The government makes the laws, and Epic tries to comply. I assume name matching is sufficient for legal compliance.
Whether it’s sufficient to make a trade restriction effective is basically impossible for me to evaluate. A googling of the topic suggests that there’s not a clear consensus on the topic among people who study it. I like to think the people writing the laws give a shit about whether the law accomplishes something effective, but I have no evidence one way or the other.
Again, I am inclined to think that the line that is being drawn here is not whether someone can get a copy of UE4 or not - they obviously can, and I expect they could just torrent it anyway, but rather whether they can have a legitimate license to UE4, which would allow them to create a product that can be sold on international markets. However, we’re deep in guesswork territory here.
Okay, we’ve hashed out name matching and scope. Next dumb question: why do they have to check for “exports” when they’re selling a game licence to a guy living and working in Florida, presumably with a credit card attached to a Florida address? If the game company and the player are both in the USA, nothing is being exported.
Just do it with a middleman whose name is on the paperwork, possibly without having an idea that he’s a middleman, and stay behind the scene via informal links.
Works with many kinds of scams. No reason it wouldn’t work with something more legitimate.
This kind of crap is one of the few things that make me see red. I hate the export crap; it should be countered via opensource R&D and high-capability at-home manufacturing that renders it as impotent as it should be.
The List of Wrong Names is exactly the kind of crap that happens when a bureaucrat gets too much power.
Sorry. I’ve been describing these as export restrictions, because that’s the kind of restriction I’m most used to seeing on video game tech, but it looks like the OFAC is a different kind of beast
I think you’re examining the process too closely to notice the context. The problem is that a potential customer got banned — for however short a period — from owning a game because he was called the local equivalent of “John Smith”. This is evidence of something not working right. Now, with that context, do you think you can see the problem now? And how to fix it?
If I get banned from my local pub, the landlord will take my name and put up a picture so that all his staff will know that I’m the Nelsie that’s banned, and not some other poor soul whose parents were as unoriginal as mine. Or, indeed, someone who looks like me but called something else.
It’s like a really stupid example of one of those lists of things programmers have taken for granted but that aren’t actually true: that a name is a sufficient identifier, and that any false positives won’t be significant. “Oh, if I assume that all years have 365 days, I’ll only be wrong one day in 1460, no, 1461 days. And there won’t be any knock-on effects, and if there are, they’ll take less time to clear up than me thinking about how to write a robust calendar subroutine.” And then forgetting that the company using his code will be running it 24 hours a day for millions of customer transactions, probably for twenty years or more.
It’s not that one “John Smith” that’s been made to wait longer than an hour for his game. It’s not even all the John Smiths who are being made to jump through hoops to get the company to acknowledge that they aren’t the John Smith that the CIA or NSA or HLS were thinking of. It’s not even everybody else who has a name identical to one on that stupid list being made to wait for that game.
It’s everyone with a name on that list every instance that the list is used. From games to air travel to snatch squads pulling random John Smiths from the phone books for enhanced interrogation when their country gets invaded (or when the local authorities want to brown-nose the US), and everything in-between. All because “Something has to be done: this is something so we must do it.” It doesn’t matter if the procedure is rubbish, as long as we’re following the procedure it’s someone else’s problem. John Smith’s problem.
It’s the tweets that have been attached to the compelling case. It’s the same damn thing that’s been going on since Abu Ghraib started filling up with people who had been improperly identified. And even when it’s grown like the black thing in Spirited Away and it’s spilling out into the world affecting things as trivial as downloading a damn game, still we get people saying they can’t see the problem.
These are in no way exclusionary; one person can fill both roles. They can even start out with the role you described and end up with the other - as in the Stanford prison experiment I previously mentioned, performing a role can shape the performer.
In reality names are not identification, and everyone with two brain cells to knock together knows this - that’s why you have to have a picture on your driver’s license, capisce? And fingerprints on your passport, and you can’t get PHI from HIPAA-regulated services without more than just a name, &etc. &etc.
There have never been more than two reasons to implement a name list - stupidity, and the exercise of power for power’s sake. Name list matching cannot achieve any desirable objective that I know of; it’s just part of conditioning people to accept their roles as oppressed and oppressors.
You seem to be saying that if I don’t see being blocked from a video game for a day as a problem, then I don’t see Abu Ghraib as a problem, because both are instances of misidentification based on name lists.
I’m actually able to acknowledge that some uses of name lists are problematic, whereas accidentally blocking people (even people on a name list) from access to a video game, then apologizing and fixing it, is not a problem.
just because a list of names was involved doesn’t elevate this to a war crime
Why should be anybody blocked from a game, assuming no game-related bad behavior on their side? Why should the government have the power to point at somebody and say, don’t trade with him or else?
What’s the fancy mathematical term for when you multiply something by zero, it’s still zero? They are the same problem, either because it’s the same thinking or because the same actual list. When you say that this part isn’t a problem, you’re making the other thing not a problem, too.
Though…
I see that you do think this is a problem now, so maybe the scales are slipping from your eyes…
Wait a minute - there doesn’t appear to be any “Muhammad Khan” on that list, as far as I can see. It seems like they checked his first and last name separately, and yep, both those names are on the list! - which is an unspeakably sloppy check system (which shouldn’t have even been in place for this anyways).
/facepalm
I think it’s worse than that - it seems like they blocked him not because his name was (metaphorically) “John Smith” and there was someone on the banned list with that name, but because the banned list had a “John Williams” and “Roger Smith” on it, or a “Roger William-John Smith aka Roger Smith” on it.
I would say John Smith had a technical problem, not a capital P Problem.
In this specific case, Epic applied a list where it didn’t belong, and fixed the problem the same day it was brought to their attention. Raising this to the level of Problem is like saying that I’m perpetuating racism and bringing back the minstrel show because I accidentally spilled black paint on myself
KHAN, Mohammad Naushad Alam (a.k.a. KHAN, Muhammad Nawshad Alam; a.k.a. KHAN, Muhammad Nowshad Alam; a.k.a. KHAN, Naushad Aalam; a.k.a. KHAN, Rahat Hasan); DOB 10 Aug 1971; alt. DOB Dec 1970; POB Karachi, Pakistan;
Yeah, my feelings on the existence of the list are a lot more mixed.
basically, the list exists at a level where I feel like there generally are no good realistic solutions - nations advance their own interests, often to the detriment of a lot of people. In the toolkit of ways that the US advances its interests, the OFAC seems not as bad as a war, but probably worse than direct financial contributions.
Then the US should ban that credit card. Its an unambiguous way of cutting that actual person out of dealings with the US, and you don’t have to enumerate all the ways they could possibly do it.
Upvote this to the moon. Your post nails EXACTLY why this system is ridiculous, and illustrates why the US no-fly list is just as stupid. Far more people will be wrongly caught up in systems like this than actual problem-childs will be prevented from doing their dastardly work. It’s not worth the inconvenience, when no problems are actually prevented from occurring. Bravo!
Yes, and note that none of the names by which he’s known is “Muhammad Khan.” So, again, that’s like confusing “Roger William-John Smith aka Roger Smith” with “John Smith” (or even “Jon Smith”). They are NOT the same names - and even if they were, it’s so common as to be worthless without extra information to verify it’s the same listed person. By arbitrarily using two of his names, you could probably get hundreds of thousands of people to “match.” But they also seem to be objecting to his first and last names separately.
