Remember when the US was going to make them into a “pariah state”?
Thinks changed quickly when you could sell them $350,000,000,000 worth of murder stuff didn’t it?
Made a lot less waves back then.
Priorities I guess.Saudi Arabia? I remember about 10 or so years ago that Saudi Arabia had banned Pokemon because “it promotes materialism”.
What changed?
Money.
After MBS became the de-facto leader (after some purges, to centralize all the power to himself) he started “liberalizing” and giving us more freedoms. It’s all bullshit.
Women weren’t even allowed to drive four years ago. That was probably the only good thing he gave us.
I’m glad I never played that game. Call me old fashioned but I prefer the original Pokemon games on the Gameboy, that’s all I ever played. It was fun going to friends’ houses and gatherings and trading Pokemon over Link cable. Fun times.
I’ve tried some of scopely’s games. They’re following this playbook to the letter.
You’ll be getting freebies when your friends spend cash. You’ll get time limited offers. You’ll be paying to “try again”, against other players.
Who wins when a wall street broker and an oil sheikh use their wallets to fight over a Pokémon gym? Scopely wins.
Scopely games are just a bunch of mixed dark patterns reskinned with some popular IP
Good video. Nailed a lot of game behavior.
“Arab country bad”
Edit: the downvotes just prove my point, as if it matters if an Arab country you are likely to never visit had your location data or not.
While I have your attention, check your propaganda
“Arab country bad”
Yes but not because of ethnicity but because of human rights abuses.
The call is coming from inside the house
Both can be true and both can be bad, like what’s so hard about this concept? One country’s shortcomings do not excuse other countries shortcomings ffs.
I am a level 47 player, altho havent played the game for several months now due to its downfall. Guess, wont be going back
But you were fine with Niantic? Why? They were an awful and evil company. Did you never look them up?
I don’t think anyone playing a game in which the main mechanic is tracking your location is the type of person to look anything up.
Lol if anyone looked at my pokemon go data, they’d think I was some playboy with a private jet that visits Jakarta one day, and Tokyo the next. They also think I have insomnia and wander around in half mile circles all night. They think I have some insane government access when I visit chernobyl or tour the entirety of Italy right in the middle of their worst covid lockdowns.
I disassembled one of my phones and physically detached the extra antenna bits for the GPS, making it extremely unreliable, and a little aluminum foil on top can start to throw my location 500ft in a random direction.
Pokemon go provides direct feedback for gps spoofing in a way I haven’t seen available anywhere else. The game isn’t too fun, but learning where I can break GPS is a pretty fun game. The game of cat and mouse with Niantic detecting spoofers has been interesting to say the least.
I didn’t understand how making your GPS more unreliable allowed you to be located in far away countries.
I thought the break would suggest two separate ideas, but in a sense it does help. Some spoofing can start ‘rubber banding’ between the spoofed location and the actual location, and if youre spoofing 1000 miles away, thats an insant soft ban. but if your phone never gets a proper fix on like 5 GPS satellites, you won’t rubber band.
I mostly used the damaged GPS phone to idly increase walking distance. If I set it to charge in a basement my character just bounces all around the outside of the house and I can wake up to a cool 10km walked. There’s better options for fake walking though.
If you’re interested in GPS spoofing, you can find a wealth of information by searching for ‘gps spoofing’ with ‘pokemon go’ tacked on the end. It takes an idea that otherwise makes you sound like a paranoid person and turns it into just cheating at a videogame.
Or probably not as I have never played the game… I’m still annoyed by this headline format.
Saudi Govt: So MbS, what are we doing this week?
MbS: Well, first we’re gonna buy Pokémon Go, and if THAT goes well, then we’ll try to negotiate peace for Ukraine.
Saudi Govt: Priorities, Crowned Prince Mohammed. 💪
Oh man… probably should have passed laws to regulate data harvesting and digital privacy back in the 90s
when the Internet was still just a series of tubes…
Tell me again how tik tok is a Chinese spy network? When they can just BUY our information like this?
Because a lie told often enough becomes true.
Realistically, every useful idiot is afraid to say they don’t know if a Chinese company is a spy network because it’s sooooooooo obvious even asking for proof makes them look stupid.
Ironically, not asking for proof is what makes us stupid.
If something is “so obviously true” yet nobody can provide evidence for it when asked, it’s probably the propaganda mill doing its job.
We know who pushed for the TikTok ban and why.
Imagine uncontroled popular mass media.
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-798115
Probably they are all spy networks… Not to pee in your cereal or anything.
If everything is a spy network, then nothing is
Yeah this is a pretty dumb take. If all social media is stealing your info, then they are still all stealing your info. This is not “if everyone has superpowers nobody does,” it’s just a dipshit thing to say.
Unpaywalled link is convenient but so do consider subscribing if you want to support this kind of journalism :
“404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Become a paid subscriber here for access to all of our articles ad-free and bonus content.”
Can you prove this is worse than an insideous, shitty company like Niantic? No. No you cannot.
FUCK Niantic, and fuck this xenophobic noise.
Yes I can. Saudi Arabia is where modern slavery still happens. Women have no rights. The country funds proxy wars in the Middle East. Everyone who’s rich in that country is rich through exploiting oil, religion, terrible work conditions, or some combination of all the above. The only other country that out-does them on this front is The United Arabic Emirates.
A succesful company in that country would be party to all those things. Giving money to such a company would be giving money in support of all these things, as the money you give them becomes part of their economy. Pokemon GO would only be bought by any company because they see the potential of it becoming a money printing machine.
Being critical =/= xenophobic.
Yes, i’d love my data to be owned by oil barons that want to see me decapitated.
The sauds are the most evil people alive. And i’m saying this as an arab.
The sauds are the most evil people alive. And i’m saying this as an arab.
Koreans might disagree with this statement.
OOTL, who is it for them, then?
OOTL, who is it for them, then?
The Kim dynasty. How can one be out of the loop about the basics of North Korea?
Why are you being hostile? I just mostly focus on middle eastern politics.
I’d argue while the kim dynasty are the worst in the korean peninsula, they aren’t as much of a danger as the sauds globally.
Why are you being hostile?
I’m not.
I just mostly focus on middle eastern politics.
Maybe broaden your horizon.
they aren’t as much of a danger as the sauds globally.
Yeah, the ones with nukes and fighting a war against Europe are not a danger.
Yay, capitalism.
The scene in Austin Powers when he first comes out of cryo and assumes the communists won the cold war makes a lot more sense to me as an adult
And what’s so wrong in this particular case?
The sauds are the last people you want to own anything you use.
I don’t get how that’s capitalism’s fault though
Because it allows people’s data to be sold off. In other words, we’re the product.
Then the “yay capitalism” phrase can be applied to any digital product, and not just to this one then
Bad people are allowed to do bad things as long as they have the money for it.
Capitalism is the fault.
Really feeling that free market…
https://media.tenor.com/0BkvWV1SdzEAAAAM/dyinginside-suffering.gif
Time to never use any of their products again
Saudi Arabia isn’t a person. I hate it when news titles aren’t specific enough. Is it the government that bought them? A private company? Just a dude that happens to be Saudi? The implications can change drastically based on who bought it.
Also the article link isn’t working for me so all i got is the title. And as most people that’d see it, they’d also only read the title, this type of simplification can lead to a lot of misinformation. Or worse, racism, as you combine a whole country and its people to one entity which is dehumanizing. I’m speaking from experience as a Saudi person who’s always grouped with the “saudi” or "Arabic " or “brown” groups instead of another human being.
In short, news should stop generalizing and be more specific, especially in the titles, the part that most people will interact with.
unpaywalled: https://archive.is/7yc9S
A Saudi Arabian company that was created by the Saudi Arabian government just purchased Pokémon Go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fund
If you can’t see the article i will paste it for you.
I’m speaking from experience as a Saudi person who’s always grouped with the “saudi” or "Arabic " or “brown” groups instead of another human being.
So am i, and i’m also sick of it and the people who use this to fuel discrimination. I see this article as more of a reason to hate the sauds, not saudi people.
Anyone that groups individuals with their government is a bigot advertising their bigotry.
Edit: looks like I upset some bigots.
Removed by mod
I guess I’m pretty suspicious of all states and the control they exert over the average person to use that metric. It’s my opinion that if democracy worked, it’d be illegal (or subverted by a CIA-backed coup).
Removed by mod
I mean, if it’s in Saudi Arabia you know the royal family is in full control, so in this it kind of makes sense
Saudi Arabia isn’t a person.
Yes, it is. In an autocratic monarchy, in a dictatorship, everything belongs to the king. The house of Saud is treating the country as their personal property and let’s not pretend that anything would prevent the guy who killed a journalist in his embassy from accessing that data.
