
Punishing Blizzard for anti-HK partisanship by flooding it with GDPR requests - lelf
https://boingboing.net/2019/10/08/ddos-gdpr.html
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merricksb
Previously discussed two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199701)

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dmix
DMCA is the other one that can be abused easily. I've seen people weild DMCA
on Reddit like a weapon, attacking entire forums with copyright requests and
Reddit automatically taking stuff down and even suspending accounts for
"repeat copyright infringement".

Always the sign of a poor law, but sometimes useful to expose it. I hope it
gets documented well.

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b0rsuk
In Poland, there's no abuse whatsover, since they're requesting a scan of ID
to let you delete your account, and that's illegal. It used to be a can of
worms and people had loans taken in their name without permission.

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greatpatton
I have also noticed a lot of 1* and HK comments on the Apple store for their
products.

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Aissen
People call that "punishing" but it's nothing of the sort: it's just
exercising a fundamental right to access whatever data companies have on you.

If they didn't do the work to automate this 3 years and half after the law was
voted, then it's on them.

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pimmen
Something that I think would do more is for the e-sports community to keep
criticizing the CCP on live streams. Ping your favorite players on the issue
and ask what they think. A lot of them will probably try to distance
themselves from politics altogether but some of them might actually respond in
ways that piss people off. If that generates more demands from the CCP to ban
people then Blizzard has to think long and hard about who's paying the bills;
the players or the CCP.

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deogeo
Is there no way to (mostly) automate GDPR responses? I too want to see
Blizzard crash, but I don't like abuse of the law, and even less when the law
in question has as many upsides as the GDPR.

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munchbunny
The hard part about automating the responses is that most companies haven't
put in the large amount of investment necessary to fully automate data
provenance. I'd bet that most companies have enough data to actually figure
out what is about which user if push comes to shove, but imagine having to
crawl through your 5-10 years of accumulated ORM and ETL hackery to fully
automate the ability to swim upstream through all of the dark corners of your
microservices to pull that data together.

I'm obviously exaggerating a bit, but for companies like Blizzard that have
been continuously developing Battle.net for over two decades, you can bet
there are some dark corners in the data pipeline.

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kalleboo
The GDPR has provisions for companies suddenly being flooded with requests,
extending the deadlines for responses in those cases.

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foepys
Only up to 3 months and you have to notify the person.

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PavlovsCat
Why not "punish" them by criticizing them, or boycotting them? Even "review
bombing" sucks, but abusing the GDPR, that _really_ sucks.

I'm very much in support of the protests, I think what Blizzard did was
shameful, and I loved seeing the hundreds of memes on their subreddits. I'm
not completely against civil disobedience and some tasteful vandalism. But
still, that doesn't mean anything goes at the drop of a hat, there's a thin
line between solidarity with a cause or a group by a massive number of people,
and a mass stampede to smash and destroy all enemies of said cause or group,
which can easily lead the whole thing into a ditch, not to mention rob it of
all moral standing.

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Xelbair
I am not punishing them with GDPR requests.

I am really curious what they do have on me, especially now that they start to
expand greatly into chinesee market. I don't even play their games any more as
they all turned into bland pulp.

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PavlovsCat
I was referring to the article, not you :) I think it's totally fair to be
reminded that hey, actually, what _do_ they have on me and not hold off until
the "punishment" is over, but then what I said obviously doesn't apply to you
per se.

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badrabbit
How about offering jobs to blizzard employees? Might work better in the long
term and a good PR move.

But food for thought here: can America win when fighting both Russia and China
at the same time? They say Germany's mistake in WW2 was fighting America and
Russia simulta eously.

My opinion is to stop fighting Russia, let them have their way with non-NATO
eastern europe and central Asia so long as they steer clear of genocide and
terrorism.

As far as China goes,offense is the best defense. Perhaps with help from
Russia,american allied western europe can compete with China's belt-road
initiative? Ex-colonial western europe has the upper hand to compete in
Africa. Just going by the nature of China's high-profile hacks (OPM and
Equifax for example),it seems influence and long-term control of the west is
their goal. They have no delusions of open war or a quick collapse of the west
but they simply do not want to be told what to do just like America will not
be told what to do when "advancing democracy" all over the world with or
without force. China is in the process of doing to america,east asia and
africa what America has been doing in Africa and South America for decades.
Russia on the other hand wants regional control, their former glory restored
and like china they also don't want to be told what to do. Except russia shows
no sign of ambitions for world domination like China. Either way, America with
all the internal strife would find it very hard to win in a proxy war against
either china or russia alone.

I only hope things don't escalate to military involvement in HK.

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badrabbit
Weird,would love to know which part of my comment caused all the downvotes.

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vegan_zaddy
Is this really the best move? Blizzard made a smart move; the player was going
to piss off a large portion of their user base. Freedom of speech works both
ways.

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corodra
A foreign country is imposing companies to self-censorship according to their
thoughts. It's also not the first time, by a long shot.

Fun part Blizzard "has" a motto, "Every voice matters".

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vegan_zaddy
"Self-censorship" happens every day. I'm allowed to say whatever I want but
I'm not allowed to force someone to give me a platform for my speech. This is
not a violation of free speech in any way.

