Perfection
That reminds me of an incident from the dawn of BBSs. The law in some hick county logged onto a BBS in California or similar, set everything up to download porn, brought a minor into the room to press return, and then hustled him out again. Then they charged the BBS under the county morality laws against corrupting minors.
As always, it’s a bit (ok, a lot) more complicated than that.
Epic can’t ban you from accessing, from your own computer at your own access point, from accessing a particular IP. Well, they sort of could, but no company wants to get themselves in the hot water of actually using their access to your computer to lock you out of certain sites, because that’s a whole massive can of worms you don’t want to open. And because it’s really easy to use things like proxies, both on client and server side, to bypass an IP blockage. So you’d be pissing off all your users while accomplishing nothing, and possibly getting yourself in trouble with the FCC, depending on what you’re doing, and how, and with what explicit permissions form the users.
The problem with cheats is that these days, it’s really hard to keep up with the cheaters and do so without a high false-positive rate. If you ban people en masse for doing something that they didn’t, that’s grounds for a very ugly class-action lawsuit, and one that would generate enormous amounts of bad press. Plus, false-grounds mass bans are really, really bad because they tend to poison the (extremely fickle) community against you, and the second that the movers and shakers move onto the next big thing, your property is dead in the water, and then you’re screwed.
So you’re in this massive bind, as a game company, where you’re continually managing this balancing act between allowing a certain amount of cheating, accepting a certain amount of false positives in your ban waves, enforcing your legal rights, not enforcing certain others so you don’t screw up and lose those rights, managing your image, appeasing the community, keeping the influencers (that are keeping your game popular with the 12-24 demographic) fat and happy, and generally just doing a ton of tap-dancing all the time as all of those lines flex and shift.
And it looks, at a glance, like Epic is not a very good dancer.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know how cheat services work, having no interest or need in them. But based on what I know about network security, that doesn’t really surprise me.
Video games are worth quitting.
It’s actually kind of cool - I don’t care about actual FPS cheating because I never cared for these games, but I geek out on the economics of it.
Basically, you have tiers of “paid cheats”, some of which you can just buy into, and some of which (usually the very top tiers) you have to also have someone already on the inside vouching for you. If you blow it, both of you lose access. This is the only place where anyone even remotely competitive would consider using a cheat from, and even then only very carefully. At the very peak of this you have what amount to bidding wars for single-person-use cheats for the equivalent of zero-days in the computer security world. I’ve never looked into what the top ones can go for, but I would be willing to guess thousands to maybe even tens of thousands for the most sophisticated cheats for the most popular current games out there, probably in those cases being re-sold on the “cheat subscription”-type forums.
Below that, you have private-forum cheats, where people share cheats but only among a tight group where, again, you have to vouch for new members. Paid cheats usually hit this after they “age out” from usefulness, because a good cheat has a limited lifespan. Any competitive cheater will compulsively watch for any cheat they’re using appearing on these forums, because the second it’s out of the tight private paid channels, it’s of no value to them.
And at the bottom, you have public cheats. This is often leaks from the private forums after another round of aging. By the time you try to use these, you are at a high risk of banning because there’s a good chance that the game company already knows about it, and if they don’t, they will now that it’s public. A valid public cheat is only good for 1-2 days at best except maybe on the most obscure public forums, and is a huge risk regardless. Only the basest of noobs would use these, and only the dumbest of those would do so on their primary accounts and from their home / non-proxied IP.
I’ve been missing part of my right big toe since I was 9, thanks to my parents using me as agricultural ‘cannon fodder’. If it’s ever been illegal to make YOUR OWN kids operate combines and tractors, then that law has been kept super-secret from all of us kids who have ever been rushed to a local emergency room. Or, in my case, my parents just hid it until school started in the fall.
My guess is that the Trump repeal of the law would condone what’s already going on: Migrant farm labor using little, little kids to pick fruits and vegetables. Now, they can also use the farm equipment!
Think about how crazy that is. You aren’t old enough to agree to a contract but you are old enough to held accountable for criminal behaviour stemming from not understanding that you can’t agree to a contract? This seems like it’s just one more problem stemming from clickthrough contracts.
I think there’s an important distinction here. If someone is banned from an online game for cheating, that’s not the same as people being blocked from using things they purchased for their own use. Cheating in a game where you play with other players is actually affecting other people in an environment that the company is responsible for maintaining.
This is more like getting banned from a bar for fighting whereas a lot of other EULAs seem a lot closer to being told you can’t drink the JD you bought at the store in your own home.
It’s a problem stemming from the crazy idea that you can be liable for a crime at an age when you aren’t able to validly enter into a contract. That’s madness.
I think those are two very different things. We start on “we don’t hit” when kids are two, but we don’t start on “before you sign something, make sure you read it thoroughly and if you don’t understand it, don’t sign it” at the same age. It’s not unreasonable as a society to think that a 17-year-old ought to understand that violence isn’t acceptable but that they still ought not be held to contracts. Of course I think the way American children are tried and sentenced is often abjectly horrific, most countries draw sharp distinctions between adult and youth justice and don’t let people say 14-year-olds should be tried as adults because their skin is really dark.
What strikes me as extremely convoluted is the idea that we could punish a child for not entering into a contract. We shouldn’t hold a 14-year-old to a contract is supposed to protect the fourteen year old, and, if necessary, screw over whoever entered into that contract with the 14-year-old.
If you enter in a contract with a 14-year-old and then provide that 14-year-old with services that are illegal because they are 14, you should be the one who is held to account for doing so.
I can see your point.
If I recall correctly the way Germany (used to?) deals with this is that there is an age below which you cannot have any criminal liability, then an age period during which you can be tried as a minor, followed by a period between 18 and 21 where you could be tried either way depending on a psychologist’s assessment.
I believe the same sort of system applies for civil contracts. There’s an age where no contract can be binding, then a period where some contracts can be entered into, then full contractual capacity.
Probably makes more sense.
Oh, that’s a shitload of lawsuits just waiting to happen…
Yeah and this administration will go to bat for the right to “allow” 14 year olds to pick fruits over the summer for sub-minimum wage so we aren’t so dependent on (illegal) immigrants to do the same.
Your tax dollars at work.
Jokes on them, kids today don’t work.
I joke, but no, really, under 18 employment numbers are way down. Especially after the recession. Partly due to adults holding onto typical “starter jobs”, partly due to some pre teen jobs being fazed out (i.e. paper routes), partly due to traditional jobs like lawn care being done by “professional services”. (ETA - I am sure social factors may also play a role.)
Until someone’s kid dies from heatstroke or something similar.
Trying to roll back child labor laws is yet another dumbass move that shows how little these fuckers care about anyone who isn’t them.
Big deal. I picked pumpkins and planted/harvested/processed sweet potatoes when I was 13 and 14. I even (gasp) drove trucks. And I’m still here. It’s almost as if teenagers are people too.
With the requirements for being in clubs, volunteer hours of some sort, etc. for graduation from high school much less getting into college what teen has time for a job?
The alternative to believing the mom is that the kid, every time he came across a ubiquitous TOS, asked her permission rather than doing what every other human being does and ignoring it. I find that a lot less believable.
Practically, TOS are worthless and what we’re left with is a Wild West where game developers have to combat cheating via technical means and booting cheaters. Which is what is done now. But this wasn’t about the cheating, but the videos that undermined the business, by presenting an impression of the game as full of cheaters, driving away users. I’m disturbed they’re using copyright as the cudgel here (because the impact will be wide-ranging), but the case that’s more straight-to-the-point is that since he couldn’t agree to the TOS, he couldn’t legitimately play the game (and record it for Youtube). But they couldn’t take down the videos so easily without the copyright strike, so…
