News of the Week; January 7, 2015

GAMES

1. EA Loses Appeal in Madden NFL 09 Lawsuit

+ Lawsuit Over Use Of Former NFL Players’ Likeness In Madden Moves Forward

2. Video Game Club 2014 – Entry 6: I’m no longer interested in worrying about whether other gamers think I’m sufficiently hardcore.

3. How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate: That tell-tale wedding of relentless hostility and ethical affectation is a peculiar youth subculture spilling out into the open web. Get ready for more of it.

4. 8chan user offers to “swat” GamerGate critic, cops sent to an old address: Post offers to swat forum-selected target; 20 police officers show up around midnight.

5. Video games and gun violence: A year after Sandy Hook

6. Racing video games may influence later behavior

7. Why PSN went down: Lizard Squad’s capabilities ‘far exceed typical DDoS groups’

+ Sony Offers Five Free Days of PlayStation Plus for PSN Christmas Outages

8. Dreaming Of Video Games – Researchers Investigate How Playing Games Affects The Sleeping Mind

9. PC Gamers Pick Their Top 10 Mods of 2014

10. Gaze Into The Future: Analyst Predictions for 2015

11. Over 2,300 MS-DOS games now completely free to play at Internet Archive

12. 18.5m PlayStation 4 units sold

DIGITAL

13. Sony Uses CES Keynote to Condemn Hackers

+ FBI: North Korea “got sloppy” with IP addresses in Sony hack

+ Sony hacking leads to U.S. sanctions against North Korea: Cites ‘provocations’ and threats against movie theatres

14. Canadian ISPs And VPNs Now Have To Alert Pirating Customers

15. Canadian Anti-Piracy Company Caught Using Unattributed And Paywalled Articles To Fill Its Blog

16. Google handled 345 million copyright takedowns in 2014: It’s a 75% year-over-year jump, and exponentially more than a few years ago.

17. Canadians That Access U.S. Netflix May Be in a Legal Grey Zone, But They Are Not Stealing (Michael Geist)

18. Top 10 Fair Use Cases of 2014

19. Bound by Law?: Free Comic Book Explains How Copyright Complicates Art

20. All Of These Works Should Be In The Public Domain, But Aren’t

21. Who’s the true enemy of internet freedom – China, Russia, or the US?: Beijing and Moscow are rightly chastised for restricting their citizens’ online access – but it’s the US that is now even more aggressive in asserting its digital sovereignty (Evgeny Morozov)

22. Inside Putin’s Information War: I spent years working for Russian channels. What I saw would terrify the West.

23. Netflix Helps You Trick Kids Into Thinking Midnight Came Early With An On-Demand Countdown

24. The Cybersecurity Tipping Point

25. Big Mother Is Watching You: If you keep your fitness-related New Year’s resolutions in 2015, it’ll likely be thanks to the new wave of devices and apps that have taken monitoring things like newborn sleep patterns and blood oxygenation from geek hobby to mass-market juggernaut. But what happens when companies have access to the most mundane details about our bodies?

26. Browsing in privacy mode? Super Cookies can track you anyway: New technique allows websites to bypass privacy mode unless users take special care.

27. Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo is a case study in the toxic nature of stack ranking

28. What Was Ello?

29. Children’s Digital Rights: A Priority – The unfolding global research and policy agenda for children’s digital rights is discussed

30. ‘I emailed a message between two brains’

31. Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer

32. The Trouble With Sweeping Questions About the Internet – Pundits and scholars too often phrase queries that miss the point: The transformative power of any technology relies first on underlying human forces.

33. Understanding Bitcoin And Its Disruption Through Its Roots

34. Virtual Reality’s Nagging Problem: It Makes Some People Sick

CONSTRAINTS

35. Novelists, poets, cartoonists respond to attacks on Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris

+ Freedom of Expression: International Publishers Association Issues Statement on Paris Attack

+ Obama condemns ‘cowardly, evil’ Paris attack, offers US help to pursue terrorists

36. Why cash and copyright are bad news for creativity (Dan Hunter)

37. Nielsen Music’s Year-End: Streaming Is Not Killing the Record Business

38. The Romantic Author and the Romance Writer: Resisting Gendered Concepts of Creativity (Rebecca Tushnet)

39. Creativity Is Collective: Personal experiences and character traits alone may not be enough to produce a prodigy. It takes a village

jon