News of the Week; December 10, 2014

GAMES

1. Activision Prevails in ‘Angry Monkey’ Military Patch Lawsuit

2. General George Patton’s rights holders go to war with video game maker: Case follows similar infringement gaming suits by Lindsay Lohan, Manuel Noriega.

3. Kmart Australia Joins Target Australia in Pulling ‘GTA V’ From Stores Shelves

Take-Two: Don’t like GTA? Don’t buy it

4. Why does gender balance matter in the games industry?

5. AbleGamers’ Weird Weekend of Porn, Charity, DDoS Attacks, and GamerGate

6. Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades: Still on track for the 2016 Angry Birds movie.

7. Microsoft Apologizes For Late Payments to Xbox Live Indie Game Developers

8. Microsoft: Will “work on making amends” for Street Fighter exclusivity

9. Half-Life 2 Is Now A Strategy Game. Thanks, Modders

10. New 3DS firmware breaks recently released “Ninjhax” homebrew exploit: Hackers urge users not to update if they want to run unsigned code.

11. Les Simerables: SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.

12. Mobile gaming overtakes PC in Southeast Asia – Report

13. “It will be hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s virtual”

14, Samsung shares horrifying laundry list of potential Gear VR risks: Users should take breaks every 30 minutes “even if you do not think you need it.”

15. Twitch acquiring eSports agency GoodGame

16. A Brief History of Games Journalism: Over the past four decades, games journalism has undergone some major evolutions. We look at how it’s changed over the years.

17. The 20 Years When Games Grew Up

18. On Like Donkey Kong: Super Nintendo vs Hip-Hop: Famed video game composer David Wise reacts to being sampled by Drake and Childish Gambino

19. Secret Habitat Explores The Phenomena Of Procedural Art

20. British Tory MP Caught Playing ‘Candy Crush Saga’ During Important Hearing

21. Playing With My Son: An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting

22. ‘Elegy for a Dead World’ Now Available On Steam

23. Obituary: Ralph Baer – Electronics pioneer who fathered the console passes away

DIGITAL

24. Apple on trial: Company execs say DRM was forced on them by record labels

Apple deleted music from users’ iPods purchased from rivals, court told: Apple scanned for music purchased from rival services such as Amazon and forced users to delete all music from their iPods, it is claimed

25. DirecTV contract punishes HBO if streaming-only gets too popular, sources say: It seems the TV provider has been planning for HBO’s Web-only service for a while.

26. Negotiating Away Innovation: Dish Agrees To Kill Autohop To End TV Blackouts

27. Comcast Sued Over Router Update That Makes Your Wi-Fi Hotspot Public, Ignores Your Opt-Out Preferences

28. AT&T still throttles “unlimited data”—even when network not congested: Half-megabit speeds force customers to abandon unlimited data.

29. Internet Provider Sonic’s CEO: Title II Is Only A Regulatory Burden If You’re Doing Something Bad

30. Is Livestreaming the Future of Media, or the Future of Activism?: It might be both. A report from Ferguson, and your laptop screen.

31. SCC holds disclosure of private communications engages constitutional rights

32. Canadian Law Enforcement Agency Dropping Cases Rather Than Deal With New Warrant Requirements For ISP Subscriber Info

33. The unstoppable rise of the global surveillance profiteers

34. All cameras are police cameras

35. NSA spies on carriers to break call encryption, report suggests

NSA warrantless bulk phone metadata spying continues unabated: Metadata snooping re-authorized a fourth time despite Obama’s reform pledge.

Idaho mom’s suit over NSA database gets a cool reception from appeals court

Secretive UK Court That Approves Of GCHQ Surveillance Says That GCHQ Surveillance Doesn’t Violate Human Rights

36. The System Isn’t Going to Fix Itself—It’s Time for Us to Police the Police

37. Microsoft tells US: The world’s servers are not yours for the taking – Redmond says the US would be aghast if a foreign government behaved as it does.

38. BitTorrent is building a decentralized web browser

39. The World Cracks Down on the Internet

China cracks down on unofficial fan groups who subtitle hit American TV shows

Who runs the Internet?: The Internet as we know it has come under threat. As governments and large corporations poise themselves to take control, the question is: What can we as individual users do?

40. Report: Iran Developing System To ID Any Internet User

41. Personal data protection is a ‘fundamental right’ in Europe

42. ‘Right to be forgotten’ on the Internet gains traction in Japan

43. Class Action Law Suits for Privacy Breaches in Canada: A Useful Tool in a Half-Full Toolbox? (Teresa Scassa)

44. A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley: Shanley Kane challenges the assumptions and practices of the tech industry.

45. Wanted: a tinkerer’s charter – Users should be allowed to fiddle with the way consumer products work without suffering penalties from governments or sanctions from manufacturers (The Economist)

46. Copyright Implications of a “Right to be Forgotten”? Or How to Take-Down the Internet Archive.

47. Chasing Clicks: Metrics should support a strategy, not be a strategy

48. Implanted Future: How Bodyhacking Could Become Commonplace

49. Uber Banned In New Delhi In Latest Twist Following Alleged Passenger Rape

Uber Faces Legal Action In India Following Arrest Of Rape Suspect (Note terms of service discussion)

More Woe For Uber As Ride Sharing Service UberPop Ban Upheld In The Netherlands

Portland Sues Uber

Uber sued by SF and LA, shut down in Spain and Thailand – Prosecutors: Uber doesn’t even fingerprint its drivers, claims high safety mark.

50. We Can’t Trust Uber (Zeynep Tufekci & Brayden King)

51. Why Uber’s ‘god view’ is creepy (Bruce Schneier)

52. With bullying app Secret on life support, investors learn the risk of investing in (jerks)

53. Readings in Big Data Ethics – Updated List (Santa Clara University)

CONSTRAINTS

54. Is Our Art Equal to the Challenges of Our Times?

55. YouTube shows video creators what copyright restrictions their audio will face: Audio Library will now include information about tracks’ playability, monetization.

56. Authors Guild Argues That Google Books Should Be Infringing Because Aaron Swartz

57. Staffers Resign En Masse At ‘The New Republic’ Amid Planned Changes

Facebook Prince Purges The New Republic: Inside the Destruction of a 100-Year-Old Magazine

58. Twitter has made the 24-hour news cycle into a 2-hour news cycle

59. Everything Rolling Stone did wrong: How it should have protected Jackie from getting torn apart by trolls – Finally, the magazine stops blaming Jackie and starts blaming itself

60. The newsonomics of the newly quantified, gamified news reader

61. For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong

62. Radio-Free Syria

63. This is Your Brain on Jazz Improvisation: The Neuroscience of Creativity

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