vivdunstan

IFComp 2025 opens

2025-09-01T16:40:13Z

IFComp 2025 is now open for judging. There are 85 new interactive fiction games and stories in there. Free to play. Judging runs until October 15th.

This year the UK's Online Safety Act and very recent developments in it have posed considerable challenges to the IFComp organisers and IFTF folks. They have navigated their way through it as best as they can. But currently 24 of the 85 games are geoblocked to all UK players. Until a few days ago it was going to be all 85 ...

More details of the approach taken are in the IFComp blog at https://blog.ifcomp.org

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IFArchive and the UK Online Safety Act

2025-07-28T20:53:21Z

Another casualty of the UK Online Safety Act: all interactive fiction (including traditional parser text adventures) games stored at http://ifarchive.org are currently geoblocked to UK users. The IFTF folks are trying to work out a solution, but there is no current clue to how long that might take. The archive holds 30+ years worth of generally amateur/free IF games - a vast number. Including my own. Which I can't play online right now. Not that I want to, but it's rather ironic! Meanwhile the intfiction forum where this might usually be discussed is still down 36 hours later, after a Linode cloud server outage.

And IFComp is also likely to be affected, including the next competition opening for judging in just over a month. IFTF folk are currently urgently reviewing that. I wonder if I'll be able to play *any* IFComp games this year.

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Age verification on Bluesky

2025-07-23T21:18:44Z

Just did the age verification (UK) thing for Bluesky. Using my face with laptop camera. Photo supposedly deleted afterwards. The website was estimating my age, and I'm saying "Tell me a number!" Or probably best don't! It didn't give me a guessed age, but it was sure I was old enough. So yup, done.

Bluesky is one of the first services asking for this verification from UK folks due to new legislation. It's likely more will do this soon too. Verification can be done by photo (if you look old enough) or ID. I was much happier with a brief photo check than doing anything with my official paper ID. I'd probably not have been willing to do the latter option.

Age verification is currently not essential to use Bluesky, even with the new UK legislation. Most of the site's features will work without it. Though not direct messaging, which is something I find useful sometimes.

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Opting out of generative AI in Meta (Facebook and Instagram)

2024-09-25T16:19:36Z

There's a viral message currently going round where people think they can object to Meta (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) using their content to train AI simply by posting a message in a post on their feed. This won't work. You have to formally object to Facebook using the correct process. Go to https://www.facebook.com/privacy/center and click the "object". Then you have a simple form you can "submit" to opt out. Make sure your Facebook and/or Instagram email address is listed there (it will be prefilled if you are logged in on the web browser). You can add a reason in the text box if you want. I put "I do not want any of my Facebook or Instagram data to be used to train generative AI. Please respect that." but it shouldn't be necessary. Key thing is to click "submit". You will get an email a few minutes later from Facebook/Meta saying you are opted out. This objection form used to be vastly harder to fill out. They have greatly simplified it. Please use this to opt out, not a fake viral message.

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