News of the Week; January 14, 2015

GAMES

1. Spoiled Xmas Mornings: The Dark Side of the Online Future

2. Research Finds ‘Context Matters’ When Video Games Are Found To Influence Anti-Social Behavior

3. Violent Video Games Help Me Get Beyond My Violent Past

4. Microsoft clarifies position on external content usage

5. Developer: Publishers didn’t want a female lead in our video game – “We had other publishers telling us, ‘make it a male lead character.'”

6. Survey: 45% of the UK industry’s women feel gender is a “barrier”

7. Can a Video Game Help Rape Survivors?: An upcoming Oculus Rift experience tracks a character’s recovery following a sexual assault—aiming to enable empathy, even therapy, for survivors and outsiders alike.

8. Is ‘SimCity’ Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?

9. Award-winning composer faces union expulsion in game music fight

10. Researchers study benefits of exergaming

11. Gone Home: A Video Game as a Tool for Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

12. Computers Like To Sit In Front Of Computers And Play Games All Day, Too

DIGITAL

13. New Clues (Doc Searls & David Weinberger)

14. How Surveillance Causes Writers to Self-Censor (Bruce Schneier)

15. Code Is Law: But law is increasingly determining the ethics of code. (Jonathon Penney)

16. The Web Is the Real World: “Like an Uber for” became one of the most hackneyed phrases in tech this year. It’s also one of the most profound.

17. By 2025, the Definition of ‘Privacy’ Will Have Changed: In a new paper from Pew, experts warn that surveillance-free spaces are disappearing.

18. There’s a blockchain for that!: The code that secures Bitcoin could also power an alternate Internet. First, though, it has to work.

19. UK prime minister wants backdoors into messaging apps or he’ll ban them: In wake of Paris attacks, David Cameron targets encrypted communication services.

+ More Surveillance Won’t Protect Free Speech

20. Activist pulls off clever Wi-Fi honeypot to protest surveillance state: “All traffic that occurred via our wireless network has been logged.”

21. Zero for Conduct: On the surface, it sounds great for carriers to exempt popular apps from data charges. But it’s anti-competitive, patronizing, and counter-productive.

22. Rightscorp and BMG Exploiting Copyright Notice-and-Notice System: Citing False Legal Information in Payment Demands (Michael Geist)

+ Canada’s Copyright Notice Fiasco: Why Industry Minister James Moore Bears Some Responsibility (Michael Geist)

+ Canada’s copyright rules explained – A guide to Canada’s Internet piracy laws (with video)

23. Authors Guild Drops HathiTrust Case

+ Authors Guild Gives Up Trying To Sue Libraries For Digitally Scanning Book Collection

24. Copyright and Inequality (Lea Shaver)

25. White House Responds To Petition About Aaron Swartz By Saying Absolutely Nothing

+ Obama won’t fire Aaron Swartz’s federal prosecutors: White House “We the People” petitions demanding their removal lingered for two years.

+ Free Our Paywalled Court Documents: The Aaron Swartz Memorial PACER Cup Contest Announced

26. Sony Pictures CEO: call to Google got ‘The Interview’ out

27. Heads up, dear leader: Security hole found in North Korea’s home-grown OS: Misconfigured default permissions on files create a way to get root on Red Star OS.

28. What Does It Mean That James Bond’s In the Public Domain In Canada?

29. 10 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Intellectual Property Law

30. Apple’s ‘unwritten rules’ spark discontent for some app developers: Developers making use of new iOS features – even some shown off at the software’s launch – are finding their apps rejected by App Store staff

31. Decentralize All The Things!

32. Snowden Claims U.S. Policy Is Creating A Black Market For Digital Weapons

33. A Tarnished Uber Tries To Woo The Press

34. The digital bypass

35. President Obama Gets It: Net Neutrality Begins at Home

36. CEO Leslie Moonves Explains CBS’ Streaming Strategy: “I Don’t Care Where You Watch Our Shows”

37. The Town Without Wi-Fi: The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.

38. Game theorists crack poker: An ‘essentially unbeatable’ algorithm for the popular card game points to strategies for solving real-life problems without having complete information.

39. No Names, Many Histories: Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman wanted to write the definitive story of Anonymous. Her new book explains why that was an impossible goal.

40. The Hacker-Proof Wares In CES’s First ‘Personal Privacy’ Section

41. CES: How Silicon Valley Is ‘Democratizing’ Storytelling

42. I tried Sling TV at CES 2015, and now I’m cancelling cable

43. Spotify Now Has 15M Paying Users, 60M Overall Active Subscribers

44. Amazon, Netflix Win Big At The Golden Globes

45. Have you ever read the Apple Terms and Conditions? Me either. If this digitally-printed booklet doesn’t convince you to read at least part of it, I don’t know what will.

CREATIVITY

46. Salman Rushdie condemns attack on Charlie Hebdo

+ ‘Anonymous’ Member Calls For Revenge On Terrorists For Charlie Hebdo Massacre

+ Lost in translation: Charlie Hebdo, free speech and the unilingual left

+ Read the New Issue of Charlie Hebdo in English

+ Blasphemy and the law of fanatics

+Hitler’s Cartoon Problem and the Art of Controversy

+ These are the biggest hypocrites celebrating free speech today in Paris

+ Former ‘Onion’ editor: Freedom of speech cannot be killed

+ Terrorists Can’t Kill Charlie Hebdo‘s Ideas

+ A Modern History of Free-Speech Martyrs

47. International journalism: after a year of arrests and attacks, who would do it?

48. Stop sketching, little girl — those paintings are copyrighted!

jon