Links 2021-02-22
Please don’t link tax me.
Reverse Engineering a Unity-based Android Game
Wladimir Palant has a blog post about reverse engineering an Android app which is only available in binary form (archive). I’m interested in reverse engineering binaries and decompilation. It seems to have great potential for preserving old video games and allowing them to run on different platforms. For example, there was a project on GitHub which decompiled Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City (currently down due to some DMCA bullshit).
How Sustainable is High-tech Health Care
Low Tech Magazine discusses modern medicine’s environmental impact. There’s a bit of a philosophical discussion about how readily we should trade medical quality for efficiency. (archive)
Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace
This article(archive) by Matt Stoller gets into Facebook’s decision to ban all news in Australia and the legislation that triggered the extreme reaction. This clarifies a few things that I misunderstood about the law:
- It’s not a link tax. This law will not affect smaller link sharing platforms or personal websites. It only applies to “The Dominant Platform” (i.e. Facebook and Google).
- It doesn’t necessarily require payment for links but forces Facebook to be transparent about any algorithm changes and forbids it from using their position to bully publishers into agreeing to terms.
Corey Doctorow also wrote about the same topic. As usual, he’s more uncompromising.