Terms of Service

Who you are agreeing with

Byte Size Factory is operated by Jackson Van Dyke, an individual, not a company. By using any Byte Size Factory product you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, do not use the products.

You need to be old enough to form a binding agreement where you live. If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian’s permission.

Not for emergencies

Nothing shipped under Byte Size Factory is an emergency-alert, safety-critical, or life-safety service. None of it is built, tested, or watched to a standard where someone’s safety should rest on it, and you should not use it that way.

This matters most for NeedToKnow. It ships a starter filter called “Local emergencies” that mentions hurricanes, flooding, grid failures, and chemical incidents, which can make it look like a warning system. It is not one. It is a filter over a handful of public feeds, run on a schedule, with a language model deciding what clears the bar you wrote. Where that falls short of an alerting system:

• Scanning is periodic, not continuous. A new account is scanned roughly hourly for its first 24 hours, and after that a free account is scanned at most once a day — less often if you choose it. A paid membership, when it opens, will allow up to hourly. Nothing runs in real time, and hours can pass between something happening and the next scan that would see it.
• I do not promise that any particular story reaches you, or reaches you within any window of time. Stories get missed, misjudged, and surfaced late. No one reviews what the model chose to show you, or what it quietly passed over.
• It can only ever reflect what its sources publish, when they publish it. NeedToKnow reads a handful of public feeds, one of which is a National Weather Service public alerts feed. It reads that feed on the same slow schedule as everything else, and reading it does not make the app an alerting channel: it is not a substitute for Wireless Emergency Alerts or NOAA Weather Radio, it is not an official alerting channel of any kind, and it is not connected to any emergency management agency or first responder. Anything none of its sources has published, it has no way to know about.
• Silence is the normal state. Most scans surface nothing, and the model is deliberately told to say nothing when it is unsure — that is the product working, not failing. Silence means nothing cleared your bar on the last scan. It never means nothing is happening.
• Notifications can be delayed or lost. A push travels through Google’s messaging service and your phone’s operating system. Battery saving, a weak connection, or a permission you switched off can hold one up or drop it entirely, and a push that quietly never arrives is not something either of us gets an alert about.

Use the systems built for emergencies instead: your local emergency number, the wireless emergency alerts your phone can already receive, the National Weather Service or your country’s equivalent, your local emergency management agency, and official broadcast media. Keep them switched on. Never delay acting because NeedToKnow has not notified you, and never read its silence as an all-clear.

Acceptable use

These are small games and apps, and the rules are the obvious ones. Do not:

• Break the law, or use a product to harm, harass, threaten, or impersonate someone.
• Cheat, exploit bugs for advantage, automate play, or otherwise interfere with other people’s experience of a multiplayer game.
• Attack the service — probing, scraping at volume, overwhelming it, or trying to get at accounts or data that are not yours.
• Reverse engineer, resell, or redistribute a product, except where the law says you may regardless of what this document claims.
• Share your account, or buy and sell accounts and in-game items outside the product.

If you find a security problem, tell me before you tell anyone else. Reports sent in good faith get a thank you, not a lawyer.

Software you install

Some of these products are not websites. They are programs you download and run on your own computer, and GameHydra is the current one. Two things are true of anything in that category and are worth saying plainly rather than leaving to the disclaimers further down.

What you buy is a licence, not the software itself. Buying a copy gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use it on the number of machines the licence covers, for as long as that licence lasts. Do not resell it, rent it, publish your licence key, or remove the part of the program that checks it. A licence can be revoked if it was obtained fraudulently — a stolen card, a reversed payment — and otherwise it is yours to use.

Software that moves your files can lose your files, so keep backups of anything you cannot replace. GameHydra relocates whole game folders between your drives and leaves a link behind in their place, and it is built to be careful about it: every move is a copy that is verified before the original is given up, a move that fails puts the game back, and nothing is deleted until the copy is whole. Careful is not the same as guaranteed. Drives fail, cables come loose, and a drive holding relocated games takes those games out of reach for as long as it is unplugged. Two habits cover you — bring your games home before you uninstall the program that moved them, and keep your saves backed up, which for most games means leaving Steam Cloud switched on.

Where a program has to check a licence over the internet, exactly what it sends is described in the Privacy Policy. Nothing installed under Byte Size Factory reports back on what you play, what you own, or what else is on your computer.

Accounts and termination

You are responsible for what happens under your account, including keeping your password to yourself. Tell me if you think someone else has access to it.

You can stop using a product at any time and delete your account — see how to delete your account for the steps.

I can suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms. For anything short of serious or repeated abuse I will try to warn you first, because most problems are misunderstandings. Serious cases — cheating, harming other players, attacking the service — may be terminated without warning. If your account is terminated for cause, purchases and in-game items are not refunded.

Purchases, licences, and virtual goods

Some products sell virtual items or currency, and some are sold outright as software. Payment is handled by a third-party payment processor either way; I never see or store your card details. This section does not apply to NeedToKnow, which sells nothing and has no payment path in it at all — the membership described in the app is planned, not open.

Where a product is sold as software rather than as something inside a game, what you are buying is the licence described above. Refunds for it work the same way as everything else sold under Byte Size Factory — see the Refund Policy.

When you buy a virtual item you are buying a limited, personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use it inside that product. To be plain about what that means:

• Virtual items have no real-world value. They are not currency, not property, and not an investment.
• They cannot be sold, traded, gifted, or transferred outside the product, and they cannot be exchanged for money.
• They exist only inside the product. If the product shuts down, they go with it.
• I may change, rebalance, or remove virtual items as part of developing the game. That is what live games do.

Refunds — for a virtual item, a software licence, or anything else sold under Byte Size Factory — are covered in one place, the Refund Policy, including what to do if you bought through a storefront rather than directly from me.

Availability, changes, and shutting things down

These products are provided as they are, and they change. I may add, alter, or remove features, and I do not promise any particular level of uptime.

I may also retire a product entirely. I have done it before and I will probably do it again — it is part of running a small studio honestly. If I retire something you have paid into, I will give reasonable notice where I can, and I will keep a way for you to request your data afterwards.

Disclaimer of warranties

The products are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. To the fullest extent permitted by law, I disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. I do not warrant that a product will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any defect will be corrected.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so some of the above may not apply to you.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Jackson Van Dyke will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, goodwill, or virtual items, arising out of your use of the products.

My total liability for any claim relating to the products is limited to the amount you paid me for that product in the twelve months before the claim arose, or twenty US dollars, whichever is greater.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot legally be limited — including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of the above may not apply to you.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory law in the country where you live.

Changes to these terms

I may update these terms. When I do, the date at the top of this page changes. If a change materially affects your rights, I will make a reasonable effort to give notice before it takes effect. Continuing to use a product after that means you accept the updated terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to support@bytesizefactory.dev.