> The New York Times — which purchased Wordle back in 2022 — has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5x6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.
This smells very similar to the issue with the tetris clone a number of years ago. The overall issue is that while games aren't copyrightable, the look and feel of a game can be copyrighted.
That ruling is really exasperating. The judge not accepting that the size of the tetris field is part of the rules of tetris is really weird to me. The tetronimoes don't even look similar in their comparison given the constraints of shapes made of four blocks, and, like, the texture obviously looks nothing like original tetris, it's just some basic-ass rendering of a shape with some color.
They had an interesting hack to connect to a high-res monitor. Timing wise they had to stick to the standard TV timing otherwise regular Amiga software would not work. So they created a hack where the Amiga would send 4 screens of pixels that would then assembled and sent to a high-res monitor. Screen refresh rate was very slow though.
I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).
Wow. That could have been something! Might have been a commercial flop, but it would have exposed a lot of young folks to some useful ideas a decade or two before they otherwise would have been exposed.
If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized across many segments of society. It became one of the things you couldn't discuss publicly.
Many topics became like this during covid including your mention of school closures. Weird time.
>Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google is getting the value from the headline, and contributing nothing to the web site in return.
So the solution Google is proposing works out for everyone. Canadian news sites can ensure people go to their site for headlines and Google can no longer show information for those sites. The Canadian news sites should see increased revenue in terms of subscriptions and advertisements.
I quit /r/pics long time ago because 90% of the images were political. Instead there is /r/nocontextpics/ (which is also currently in restricted mode) which is what /r/pics used to be a long time ago.
Once enough of those get created, it would probably be more harmful to Reddit if the mods then opened up their original subreddits. Now users have to pick between /r/foo and /r/foo_unlocked. Communities are fragmented.
Powerjannies probably aren't too worried. Most users will choose the r/foo instead of foo_unlocked especially in the 6-month+ timespan.
Building some community of 1000 people is a complete waste of time, if it starts to get traction the powerjannies will unlock their own communities and maintain their personal power/influence.
There simply is no circumstance where building a replacement community to bypass the powerjannies' control will be a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
If there is a feeling that this is a loud minority waving pitchforks and that subreddits that re-open largely go on unaffected... the move to bypass the minority has to come from reddit themselves, otherwise the powerjannies will just regroup and come at it a bit more subtly once they realize they're on the losing side. They ain't gonna give up that mod slot when they know how much personal power it affords them.
And people can say there isn't power in it, or they're in it for the community, but, this kind of "keeping it closed for everyone because some users don't want it to be open" is exactly the kind of thing that gets a powermod all bricked up. There's enough power for some people to get a thrill out of it.
The current protest falls into a perceived gap in the "inactive sub" rules - if a sub is inactive and the mods are gone, that sub can be reassigned to new mods and reopened. The mods are saying "no, we're not inactive... we're just not letting anyone talk, but, there's 1 post a week in a private thread, see?". And the reality is that even if you accept that's a valid gap in the rules (arguably this is already covered by mod reassignment rules) this certainly will not be allowed to persist forever, Reddit will simply change the rules around what constitutes abandonment. The pressure is already on from community members who don't feel represented and are willing to take over the mod work if the current mods simply no longer wish to mod under the new system:
You can protest at the factory gate all you want, and shame people for "crossing the picket line". You can't obstruct the actual factory floor, and if that happens the cops will remove you. And that's what things are fast coming to with the whole situation.
Mods are free to not mod. Users are free to not post. That's the "protest at the gate" approach. You can't be disruptive on a commercial platform, or you're gonna get removed. If mods no longer wish to participate and abandon the platform, Reddit is perfectly free to execute its "abandoned subreddit" procedures and reopen the sub, or to alter those abandoned-subreddit procedures in any way they want. If users/mods wish to behave in a disruptive fashion because they don't want to be members anymore, they will be banned.
And yes, there are people willing to step in and do the work too. Powermods are not that special, actually they're kinda awful at times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0kie6dPjo
Maybe the copyright is on the colors on the game field?