11/19/19

Youtube COPPA?

Recently, youtube has announced they are enacting COPPA laws as of next year.

All content creators are required to appropriately mark their videos as kids content or not.

Videos marked as "Kid's Content" will not display ads, will have disabled comments, etc. to protect kids' identities.

"When deciding whether or not your channel or video is made for kids, you should consider various factors, including:

Subject matter of the video (e.g. educational content for preschoolers).
Whether children are your intended or actual audience for the video.
Whether the video includes child actors or models.
Whether the video includes characters, celebrities, or toys that appeal to children, including animated characters or cartoon figures.
Whether the language of the video is intended for children to understand.
Whether the video includes activities that appeal to children, such as play-acting, simple songs or games, or early education.
Whether the video includes songs, stories, or poems for children.
Any other information you may have to help determine your video’s audience, like empirical evidence of the video’s audience."
however, here's the kicker: if you don't mark content as kid friendly, or mark a video incorrectly, you could be sued by the FTC,
and fined $42k. forty-two THOUSAND dollars, PER video in question.
and guess what? they don't tell you what is considered kid's content. at all.
I have no idea why they find this acceptable. I'm currently in the process of saving and removing all of my content from the site before
further clarification on the laws, because forty-two thousand dollars is a HELL of a price to pay.

Youtube isn't particularly known for being friendly towards it's userbase and audience, and only focused on earning ad revenue,
so this doesn't come to as much of a surprise, but this is taking it way too far.
I wonder what was going through their staff's minds, making such a disgraceful change.
-logan

Nexon's Durango:Wildlands

11/19/19

This game was recently featured on the Apple app store. A game published by Nexon,
same hit creators of popular games such as Maplestory and Mabinogi, have released this mobile game
that is sort of like the love child of the first Fallout game and Ark:Survival Evolved.
Upon downloading it I noticed it has a strange request, to monitor you with your phone camera
as you play the game, to study your enjoyment of the game.
Despite this bizarre surveillant request in this hell world, I'm embarassed to admit I'm hopelessly addicted to the game.
The camera observation is only optional, and I, like most people I'm sure, would opt to keep it turned off.
I'm a big fan of Nexon, and I'm a little put off that this is a feature at all.
Despite all of that, I've thoroughly enjoyed the game, and am currently trying to tame myself a raptor...

-logan

Impeachment

11/19/19

The Impeachment hearings have been a hot topic this past couple of days.
The republicans claim it's without ground, and yet their defenses are constantly torn apart and they can only repeat
the same arguments, along with attempting to out the Whistleblower despite them being protected by law.
Our whistleblower protection laws are put into place to prevent corruption, and make it easier for members of the government to
speak up, without endangering them and silencing them before the claims ever even make it to the public.
From what currently stands, is that Trump supposedly attempted extortion with President Zelensky, trying to use him
to dig up information on an opposing candidate, Joe Biden, in order to aid him in the election.
Considering much of his party has already been found guilty of Russian Collusion and have already been arrested and convicted,
things aren't exactly looking good in his favor.
The timeline of events so far, as the public is aware of, goes like this:

trump first promised aid in February
The Ukrainian president called trump in April, this first phone call, inviting him to visit Ukraine, and there’s no evidence in this first call of corruption involving the visit.
this is before any hold placed on the aid is made aware of.
in July, a White House security official becomes aware there’s now been a hold made on the aid.
this is when we get the second call. In this call, president zelensky questions abt the aid, and says “We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps, specifically we are almost ready to buy more javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”
Trump responds “I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…” with ellipses marking something has been removed.
President zelensky assures his cooperation and insists that Ukraine is “good friends” with the United States, and they will do anything to assure their friendship.
Trump continues “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it…” more ellipses indicating something’s been removed.
the rest of the call seemingly goes rather uneventfully.
In August, the special advisor of Ukraine becomes aware of the withhold of aid and questions about it.
recently we found out that John Bolton, national security advisor, met with trump some time in August, privately, to try to persuade him to release the aid to Ukraine. Trump refused. Bolton then resigned in September.
it’s also within this month that the whistleblower comes public with the complaint, claiming that during the July 25th phone call, there was suspicious activity between the call of trump and president zelensky that he was withholding aid in order to get information on the Biden family to aid in him the election.
Bill Taylor, ambassador from Ukraine, who is also one of the people who testified in the first impeachment hearing, states that he’s been getting desperate calls from Ukrainian officials regarding the withholding of aid.
“The minister of defense came to me,” he said. “I would use the word ‘desperate,’ to try to figure out why the assistance was held.”
Investigations about the situation begin. Coincidentally, two days later, aid to Ukraine is finally released.

-logan