Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
"Vice" shut down last year[0]; its brand was recently purchased and is now run by a hedge fund based in Nashville. I think this incident very clearly sums up the difference between what's news journalism, and what's a vapid content farm operated by financebros.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39476074 ("Vice website is shutting down (writing.exchange)"—459 comments)
Lula also himself accused the USA of putting tariffs because of credit card companies.
we live in an unhealthy place in time, if everybody claims they‘re more democratic than the other side of the spectrum, yet conveniently traverses the agreed-upon boundaries of a level playing field and utilizes foreign or supra national support.
The EU’s core function is essentially that. While the Brussels institutions are hated almost unanimously by all Europeans, it’s virtually impossible to get rid off the EU, because it represents the chance to circumvent the local democratic process for all domestic parties. Its institutional undermining of domestic democratic institutions.
Imagine you being a pro-gay-rights activist inside the deeply catholic Poland: Would you go through the slow process of convincing the Polish citizenry or would you rather skip those decades and do it via the EU-Bureaucracy?
Same is true for dissidents whether in Brazil or EU which depend upon representation via media, yet need foreign media platforms to have a say at all.
Thus as much as I despise the Brazilian government and its autocratic judges, fundamentally it is morally improper to utilize foreign help.
I don't think cryptocurrency has failed. Yesterday I successfully payed with crypto when the payment with multiple credit cards failed.
It's like salting the earth of your garden because nothing will grow in it.
At best they can ask the public to please turn over their private keys, which will go about as well as efforts to stop piracy.
At one point the US gov was building their own crypto currency, and I'm sure it wasn't because they felt the existing options weren't private enough from oversight.
Stopping cryptocurrency is as hard as stopping end to end encrypted messaging or banning porn.
You either allow access to the open internet or you do not.
Well sure, but if you want to actually use it you need the whole keypair. Unless you're really good with you elliptic curve abacus you're going to need a computer for that l.
Any currency that has any political ideology would require some form coercion to be used by those who do not share that ideology. Fiat currencies carry that coercion implicitly, people who don't like the government generally still use their money because they have little choice.
The underlying principle of Bitcoin was consensus. Agreeing to operate on whatever principles the majority of miners are using. Forks are an integral part of that, people choosing a different path and those who agree with them going that way. The perceived value coming from those who accept whichever fork they chose and what they think it should be worth.
The only real "Stick it to the man" kind of philosophy that came with it was as a rejection of unilateral monetary control. That is the antithesis of consensus.
In an ideal crypto world governments would be the majority of the miners. They would negotiate amongst each other to decide on monetary policy by consensus. That's a long way from happening, with no clear path towards that end in sight.
In a sense that too, is an ideology, the distinction is that the ideology doesn't want to do the thing that it can't. It presents an option, instead of forcing people to use it.
1. Not a problem with any other currency I've used. 2. I've never even been offered to have my transaction clear more quickly by paying a higher fee. 3. If I'm sitting at a store and they tell me I can either wait around for 5-10 minutes (and possibly more) for my transaction to clear or pay 50 cents for it to be instant, I'm just gonna pull out my credit card and use that. I don't suspect I'm in the minority.
As for "cleared", do you mean confirmed? Just pay 1-2 EUR more, that would make it almost, if not instant.
The biggest annoyance with it is that uptake is quite variable from country to country.
But if I want to buy online from Germany or some other EU country, I need to use American payment method. Also if I want to buy from China, I need to use an American payment method.
-also introduce new middleman
I don't think that works honestly, its just move a new money into new player everyone want to take a cut
Just because few people make use of their rights is not a valid argument for their removal.
(I assume you mean BTC here, since very few places actually take privacy coins like Monero.)
*a negligible minority
which is about the same amount of people that would be interested in buying rape/people-farming games. seems like a match made in (some twisted version) of heaven.
In the USA at least, you can even steal electricity and be convicted of the crime and they still have to provide you with service, they just put your meter up on the pole.
Even this is sort of bullshit. Chargeback fees are paid by merchants and there are already high-risk merchant accounts with higher fees and cash reserve requirements as a solution.
I've also been prevented from sending money by e-check because my bank was concerned the form of payment was too suspicious, so I ETF'd money from another account instead. I don't think the law can force a 3rd party to facilitate a purchase.
Add in some really heavy handed rules that government can't use it to spy and maybe it will work.
Also, these people really should be shamed for their censorship.
Private spending and communication are the beating heart of a healthy democracy and must be run directly by the public and decentralized or aspiring tyrants will co-opt them.
The people will never actually be in charge until we stop letting currency be controlled by governments and corporations.
* PornHub has been only taking cryptocurrency for payment for a while, and they seem to be doing ok
* The US just passed GENIUS Act with somewhat bipartisan support -- probably not even imaginable one year ago
That's a common misconception. In most jurisdictions retailers can set their own payment policies.
It's a tremendous pain for retailers to accept cash, which is why they're willing to accept high transaction fees from online points of sale.
Censorship has a way of pushing people to learn inconvenient technology, just like how most Chinese citizens know how to use VPNs.
I could see CA and FL easily passing such a law given the right push from constituents.
* Legal changes. Web platforms have section 230 protection to host user content. For payment processing this might be something like the proposed Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) that requires banks to offer additional (non-Visa/Mastercard) payment providers. Or a more explicit payment neutrality law the requires credit card companies to be more even-handed in non-financial issues. Or anti-debanking laws that ensure everyone has some minimal access to sending and receiving payments.
* Lawsuit results. Part of the issue with Visa was that they got dragged into lawsuits against sites that were using them to process payments; the lawsuits and appeals around that are still unresolved but if Visa's lack of legal liability goes away then it will be harder for random outside groups to harass them, for good or ill.
* Introducing an independent payment processor. While JCB in Japan has had some similar pressure applied to them, when there were national sovereignty concerns over Visa being able to dictate that American laws and norms should apply to their country Japan had many other payment processors to fall back on. Similarly, PIX in Brazil makes it much harder for non-government private actors to dictate what people can and cannot buy.
>The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who originated in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. They sought to purify the Church of England by removing Catholic practices and beliefs. Driven by their religious convictions and facing persecution, they eventually migrated to North America in the 17th century, establishing colonies in New England.
The internet has more or less rendered these efforts moot in recent times. This was highlighted when they tried to impose a rating system on games a couple of decades ago. I asked a school kid about the effect on him. He said it didn't effect him, as he downloaded his games from the internet. It all fell apart about then. Consequently we had the opportunity to see seen the flood of porn would do to society, and noticed nothing of consequence. The flood of conspiracy theories for life hacks on the other hand was completely unanticipated and it's impact badly underestimated.
Collective Shout is an excellent illustration of the effect. It's effectively a one girl band, yet her shouting on the internet about her desire to force her Baptist pro-life maternal morals down everyones throats has now been heard across the world.
And... are you really being served internet ads for candy?
Right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media (the groups behind the shutdown of Xtube, and the all-but-shutdown of Pornhub[0], as well as the short-lived ban of pornography on OnlyFans) are definitely the driving force behind these bans, but fundamentally the card networks are ambivalent at best when it comes to anything that could be remotely considered pornographic.
[0] Pornhub still operates, but they removed all "non-verified" content, so it mostly serves as an marketing outlet for studios and OnlyFans creators, and all of the older content that was never verified was removed entirely.
"Allegedly" is a very operative word there. Pornhub was actually extremely aggressive about removing CSAM and nonconsensual content, to the point where Facebook was actually a far larger problem for those actually concerned with stopping CSAM[0], with three orders of magnitude more instances on Facebook than all Mindgeek websites (including Pornhub) combined.
However, groups like the ones I mentioned only targeted Pornhub, because they don't actually care about CSAM. Their goal is to eliminate pornography and all "immoral" content, where "immoral" is defined according to an explicitly religious, right-wing interpretation of the term. That's not a secret; that's how they advertise themselves, and that includes the group in question here, Collective Shout[1], although the latter is now trying to hide that tie via futher censorship[2].
Because going after Facebook doesn't fit into an agenda of banning pornography, you'll never hear them mention one word about CSAM or other horrendous abuse that happens on Facebook and is facilitated by the platform.
> Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice.
That's not quite true. Processors can set their own restrictions, but so can Visa/Mastercard/etc, and they absolutely do police perceived brand risk, which includes not just pornography, but also completely nonsexual content as well.,
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-a-hotbed-of-child-sex...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/After-payment-processors-promp...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/acvalens.net/post/3lufjdqmhxs2v
You're not wrong but that's only part of the story. What you're describing happens, which leads to overly-conservative interpretations of the unwritten policies. But the card brands do also have explicit rules that they expect downstream players to adhere to.
Confusingly - and this is where your impression (which is common) likely comes from - the card brands themselves provide different rules to different downstream providers, so it's not like there's one single, consistent list of rules for Visa globally (for example). It's not law and they are not bound by precedent or even an expectation of consistency.
just kidding. this is the first i've heard of that, though.
i don't think it totally makes sense. your card transaction will still say "STEAMGAMES.COM 7264823" or similar, regardless of the content purchased. on top of that, all sorts of shady porn & dating websites that you would NOT want leaked use the credit card companies.
Every time you buy an over the counter medication at the pharmacy with a credit card, the data brokers know by combining information sources, and sell it to insurance companies.
That data is then sold back to the data brokers.
Straight up spyware developers embed in games.
Several competitors exist too.
There are too many laws across different jurisdictions that makes it really challenging for companies to offer goods and services.
The only way to circumvent jurisdiction-specific laws is to make them impossible to enforce.
Yes indeed, a huge success like this will give them a big boost in motivation and funding for many, many years to come. IMHO we need to regulate away the credit card processing companies ability to discriminate like this, and while we're at it we should stop letting them heavily tax the entire economy
But I haven’t played a GTA game in a decade so maybe I’m misremembering..
Create an app/website called FakeMoney. Put a big ass disclaimer up front saying that it's not real money, and you can't buy anything with it, but let people buy FakeMoney with in-app purchases. Pretend it's a game.
The app just shows a number and lets you send some of it to other FakeMoney accounts.
That's it.
If there were "endpoints", people who gave you "real" cash in exchange for FakeMoney, could something like that eventually replace "real" money?
O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from these turbulent prigs?
Possibly by trading with someone who already has electronic cash, I guess – but how do I know I’m not laundering the other person’s money, and/or financing terrorism or CSAM with my fiat money?
Jokes and cryptocurrencies aside. The digital euro is being built and will be deployed in the coming years, enabling offline digital money transfers. I'll have to see it to belive it.
Unfortunately, all such systems are quickly co-opted for the purpose of speculative price schemery. Bitcoin will soon reach a point of no-return, when the smallest fractional has an exchange rate so high that it will be impossible to purchase small goods at all (except in bulk), though in reality that point was reached many years ago. The entire concept of cryptocurrencies might actually be irrevocably poisoned, because even a new system would have to deal with the public perception baggage of the last decade's many Ponzi-type scams and various joke/meme coins. If only Satoshi had been a social genius instead of a technical genius.
Group Behind Steam Censorship Policies Have Powerful Allies
Book burners don’t have any morals, they just want to burn books, and they’ll come for yours sooner or later.
And the payment processors aren’t “book burners.” They’re acting to restrict an unsavory market that potentially hurts their business. They have no agenda or incentive to promote censorship as such.
They're not book burners... they're just trying to eliminate certain media they find objectionable? They would consider it unacceptable for Steam to, for example, make these items only purchasable through crypto/bank transfer.
Okay, since you stated it as a fact: Citation needed. Show me Visa’s statement to the effect that they have no agenda, because all of their actions suggest otherwise.
If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.
My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.
I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.
But what’s been happening lately with onlyfans and other things is a recipe for a disaster in my mind. We’ve made it hard for younger generations, made paths to success much less atrainable and instead have enabled black markets while the economy suffers because of it. I imagine we’re stuck with a deranged and broken society of people moonlighting to make ends meet by doing soft porno in far greater numbers than before. And yes of course that’s what strip clubs are for but that was way less of an issue than this.
You can't just call things violence. We need to stop doing this. If nobody is getting physically harmed, it's not violence.
And no, your stupid bullshit about harming one's soul doesn't count. I mean leg chopped off type of thing. Then, you can call it violent.
Otherwise, you're just dishonest and manipulative.
Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
We are discussing blocking of legal content by the payment companies. If they do not like this games or GTA or metal music they should make laws.
But they are concerned by virtual incest while in USA cousin marriage is still legal in many states.
If i believe in this stupidity that music and games are harmful then I would use the big money to do some studies to prove this and then make laws, not force my ideology by abusing the payment monopoly this companies have to push my stupidity to the entire fucking world.
According to wikipedia 24 states have it banned and then 7 more apply restrictions such as a minimum age or infertility
Not true at all. Just because it is legal doesn’t mean it is considered socially acceptable [1].
> but not considered incestuous in most of Europe
Not according to the catholic church [2].
[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_prevalence_...
[2] https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume... (see CIC 1091)