He / They

  • 4 Posts
  • 606 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense
    1·
    1 day ago

    I don’t know where you got the idea that sports betting is the only betting with a wagered outcome, that’s basically all card or table games at a casino.

    My point of mentioning casinos having more than just slot machines is to say that they are first and foremost gambling establishments. Not every game in a casino actually is gambling, either; a lot of them have regular arcade games too.

    The question of whether trading cards and loot boxes are gambling from a legal perspective is down to how the laws are written, and the laws in the US currently haven’t defined them as such so far, because there is no wager on a specific outcome.

    If loot boxes allowed you to pay more in order to get more good items on a ‘win’, my guess is they’d be smacked with a gambling designation instantly.

    Or if trading cards allowed you to wager on the presence of specific cards in the pack, and win additional booster packs if correct, for instance.

    If casinos want to say some of their games have been improperly classified as gambling because those games don’t have those characteristics, they certainly can go to the gaming commission or take them to court and argue that (and depending on the game they may even be correct), but since they have to have a license anyways for all their other games that definitely are gambling, they probably won’t care to.

    And there are in fact slot machine games that aren’t gambling (e.g. CloverPit), that just simulate playing a slot machine without actually having any real monetary mechanic (apart from paying for the game), so just being a slot machine doesn’t inherently make it a gambling game.

    Not to go too philosophical, but every physical item you buy is physically unique from each other one. Even with processes like Six Sigma to minimize variations, each car, table, chair etc is physically unique, and each in ways that affect its performance. You could buy 100,000 chairs of the same kind, and figure out which one is ‘best’ based on some characteristic (e.g. max weight), but that doesn’t make “buying a chair” gambling, just because you may will get a worse or better chair each time.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense
    6·
    4 days ago

    Yep. There are too many people who don’t understand addiction, and think that gambling is the root cause problem, rather than one of many systems that preys on addiction disorders.

    The reality of addiction is that it will always find something to fulfill it without treatment, and banning or regulating every trend of collectibles that pops up is not an actual solution. Banning or regulating specific structures that intentionally prey on addiction is important.

    Too many people mistake their feeling-based objection to gambling that was inherited from the protestant moral objections, with actually being about solving predation on addiction.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns
    1·
    4 days ago

    That’s not what this commenter was doing, though.

    So what do you think there were doing, exactly?

    Let’s break their comment down, and then you can point out the part that is “extremist”.

    14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there’s many millions of routers.

    This is 100% accurate, especially in the age of Mirai-like IoT botnets. 14k is pretty small nowadays. Variants of Mirai (e.g. Midori and Aisuru) had 300,000+ devices.

    Asus is not known for backbone routing

    Correct, this is a pretty low-danger botnet due to being low-power consumer devices, even if it’s difficult to clean.

    so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet,

    Less fair, because it is still news, and Ars is a tech news site.

    or is this article intended to serve another interest?

    The part I assume you take issue with, but it’s also a completely fair question (and is in fact precisely “telling people to question the purpose and bias of news”). The article made the deliberate choice to name-drop BitTorrent and IPFS, despite them not being related other than them also using DHTs. I understand the writer may not have been intending to draw a “malware <-> bittorrent” association in the readers’ minds… or they may have. It’s sort of like saying, “the killer drove an Audi, much like Nico Hulkenberg”. That’s why you have to critically question news.

    what’s the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn’t care less about

    The point is that you immediately jumped to calling them an “extremist” for what seems a pretty innocuous (if not particularly useful) comment. We generally assume good-faith around here, and calling people “extremist” for questioning an Ars article doesn’t seem like that to me.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns
    1·
    4 days ago

    But in the society we live in, that position is pretty extreme.

    By what metric? And “Extreme” and “Extremist” are two different words, with different meanings and connotations.

    Extreme simply means the far end of a spectrum. Extremist means

    having or involving beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable

    (and that’s even avoiding the legal definitions that exist in e.g. the UK that specifically tie “extremist” to violence)

    At no point did I ever say that it’s a bad thing to hold that position

    Without offering any metric by which to assert that, you most certainly did convey the commonly understood negative connotation by calling it extremist.