News of the Week; October 22, 2014

GAMES

1. Judge says EA executives committed “puffery,” not securities fraud: Statements about Battlefield 4 launch were “corporate optimism, or puffery.”

2. IT HAPPENED TO ME: I’ve Been Forced Out Of My Home And Am Living In Constant Fear Because Of Relentless Death Threats From Gamergate. This is what happens when you stand up to the misogyny of gaming culture.(Brianna Wu)

+ ESA: “There’s no place in the video game community for threats”

+ So Long #Gamergate. What Did You Teach Us?

+ On GamerGate: A letter from the editor

+ We cannot let this become gaming culture: Organised abuse and threats of mass murder: this is the legacy of GamerGate.

+ Rape and death threats are terrorizing female gamers. Why haven’t men in tech spoken out? (Brianna Wu)

+ More women play video games than boys, and other surprising facts lost in the mess of Gamergate

+ The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate

3. ‘Hatred’ Unapologetically Embraces The Violence of ‘Mass Killings’

+ ‘Hatred’ Developer Creative Destruction Denies Accusations That Some Studio Members Are ‘Neo Nazis’

4. Nintendo Bricks Wii U Consoles Unless Owners Agree To New EULA

+ Virtual worlds players – consumers or citizens?

5. Multiplayer Network Innovations Files 26 Patent Infringement Lawsuits Between August and October

6. Indie game pulled off Steam after dev threatens Gabe Newell on Twitter: Paranautical Activity dev was irate over mistaken listing, Steam’s monopoly.

+ Mike Maulbeck Resigns From Code Avarice

7. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team accused of match fixing

8. Digital Extremes sells 61 per cent of shares for $73 million

9. Sony launching eSports league

10. 40,000 fans pack stadium for League of Legends final

11. FGC Player Terrance ‘PushaTee88’ Moore Passes Away After Collapsing at Tournament

12. How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift

13. Action Video Games Improve Sensorimotor Skills

14. One year after launch, The Stanley Parable surpasses 1M sold

15. Report: Mobile to become gaming’s biggest market by 2015

DIGITAL

16. BBC to publish ‘right to be forgotten’ removals list

17. Dish Wins Yet Again Over Networks Looking To Kill Off New Innovations With Questionable Copyright Claims

18. Parents May Be Liable for What Their Kids Post on Facebook, Court Rules

19. UK stiffens maximum sentence for online harassment to 2 years

20. Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K.

+ Amazon Must Be Stopped: It’s too big. It’s cannibalizing the economy. It’s time for a radical plan.

+ Amazon’s Elite Reviewing Club Sabotaged My Book

21. Chinese government launches man-in-middle attack against iCloud: Targeting new iPhone users to capture user credentials, monitors find.

22. China Turns From ‘Pirate’ Nation To Giant Patent Troll

23. How Corporate Canada Rejected the Canadian Government’s Plan to Combat Patent Trolls (Michael Geist)

24. Copyright Maximalists And Lobbyists Insist ‘Criminal Elements’ Are Secretly Leading The Copyright Reform Effort

25. Google rolling out new anti-piracy search algorithm: “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings.”

26. Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users

+ What Whisper Is All About

+ Whisper: the facts

27. Facebook wants the DEA to promise that it won’t create fake accounts

28. Explaing the rise and fall of the Warez MP3 scene: An empirical account from the inside

29. Illegal Copying Has Always Created Jobs, Growth, And Prosperity

30. Human society in a digital world – by Neelie Kroes and Carl-Christian Buhr

31. Virtual Economies – what can they teach us about the real world?

32. Lobster Is A Marketplace For Licensing Affordable User-Generated Content

CONSTRAINTS

33. Crooner in Rights Spat: Are copyright laws too strict?

34. What has happened to journalism?: Redeeming an institution that is essential to democracy

35. ‘Am I being catfished?’ An author confronts her number one online critic: When a bad review of her first novel appeared online, Kathleen Hale was warned not to respond. But she soon found herself wading in

36. HBO has embraced Netflix’s business model, but not its net neutrality politics

37. Comcast “extortion” shows the need to treat broadband as a utility, Reddit’s Ohanian said

38. Will Silicon Valley Buy Hollywood?

jon