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Comment by easyThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I just want to point out that AGCOM once decided to put out an "Economically Relevant Instagram Influencers Register".

They're not really... let's say, 'on the ball' for understanding how the internet works. It's a bit of a running joke in Italy that their decisions are often anachronistic or completely misunderstanding of the actual technology behind the scenes.

And for the most part they just deliberate, they have no direct judicial authority. They ask an administrative judge to operate on their decisions, which brings us to some of the favourite sentences for any italian lawyer: the... "Ricorso al TAR". ("appeal to the Regional Administrative Court", which is a polite way to say "You messed up, badly and repeatedly, and now we have to spend an eternity trying to sort this out in a court room").

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If we truly want to point out the ridiculousness of Italian tech regulations, the influencers' registry, the temporary ChatGPT ban from a few years back or even the new AI regulations cannot hold a candle to the 22-year-old war on... arcade games.

A poorly written regulation from 2003 basically lumped together all gaming machines in a public setting with gambling, resulting in extremely onerous source code and server auditing requirements for any arcade cabinet connected to the internet (the law even goes as far as to specify that the code shall be delivered on CD-ROMs and compile on specific outdated Windows versions) as well as other certification burdens for new offline games and conversions of existing machines. Every Italian arcade has remained more or less frozen in time ever since, with the occasional addition of games modded to state on the title screen that they are a completely different cabinet (such as the infamous "Dance Dance Revolution NAOMI Universal") in an attempt to get around the certification requirements.

I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002

An arcade stuck in the early 00s would be my ideal third space though.

Have you seen Arcade Time Capsule? It is very accurate recreation of a classic arcade with games you can actually play if you provide the ROMs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LOtkGN138Q

Not the OP, but I tried it when it came out. VR headset technology wasn't good enough for screens within screens and it was nauseating more than anything.

There's also impedance mismatch between using the headset controllers and the physical ones in the game. Ideally, I should be able to use my own fightstick in an augmented reality configuration.

The quest 3 is good enough and the Galaxy XR is incredibly high resolution. But it isn't a really ideal way to play arcade ROMs for long term but just to enjoy the nostalgia.

How is the Galaxy XR? I want one but I can't justify it if it doesn't connect to my non-Samsung work laptop.

I got it for $75 a month for two years. Visual clarity is incredible and monitor replacement level but comfort is meh so I bought studioform creative head strap which helped a lot. You can use Virtual Desktop to connect to any computer easily.

I'm a sysadmin so I bought it to see if it would work when I want to ssh into systems I'm physically near in racks. It has worked really well for this.

Reminds me of US Pinball laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball#Relation_to_gambling

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