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Verizon takes aim at Tumblr's kneecaps, bans all adult content
Oath, the Verizon subsidiary that owns the Yahoo and AOL digital media brands, has announced that as of December 17, all adult content will be banned from the Tumblr blogging site. Any still or moving images displaying real-life human genitals or female nipples and any content—even drawn or computer-generated artwork—depicting any sexual acts will be prohibited.
Genitals and female nipples will only be permitted within the context of breastfeeding, childbirth, and in health-related subjects such as gender confirmation surgery. Written erotica will also remain on the site.
Nowadays, pornography represents a substantial element of Tumblr's content. A 2013 estimate said that around 11 percent of the site's 200,000 most-visited domains were porn, and some 22 percent of inbound links were from adult sites.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 09 2018, @01:33AM (1 child)
I've been pondering how to game online with much less dependence on a center. Might still need something for the players to meet and start games, but after that, playing the game should not depend on a central server being accessible and up. There are broadcast and multicast protocols in IP, and digital signing should be able to prevent spoofing. But I never heard of any MMORPG or browser based game that isn't a client-server system. It ought to be possible to play a simple card game such as hearts or crazy 8s with only the players' computers connected in a P2P network, no central server, not even one of the players' computers taking on the role of server.
Same goes for such services as even IP telephony. Sure, they use a direct connection between the 2 (or more) parties on the call. But to find someone's info so you can make the connection in the first place, you're back to having to contact a centralized directory of some kind.
Client-server is perhaps the easiest way to go about these kinds of problems, from conception to implementation. It's led to overuse, and to these kinds of problems in which the controllers of the center can bring down the whole network merely through the equivalent of letting go of the dead man's switch, AKA, going out of business and unplugging their servers.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday December 10 2018, @04:26PM
There's been a lot of attempts to get something like this...Freenet, YaCy, BitTorrent, even WebRTC. It's not THAT difficult, the problem is doing it in a way that lasts and that's convenient enough for your average gamer.
One option is a system like bittorrent trackers -- there is a central server that helps mediate connections, but it's a fairly open protocol and anyone can set up their own server if they want. That would probably work fine for most games, but the developers don't want to give users that freedom. It's been done though, you can either find where the game stores the URL and modify it (I know people do this with WoW to run private servers, although that's *slightly* different) or you could potentially just modify your hosts file to redirect the connection. Every once in a while an old game gets resurrected in this way...at least until the developer responsible gets sued into oblivion (see https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/02/preservation-or-theft-historians-publishers-argue-over-dead-game-servers/)... [arstechnica.com]
Another option is something like Freenet seed nodes -- the installer comes preloaded with some initial connections, but generally those are no different than any other node. You connect to those nodes, they give you new nodes, and once that's done the originals can go offline and you can still connect through everyone else that you've found. That probably wouldn't work so well for games though, as most users aren't going to leave the server running 24/7, and people also aren't going to be as careful about maintaining their installation over long time periods. So once the seed servers included in the installer go down, nobody new can play, and the existing players can only play as long as a few of their previously known connections stay online. Or you release your own patch for the game later to introduce new seeds, but that only delays the problem a bit, and new players still have to find and install your patch before they can play.
YaCy I think is somewhere in the middle -- they have official servers that track the official "global" network, but I'm pretty sure you can also directly connect two servers and start building a new network just by putting in the IP address. I think that should also include auto-discovery of other nodes on that same network, so that's probably a pretty good approach for something like gaming. Then a larger organization could put together a new server client that serves primarily to coordinate new connections in order to create a new "global" network, but even without that kind of support any individual user could still directly connect nodes to build up their own network too.