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The fines were applied under illegal pretenses. It’s like a castle built on sand.
And X is not entirely safe from being blocked. The messaging app Telegram suffered similar judicial abuses by the same judge during the 2022 elections. Telegram did not have legal representation in Brazil, but the judge threatened to block Telegram in Brazil anyway if they did not establish an office to officially receive his orders there. Then he began his usual judicial harassment campaign against Telegram: secret orders to block dissidents, daily fines, summoning the company’s representatives to testify before the Federal Police, and so on.
At the time, the Supreme Court was openly promoting a legislative bill that would facilitate their censorship efforts. In practice, this proposed law would dismantle the DMCA-like takedown request system that shields platforms from responsibility for user-generated content, something U.S. users take for granted. Please note how absurd it is for the judicial branch to sponsor a legislative bill: it blurs the separation of powers.
The same bill included provisions to appease big media conglomerates, as it would force Google to pay for news snippets on Google Search and Google News. It would also require Netflix to pay residuals to Brazilian actors, even if past contracts did not stipulate anything of the sort. And since the right-wing political spectrum would be the most negatively affected by a censored internet (traditional media is already pro-left), the left-wing portion of parliament also supported this bill. A large consortium was formed in defense of the bill: the Supreme Court, traditional media, artists, left-wing politicians, and the left-wing Executive government itself.
However, Google and Telegram opposed the bill as it interfered with their business and would incentivize arbitrary censorship. Both companies published prominent Op-Eds on their homepages, warning about the severe consequences of this bill. In Telegram’s case, a message was sent to all users criticizing the bill. The Supreme Court judge was livid and ordered Google and Telegram to remove the Op-Eds, accusing them of political interference (as if the Supreme Court was not doing the same by advocating for the bill’s approval). Note that there is no law forbidding companies from expressing their opinions on their platforms; the judge was simply unhinged and fabricated this accusation. The judge even summoned Google’s local CEO to testify before the Federal Police to intimidate the company.
Is being a pro-free speech platform anti-democratic?
If you’re trying to say that some of X’s users are “threatening democracy,” there are already laws in Brazil to address this without resorting to illegality.
The law states that platforms are only required to remove content by a court order, and the content to be removed must be specified. The Supreme Court judge I referred to earlier was blocking entire accounts, which amounts to “preventive censorship,” clearly prohibited by the Brazilian Constitution.
Moreover, this judge created a parallel judicial system where he denies citizens the right to be tried by their local judges: the process goes directly to his desk, and he acts as both prosecutor and judge simultaneously. It’s a gross violation of the principle of due process.
They’re just shutting down their local offices in Brazil, which are primarily used to represent X legally.
This is happening because a Supreme Court judge is conducting an inquiry to persecute those he deems propagators of fake news. In most legal systems, it would be considered highly illegal for a judge to conduct an investigative inquiry. It is also illegal in Brazil, but the other members of Supreme Court authorized this inquiry (“in the name of democracy”) and turned a blind eye for all its absurd consequences.
This judge doesn’t need the prosecutor’s office or any private individual to initiate the proceedings. The scope of this inquiry is very broad (fake news as a whole) and has no expiration date, making it potentially eternal. In some cases, he himself is supposedly a victim of fake news, which means this judge potentially occupies three roles: judge, prosecutor, and victim. As a result, ordinary citizens in Brazil can be “summoned” to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction immediately if the accusations are connected to this Fake News inquiry. Since the Supreme Court is the final jurisdiction for appeals, people unfortunate enough to get caught in this arbitrariness lose the right to appeal the decisions of a judge that is also the de facto prosecutor.
A few days ago, there were some leaks showing this judge’s assistants being asked to write reports against some individuals and news organizations that the judge wants to prosecute. In one instance, where there was no wrongdoing to report about a certain right-wing newspaper, the judge replied to his assistant: “Just look for some spicy allegations and be creative”. So this judge is using his superpowers to direct the investigation to serve his own ends, which mostly involves silencing critics of the Supreme Court and himself.
His most recent power trip involves sending secret orders to X’s Brazilian legal offices, demanding some accounts be blocked, and asking for all information related to these accounts. The judge stipuled daily fines for disobedience. But X’s Brazilian workers don’t have direct control of which accounts are blocked or not, so they tried to appeal to the full Supreme Court judges (which so far has not responded), and no account was blocked or doxxed. The judge then raised the daily fines further and threatened to jail X’s chief lawyer in Brazil, even though this lawyer has no control over what happens to X’s accounts. It’s as if he were threatening to arrest a lawyer for the supposed crimes of his client. To protect these workers from unfair arrests, Elon Musk laid off all workers from X’s local offices in Brazil, effectively closing all operations in the country.
The site and the app will continue working until the judge comes up with some bullshit reason to order all Brazilian ISPs to block access to X’s servers.
In a world where historical figures are repeatedly represented in media with the wrong ethnicity, that VA’s complaint seems like irony.
But seriously: if Genshin really aimed at accuracy, they’d have to portray the character as some old guy, which is totally contrary to the tone of the other characters in the game: youthful, cool-looking, modern.
Even the Steam Deck being computationally weaker than Asus’ and Lenovo’s offerings, I believe it’s still the superior option due to Valve’s commitment to its repairability. I would not be confortable buying an expensive gadget like these and not having the peace of mind of having rapair parts officially available for purchase.
Indeed, when I spot an apparently good mobile port I’m often hesitant to purchase it because an OS update may break compatibility at any point, and most developers don’t give a damn about updating their games so they stay compatible.
Until they fix this major structural issue, I don’t see premium smartphone gaming taking off. People will only invest their money if they have the confidence they’ll be able to play their game for the foreseeable future.
The main incentive for Blizzard to keep their game to their own launcher is not having to pay the 30% platform fee to Valve, especially on a MTX-based game.
It they are knelling to Valve now, it’s a sign Overwatch 2 is flopping so hard that the potential for Steam users playing the game outweighs the 30% in lost revenue.
As someone who’s not exactly a fighting game enthusiast, I can’t deny this game looks very appealing. I’d probably buy it if I had the proper hardware to play it.
That’s a stark contrast to SF5’s launch, in which I only remember seeing negative news about it. I guess first impressions matter in this case.
This new RPG approach allows them to:
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Adjust the “grindness” of the gameplay, requiring the player to kill a lot of enemies on sidequests to actually start being a threat to normal enemies. If the player rushes to the story missions without level grinding, enemies will feel like damage sponges.
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Make the previously insta-kill hidden dagger ineffective if the level of the player character is too lower that the enemy level. They do this so the player don’t have lethal options if they bypass the grinding.
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Introduce a loot-based economy, with crafting mechanics sprinkled on top. This is another aspect of grindness to make the player waste time before going to the main event (the story missions).
All previous points offer clear avenues for Ubisoft to sell MTX: XP boosts, premium loot though MTX, etc.
Ubisoft seem to be running out of ideas if their best bet is remaking a relatively recent game. They should leave the Assassin’s Creed franchise resting for a bit if they lack innovative ideas for it.
Maybe doing a feudal Japan AssCreed is still valid as there’s fan demand for it, but if they do they better nail it because they’ll be inevitably compared to Ghost of Tsushima.
Yeah, this is a bullshit excuse considering basically all physical releases come with Day-1 patches anyway. They should at least commit to releasing a physical version down the line. Maybe it’d be better if such late releases become the norm, so that what’s in the disc is the final/GOTY version of the game that doesn’t require any further patches.
I read its characters got woke designs and it cast a bad reputation on the game, like it was a game made for DEI pandering.
But that’s just part of it. I guess it’s the Live Service Gaming fatigue, and this game didn’t bring anything new to the table to set it apart from Overwatch.