Facebook is openly hostile to its own users. It blocks private messages with links to content Facebook does not approve of, and the types of content that are blocked or allowed, should greatly trouble people. They practically hold our data hostage, and have put considerable roadblocks in place over the past several years to make it more difficult to access information, even for developers. In 2014, they intentionally manipulated posts to make certain users more depressed in an experiment that should have made everyone reconsider their interactions with the network. On the surface, many casual users may not notice how Facebook’s hands have grown tighter around their walled garden of data, but for developers and content creators, the signs are everywhere and should trouble everyone.
The much anticipated Cyberpunk 2077, after delays, was finally released in December of 2020. I probably wouldn’t have purchased this game at launch if it wasn’t for the fact I found a pre-order deal for $45. With the low price, I had fewer regrets as I entered a world of stunning yet demanding graphics, rich story and endless game bugs. Only one glitch I encountered affected game progression, and it was already patched in an update I had put off. At first the bugs were just hilarious, and usually they made the game play easier. Yet as I progressed, they became increasingly distracting. It’s a shame because the world building was so meticulously constructed, the voice acting was high grade and the story above par for a video game. It’s tragic that all the artists, writers and animators made such amazing assets that were overshadowed by a tragically horrific game engine. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that brought to life a genre that I’ve always enjoyed, yet it honestly should have targeted at least six months of additional development.
Living within a city, it’s often nice to be able to get out and explore local parks and recreational areas. Google Maps used to be a helpful tool for finding public parks and forests. Many wilderness areas were colored green. Even though some of them were not public parks, the color coating helped narrow down areas of interest. A recent update changed this behavior to make zoomed out views of maps rendered entirely in green, for anything that isn’t an urban area. This change isn’t reversible by an option, layer or preference, and makes Google Maps more difficult to use for one of my favorite use cases. This isn’t the first time Google has broken their online maps or introduced a terrible feature. Thankfully, there are open source solutions and alternatives.
I really enjoyed playing the first Spider-Man for the Play Station 4. The controls were fluid, the graphics stunning and the gameplay felt like you were in the universe of the comic books, filled with high paced action and campy dialog. I was looking forward to its sequel as a launch title for the Play Station 5. Spider-Man: Miles Morales has the same fast paced gameplay as its predecessor. However, the story was not as well constructed. There were many elements that felt like they were pandering to our current political culture, some dialog made me cringe, and the game was considerably shorter than the original. Still, the mechanics drew me in, the graphics were beautiful and the missions were challenging. I enjoyed playing it, although it did mostly feel like a set of expansions to the original with no truly noticeable changes.
Sites like Reddit and Hackernews allow people to vote stories up or down. Users collectively rank the values of user submissions and comments. The Hivemind. It can lead people to create and discovery great things, or just enjoy funny cat videos. These sites filter content through a combination of their moderators and the masses. With that filter comes bubbles, echo chambers and group think. Only the most commonly held opinions are given a voice. If you want to break free of orthodoxy privilege, you need to change the way you use these websites, by reading comments from the bottom.
The original Final Fantasy VII is one of my favorite games of all times. It came out in the 90s while I was in high school, and my best friend and I were both playing the PC version with our, state of the art, Voodoo2 graphics cards. Another friend, who was a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series, saved up to buy a PlayStation just for FF7. The gameplay featured turn based RPG elements, along with exploration, magic and storytelling. With it’s 3D graphics overlayed on pre-rendered backgrounds, full motion video, and addictive combat system, it was an iconic game of the era. The remake, developed over two decades later, uses a more fast paced combat system. It retains many of the story elements of the original, enhances the original music score, and develops many of the same iconic characters. Yet it also adds some new faces, and draws out the first eight to ten hours of the original game into a forty-hour story of its own. Although enjoyable, it won’t be as accessible as the original to as large an audience.
My mother had Multiple Sclerosis. While I was in primary school, she had lost her ability to drive a vehicle. By the time I was in high school, she could barely walk. The Internet was the big new thing, and while it opened her world greatly from her limited mobility, her view of the world was still restricted to what she saw on TV and through an Internet Explorer web browser. It’s a terribly distorted way to see the world, and it is currently the way many people in cities all around the planet are viewing current events. For many of us who live in cities have been locked away from each other by our governments, Orwellian messaging is blasted to us from news, advertising and social media, telling us we are all responsible for the microbes in our bodies and the lives of everyone on the planet. It’s a terrible distortion of reality and is fracturing the minds of people in my country and all around the world.
Once upon a time, there were many chat services. AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and others. These messengers had their own desktop clients, and developers reverse engineered their protocol to build custom applications, both open and closed source. Trillian, Audium and Pidgin were applications that let people communicate across all these messengers with one program. Over time the old protocols died, and newer chat services like Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts started storing your entire history on their servers. People started using the web interfaces and mobile apps, no longer caring about desktop programs.
Matrix is an open source communication protocol. It’s similar to XMPP (formerly Jabber) in the sense that anyone can set up a Matrix server and communicate to people on other Matrix servers. It’s a federated protocol, just like e-mail. Google Hangouts used to support XMPP federation, but silently removed support in 2014. Matrix supports bridging other chat services, so they can appear in a unified view. With my current setup of Matrix and appropriate bridges, I’ve combined my view of Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Telegram and native Matrix chats into one convenient user interface. The path to get to that integration was not as simple.
Large Internet platforms have always moderated the content they allow on their services, and Section 230 of the Federal Communication Act allowed for the growth of user supported platforms, by not holding them to many of the same liabilities a publisher would face. Yet today, we’re seeing unprecedented censorship, editing and moderation of platforms with massive userbases. The Internet of today has corporate super powers, virtual nations, that can effectively dismiss voices and points of view that do not fit their narrative. When Twitter is effectively able to censor the reach of articles from established newspapers, we have to ask what meaningful reform can be made to Section 230, to ensure every American has control over the way their voice is presented to the world. The following are a few proposals for reforming the law, and also the challenges in implementing them.
All nations are corrupt. All leaders are corrupt. In Orwell’s famous novel Animal Farm, a revolution that started with the best of intentions, and that supported the rights of every animal, eventually led to one class of animals finding ways to convince all the others to let them lead. The goal of the people of any republic should be to try to minimize that corruption, and implement a process that make their leaders beholden to as large a portion of the population as possible. In American, in 2020, that processes is in crisis.
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