Month: February 2018

(credit: Mayor McGinn)

In a bipartisan 388 to 25 vote, the House of Representatives approved legislation on Tuesday to make it easier for states to prosecute websites that facilitate prostitution and sex trafficking—including trafficking of underage girls. But critics say that the legislation, known as the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), could undermine a key legal protection for free speech online.

The House bill modifies Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which provides website operators with broad immunity for hosting third-party content. Digital rights groups argue that Section 230 made today's innovative and free-wheeling Internet possible because sites don't have to worry about getting sued if their users post content that violates the law.

"FOSTA would punch a major hole in Section 230, enabling lawsuits and prosecutions against online platforms—including ones that aren’t even aware that sex trafficking is taking place," the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote on Tuesday.

Enlarge / Washington State Capitol Legislative Building in Olympia, Washington. (credit: Getty Images | VW Pics )

The Washington state legislature has approved a net neutrality law that applies to all wired and wireless Internet providers in the state and prohibits blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

The bill comes in response to the Federal Communications Commission decision in December 2017 to scrap federal net neutrality rules. The state bill still needs the signature of Governor Jay Inslee, who previously pledged to enforce net neutrality "under our own authority and under our own laws," calling it "a free speech issue as well as a business development issue."

Washington is apparently the first state whose legislature has passed a law that imposes net neutrality rules on all ISPs. The governors of five states had already decided to impose net neutrality restrictions on ISPs that provide Internet service to state agencies.

Enlarge / Android Go has access to the whole Play Store, but these are the Go-specific apps.

Mobile World Congress is happening this week, and we're slowly getting a better picture of what Google's new "Android Go" initiative will look like. Android Go is a special configuration of Android 8.1 (with a selection of special "Go" apps) that targets low-end devices with 1GB of RAM or less.

MWC has seen a ton of manufacturers sign up for the program and announce phones shipping with the Go config, so it's time for a hardware roundup.

Nokia 1—Probably coming to everywhere but the US

Welcome back to "War Stories," our ongoing video series looking at game devs tackling complex programming challenges. Check out our previous chats with Looking Glass founder Paul Neurath and Ultima designer Richard Garriott.

Any fan of spacefaring turn-based strategy games should know the name Brad Wardell. For decades now, Wardell and his studio Stardock have been behind the well-loved Galactic Civilizations series, which started on the ill-fated OS/2 before finding success on Windows years later. The studio's space-RTS empire also includes Sins of a Solar Empire and Ashes of the Singularity, keeping alive a genre that has fallen into obscurity in recent years.

Around 2010, though, Wardell and Stardock took a turn away from sci-fi and toward high fantasy with the extremely ambitious Elemental: War of Magic. As Wardell recalls, the development plan called for units that could marry and have children that really aged, fully designable cities, and individual units that could each be fully outfitted with their own sets of clothes.