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Twitter Stops Users From Playing DOS Games Inside Tweets
jones_supa writes: Twitter has killed off an interesting trend of playing DOS games in tweets. Last week, users discovered they could use the new "Twitter Cards" embedding feature to bundle full DOS games within tweets. Running DOSBox inside the web browser is possible thanks to an Emscripten port of DOSBox called Em-DOSBox. The games were pulled from Internet Archive's collection of 2,600 classic titles, many of which still lack proper republishing agreements with the copyright holder. So, is embedding games within Twitter Cards, against the social network's terms of service? Either way, Twitter has now blocked such activity, likely after seeing the various news reports and a stream of Street Fighter II, Wolfenstein 3D and Zool cheering up people's timelines.
The main concern is that enough people rediscover old games, not upholding copyright. Personally, even as a good ranking gamer in contemporary FPSes, I could ditch every game made past 1983 and be very happy with the earlier ones.
Twitter is so desperate to make money, they'll only bring this back if they can somehow profit off of it.
Is there any reason to suspect that the version of dosbox compiled into javascript is more vulnerable to having programs inside punch their way out than the version of dosbox compiled for your platform of choice is?
I doubt that it is god's gift to efficiency; but it isn't obvious why dosbox would be a more permeable VM in-browser than it is on the desktop(how permeable it is, or isn't, I don't know, it probably gets less testing than the more heavily used and often publicly exposed VMs; but it is also emulating something relativley simple compared to those).
Do I REALLY want to run a dosbox in my browser?
How are we supposed to know the answer to that.
How long until someone comes up with an exploit?
An exploit to what exactly? Are you actually asserting that someone will discover a JavaScript security hole, then instead of simply exploiting it with a standard web page, they would instead construct an ms-dos program designed to run in dos box that exploits some additional security hole in dos box in order to exploit the JavaScript vulnerability? Do you happen to be afraid of your own shadow too?
Better known as 318230.
I'd say it's gotten a bit metaphysical at this point. The browser is is running the Javascript inside of a sandbox. This particular javascript file is a cross-compiled version of Dosbox, plus some API wrappers to make Dosbox think that it's running in Linux with SDL2. Dosbox in turn is emulating the CPU and hardware of a typical 386, as well as providing implementations of various DOS facilities.
Browser exploits exist (or at any rate have existed in the past, and may exist in the future; a 0-day may or may not exist at any given time), and most of them use Javascript in some way; this much is true. However, why write a DOS program that tricks Dosbox into tricking Emscripten into running that exploit when you could just run the exploit directly? This might be a great way to show off, but wouldn't be very practical.
Whatever that was meant to do, it isn't doing it.
Please, don't feed the trolls..
Fine, but is it alright if I feed someone who writes an emulator to host an operating system which runs a program that feeds the trolls?
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were the games in the tweets? i thought the tweets were in a browser running on the user's machine.
You failed with that last one. We don't use laptops.
tweets are still restricted to 140 characters, yet they allow you to embed dos games into the message?
Do I REALLY want to run a dosbox in my browser?
Just type WIN at the command prompt and hit enter, LOL.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That would be a much more interesting hack than the usual exploits. Probably it would be worthy of posting on slashdot.
Biters show up to say it's just a javascript sandbox. Counters point out vulnerabilities. Counters are countered. We bitterly bitch, we derail into pepsi vs coke, and someone Godwins.
If I could advocate parent, s/he exhibited instincts we've been trying to teach. Our security guy slapped together a little phising/soc-engineering training video that a few of our departments got added to their training, including IT. I realized you could boil the thing, and all it was really saying is Be Skeptical, over and over.
The other instinct I noticed is the one that wants to downloading something you can control and manipulate, run it on a proper loader. Not saying that one should be universal like the Caution above, just observing it.
* What you can still do in 32KB of RAM!
God damn youngster
http://www.bricklin.com/histor...
There's visicalc in 28K
Why use a megacorp website that hates fun?
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Also, your browser is dynamically recompiling the javascript.
It supports consoles as well, via JSMESS. https://archive.org/details/gg...
Then you probably need a better screen. Back then, the highest resolution was 640x480 and later 1024x768. If your system can't double or quadruple that correctly then you need to get a better display. Or don't resize it at all. Back then we DID play on 12"/14" displays.
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Is that games from back then can fit in a tweet from nowadays. Imagine that every stupid tweet you have ever sent, seen or received is a full-fledged video game. That's how scarce our storage space was back then (and we liked it).
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