history

28 Oct

The Video Game History Foundation’s fight for game preservation isn’t over

stp2y0 CommentsNewscopyright, foundation, gaming, history, news, Video Games

Last week, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) released a expressing its regret that the US Copyright Office’s refused to grant an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to help preserve rare video games. However, the VGHF continued by saying it won’t back down and will continue advocating for improved video game preservation.For some context, the VGHF had been a longtime supporter of the Software Preservation Network’s (SPN) petition to receive a for the sake of preserving video games, especially for researchers who need access to them and can’t do so due to unavailability. As the only currently…

18 Oct

You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsencryption, hacks, history, plaintext, politics, security

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and essentially harassing him to death. So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers…