Rockstar Ports Its Old, Antiquated, Flawed Censorial Blacklist For Player Chat Into New 'Red Dead Redemption' Game
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Those familiar with how multiplayer online gaming works know that inter-player chat is both a feature of this gaming genre and one of its primary hellscapes. On the one hand, in-game chat can be both fun when it's part of the game and funny when you get lively banter between players. On the other hand, such chat is also rife with stupid, sophomoric, abusive language casually bandied about by teens and adults alike. Because of this, some game developers have tried to limit what words can be inputted into the game's chat system. The end result of this is mostly spectacular creativity for players dedicated to being assholes in getting around such systems. But for Rockstar, when it came to the online portion of Grand Theft Auto, this chat blacklist was also a place to stupidly blacklist references to illicit gaming sites like "The Pirate Bay", meaning users entering that text would see their words simply disappeared.But this all gets doubly stupid now that Rockstar is set to release Red Dead Redemption 2, within which it simply ported over its previous blacklist.As revealed by a user on Reddit, the company has implemented a banned words list, which attempts to deter people from using some of the worst sexual, racial, and religious insults, which is fair enough.However, the developer has also seen fit to prevent players from talking about sites like The Pirate Bay, with the word ‘PirateBay’ banned from the game. Since the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site is hardly a friend of the gaming industry, the decision is not that much of a surprise. However, the developer goes much further with a whole range of bizarre censoring decisions that start of weirdly and get worse.Taking them in alphabetical order, first up we have the term ‘BTJunkie’, which refers to a once-prominent torrent indexing site. What’s so special about this platform is that it’s been shut for well over six years. In fact, the site closed down for good in 2012following the massive raid on Kim Dotcom. Safe to say, it’s not coming back. The examples go on from there. Now, there are a couple of things to say about this. Obviously blacklisting long-dead websites, even if it would have been once understandable that a game developer would want to keep those names out of the game chat, is painfully stupid. I'm not sure what Rockstar thinks it was accomplishing by keeping those site names out of their game chat when those sites were live, but I'm super-certain that they're accomplishing nothing by doing so when those sites are dead. And because, of course, there is the inevitable collateral damage caused by such word-bans.The initialism ‘VCDQ’ has also made it onto Rockstar’s Great Firewall, which is nothing short of ridiculous. VCDQ – otherwise known as VCDQuality – was a site that reported on freshly-leaked pirate copies of movies and commented on the quality of the release. The site never offered copyrighted content and was a really useful platform. It too has been dead for a number of years. The other thing to say about this is simply that any company that would so callously treat chat censorship in this way, where the company thinks that a simple port of old blacklists would suffice, is a company that doesn't care much for its own players. Gaming companies can put in these blacklists if they like, and they might be good things when it comes to hateful and abusive language, but they should do so with care. Gamer interaction is kind of a key component of online multiplayer, after all. To treat banning words with so little regard isn't a great look.So, the end result? Anyone want to place money betting that this censorship of its own customers has made Red Dead 2 free from abusive language and conduct? Or that there aren't more examples of collateral damage out there, specifically since the blacklist also bans the word "Torrent" entirely?I didn't think so.
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Big Boost For Open Access As Wellcome And Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Back EU's 'Plan S'
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Back in September, Techdirt wrote about the oddly-named 'Plan S', which was nonetheless an important step forward for open access in Europe. As we remarked then, the hope was that others would support the initiative, and that has now happened, with two of the biggest names in the science funding world signing up to the approach:To ensure that research findings are shared widely and are made freely available at the time of publication, Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have today (Monday) joined cOAlition S and endorsed the principles of Plan S. An article in Nature on the move notes that Wellcome gave out $1.4 billion in grants in 2016-17, while the Gates Foundation spent $4.7 billion in 2017, although not all of that was on science. So the backing of these two organizations is a massive vote of confidence in Plan S and its requirements. Wellcome has also unveiled its new, more stringent open access policy, which includes a number of important changes, including the following:All Wellcome-funded research articles must be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC at the time of publication. We previously allowed a six-month embargo period. This change will make sure that the peer-reviewed version is freely available to everyone at the time of publication. This move finally rectifies one of the biggest blunders by academic funding organizations: allowing publishers to impose an embargo -- typically six or even 12 months -- before publicly-funded research work was freely available as open access. There was absolutely no reason to allow this. After all, the funding organizations could simply have said to publishers: "if you want to publish work we paid for, you must follow our rules". But in a moment of weakness, they allowed themselves to be bamboozled by publishers, granting an unnecessary monopoly on published papers, and slowing down the dissemination of research.All articles must be published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY). We previously only required this licence when an article processing charge (APC) was paid. This change will make sure that others -- including commercial entities and AI/text-data mining services -- can reuse our funded research to discover new knowledge. Although a more subtle change, it's an important one. It establishes unequivocally that anyone, including companies, may build on research financed by Wellcome. In particular, it explicitly allows anyone to carry out text and data mining (TDM), and to use papers and their data for training machine-learning systems. That's particularly important in the light of the EU's stupid decision to prevent companies in Europe from carrying out either TDM or training machine-learning systems on material to which they do not have legal access to unless they pay an additional licensing fee to publishers. This pretty much guarantees that the EU will become a backwater for AI compared to the US and China, where no such obstacles are placed in the way of companies.Like Plan S, Wellcome's open access policy no longer supports double-dipping "hybrid journals", which charge researchers who want to release their work as open access, but also require libraries to take out full-price subscriptions for journals that include these freely-available articles. An innovative aspect of the new policy is that it will require some research to be published as preprints in advance of formal publication in journals:Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak, these preprints must be published:before peer reviewon an approved platform that supports immediate publication of the complete manuscript under a CC-BY licence. That's eminently sensible -- in the event of public health emergencies, you want the latest research to be out there in the hands of health workers as soon as possible. It's also a nice boost for preprints, which are rapidly emerging as an important way of sharing knowledge.The Gates Foundation has said that it will update its open access policy, which in any case is already broadly in line with the principles of Plan S, over the next 12 months. Even without that revision, the latest announcement by these two funding heavyweights is highly significant, and is likely to make the argument for similar organizations around the world to align their open access policies with Plan S hard to resist. We can therefore probably expect more to join cOAlition S and help bring the world closer to the long-cherished dream of full open access to the world's research, with no embargoes, and under a permissive CC-BY license.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
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