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Twitter Stops Users From Playing DOS Games Inside Tweets

Posted by Soulskill on from the no-fun-allowed dept.

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.

10 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. The main concern by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The main concern by damnbunni · · Score: 2

      You know, if you unplug the ethernet cable from the PS3, you can just play the game without updating it.

      (Or disable the wifi, I guess. My PS3 is one of the wired-only ones.)

      Granted, that won't work for online play, but people playing online generally don't gripe about needing to download updates.

      The only time I ever put my consoles online is when I want to buy something from one of the download shops.

  2. They want to monetize it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Twitter is so desperate to make money, they'll only bring this back if they can somehow profit off of it.

    1. Re:They want to monetize it by Runaway1956 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes - and THAT would be a blatant copyright violation.

      Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.

      Casual users playing around with the code is cool, in my opinion. Corporate users making a profit, however indirectly, is not so cool.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    2. Re:They want to monetize it by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.

      Umm, when was that exactly? Wide-scale publication was not possible until the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The first copyright privilege after that was granted in 1486, and others quickly followed in the 1490s and early 1500s. They were almost exclusively granted to PRINTERS, not authors.

      It would take a couple more centuries before authors (not printers) tended to be granted copyright and thus had primary control over profit.

      (I of course take your point that Twitter making money off of this would be copyright infringement in the modern sense. But your idyllic "back in the mists of time" when no one was guaranteed profit and authors got some of it... well, it wasn't quite like that.)

  3. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    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).

  4. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by db48x · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. playing games inside of tweets? by shadowrat · · Score: 2

    were the games in the tweets? i thought the tweets were in a browser running on the user's machine.

  7. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by sexconker · · Score: 2

    You failed with that last one. We don't use laptops.