It’s inevitable and it will be hysterical, destructive, and pointless other than to whip up political outrage… unless we all make fun of it now so that the story can’t take hold.
There’s this guy who’s building an open-source SEGA emulator for love and is distributing it for (basically) all major platforms including iPhone. The latest cut just dropped, check it:
touchHLE v0.2.1 is out. Happy Halloween! ?
This is the first release with support for Wolfenstein RPG, Doom II RPG and I Love Katamari. There’s also some important usability improvements on Android, among other things. Please check out the release notes! https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/releases/tag/v0.2.1
https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01HE3RD1EYJ6VC3ZGYEBH6TZEV
The thing is… did you spot the name “Wolfenstein” above? I don’t know if you’re aware but at least some of the Wolfenstein series are literally censored in Germany because of Nazi iconography, and so in those markets the Nazis are replaced by green-blooded zombies / aliens / similar, and Hitler loses his moustache to of course make it totally inobvious that that’s what’s being referred to:
The German Strafgesetzbuch section 86a outlaws the use of Nazi symbols as part of the denazification of the country post World War II. This law covers not only symbols like the swastika, but gestures like the Nazi salute. It doesn’t explicitly prohibit depictions of Adolf Hitler, but nevertheless, Hitler’s appearance in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus has been censored: they took his mustache off.
https://kotaku.com/wolfenstein-2-has-a-strange-workaround-for-germanys-cen-1819985020
As ever the problem with applying censorship (or export control, or restricted licensing) against software distributed by huge capitalist corporate actors and expecting it to “work” is that at some point something adequately similar will simply become an open-source free-for-all and the people — often, well-intentioned civil society wonks attempting to “protect” vulnerable individuals — will suddenly have to face overwhelming free circulation and distribution of the thing that they sought to restrict.
A bit like what’s going to happen to AI models over the next 10 to 20 years.
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