' for Rc and Arc types. Semantically clone implies memory being duplicated, but when you clone an Rc or Arc that isn't what you're doing. You are in fact explicitly not copying memory which is the entire point. If you think of clone as semantically equivalent to malloc I think the problem becomes more apparent. Had they introduced a new trait and method for "cheaply copyable types" like Rc and Arc we wouldn't have this problem as the compiler could trivially work out anywhere it could make copies. In short there's a need for a trait that sits in between Clone and Copy. Heavier than a Copy, but significantly lighter than a Clone.

    Edit: thinking a little more semantically this equates to: Copy types can be duplicated without using an allocator simply by copying bits as is. Clone types require an allocator to copy and a method call to perform book keeping. This new trait can be duplicated without an allocator but does require a method call to perform book keeping.

  • Bernice King says ‘now do Epstein’ after Trump releases thousands of MLK Jr files

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  • So what you're saying is King trumps Trump?

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    New youtube web video player interface...?

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  • It looks a lot like their smart TV interface which has always been less functional than their web or mobile app interface. They're probably trying to cut the UI down to just the bare minimum that the majority of casual users regularly use. In part I'd assume to reduce the maintenance overhead, but I'm sure it likely will also make things harder for ad blockers.

  • Wary Democratic establishment keeping New York's Mamdani at arm's length

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  • I think the problem is the way political parties are structured in the US. At the end of the day the thing that actually matters with a party is how its members behave in their respective offices. It's how senators and congressmen vote, what bills the president champions and vetoes. For party officers people judge by what they can see and that's mostly which candidates are receiving support and which aren't.

    So what are people seeing? They're seeing the same politicians in office today as 6 months ago, voting the same way they always have, and many prominent Democrat politicians attacking Mamdani. Sure they can't have changed who's in office without an election happening, but that's kind of the point, until that happens those people are the DNC to most people. In order to change that perception those politicians would need to be publicly kicked out of the party. Until people no longer see "Senator X (D) from Y" making headlines they are the DNC to most people.

  • Trump frustrated at having to take the heat for Pam Bondi's handling of the Epstein files

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  • Maybe we'll get real lucky and land on 1790s France. Probably not, but we can always dream.

  • Trump frustrated at having to take the heat for Pam Bondi's handling of the Epstein files

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  • More accurate title:

    Trump mad that Pam Bondi is failing to make Trump's involvement with Epstein go away like ordered

  • Democrats try a new tone: Less scripted, more cursing, Trumpier insults

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  • An informed voter base that votes based on understanding the policies is of course the ideal, but the problem is a significant chunk of the current voters are already those brainwashed idiots voting for the loudest moron. If what it takes to unseat them is an equivalent group of brainwashed idiots voting in the opposite direction that might just be the compromise we have to make. The critical thing is going to be that the person those idiots elect needs to actually pass intelligent policies. If you can convince morons to vote for someone actually intelligent, that's still an improvement over the current state where morons are electing either pure evil, morons, or both.

  • Trump diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, press secretary says

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  • That's how desperate they are to get people talking about anything but Epstein. Unless Trump keels over dead don't fall for it, keep pushing on the Epstein connection.