News of the Week; January 21, 2015

GAMES

1. EA Sued For Allegedly Violating Sports Statistics Patent

2.  UK Man Arrested For Christmas Day Attacks on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network

3. Hack on PS and Xbox attackers leaks DDoS customers’ plaintext passwords: Breached database shows DDoS-for-hire site received $11,000 in bitcoin.

+ A hacked DDoS-on-demand site offers a look into mind of “booter” users: Ars analyzes the database contents from LizardSquad’s hacked “stresser” site.

4. Man Dies After Three-Day Gaming Binge

5. Counter-Strike pro team accused of match fixing

6. Hatred gets Adults Only rating, making console, Steam release unlikely: ESRB gives violent game its most restrictive rating.

7. ‘Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number’ Refused Classification in Australia

+ ‘Hotline Miami 2’ Designer To Australian Gamer: ‘Just Pirate It’

+ Can you pirate your own video game?

8. Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz Launch Anti-Harassment Resource ‘Crash Override’

9. The right way to monetize kids?

10. Twitch starts free-to-use music library

11. Dailymotion launches game streaming service

12. PS4, Xbox One drive US industry to $13.1 billion in 2014 – NPD

13. Disney, Activision both claim landslide victory in toys-to-life category

14. Eutechnyx sells its NASCAR games business

15. GigaMedia faces NASDAQ delisting

16. PlayStation Now Review

17. Retail losing importance, finds GDC survey

18. Research: FPS Games Enhance Learning Capabilities

19. Hey, Videogames: Please Trick Me Into Thinking I’m Smart

20. Mario develops awareness, plays his own game: A team of researchers has programmed an AI into Nintendo’s Super Mario Advance, so that he can play his own game according to his feelings.

DIGITAL

21. Democracy in the digital era

22. Obama and Cameron’s ‘solutions’ for cybersecurity will make the internet worse: Drafting policies to imprison people who share an HBO GO password? Eliminating end-to-end data encryption? They can’t be serious

23. EFF Offers A Strong Rebuke Of President Obama’s Cybersecurity Proposals

24. Editors urge David Cameron to tighten police snooping rules: Prime minister asked to intervene to help protect journalists’ phones and communications records

25. Exclusive: Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare

26. Facebook Banishes Hoaxes From The News Feed

27. Lindsay Tedds: Threats on social media are not victimless crimes

28. No Personal Jurisdiction Over Nasty Facebook Post–Burdick v. Superior Court

29. The age of Amazon is upon us: How one court battle reveals the growing threat of monopoly – Federal judges recently heard arguments in the latest case between Amazon and Apple. Here’s what you need to know

30. TV on your phone: Dish prevails in copyright fight with broadcasters: Judge says Dish Anywhere service is not Aereo. Fox “disappointed” with ruling

+ U.S. Dist. Ct. Reasons in Fox Broadcasting Company, Inc. v. Dish Network LLC, et al,

31. A year of significant change for Canadian IP law and practice

32. Copyright in Public Places

33. Can you copyright a tweet?

34. Artist Luc Tuymans Loses Plagiarism Case, Raises Questions

35. Pirate MEP Proposes Major Reform Of EU Copyright

36. The Limits of Copyright: Text and Data Mining

37. European Parliament Report Proposes Wide-Ranging Copyright Reform, Including Reduction Of EU Copyright Term

38. Steven Soderbergh Fought To Make Re-Editing Films Illegal; Now He’s Re-Editing Famous Films: from the the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me dept

+ Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edited Version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

39. Netflix sends cease and desist letter to virtual border-hopping service

40. Stream On?: How Canadian Law Views Online Streaming Video (Michael Geist)

41. Cory Doctorow and EFF aim to “eradicate DRM in our lifetime”: “It’s the difference between ‘Yes, master’ and ‘I CAN’T LET YOU DO THAT DAVE.”

42. Hockey Player Feels The Streisand Effect After Trying To Defensively Trademark His Nickname

43. The weird racial politics of online dating

44. 4chan founder Moot no longer running the internet’s collective id

45. Drugs, ‘murder,’ and Bitcoin: Your guide to the sensational Silk Road trial

46. Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz found Crash Override: “Online anti-harassment task force” to provide support for targets of online hate

47.The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?

48. Net Fix: FCC chief on solving the Open Internet puzzle (Q&A)

49. Why Bitcoin is and isn’t like the Internet (Joichi Ito)

50. Why Almost Nobody Wants to Pay for the ‘Netflix of Magazines’

51. Google, Fidelity invest $1 billion in SpaceX and satellite Internet plan

52. The new era of hashtag activism

53. The A.I. Wars?: Why artificial intelligence may not revolutionize security and geopolitics—yet.

54. After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web

55. MySpace Still Reaches 50 Million People Each Month

56. The Cathedral of Computation: We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy.

57. 2015 : What Do You Think About Machines That Think?

58. Among the Disrupted (Leon Wieseltier)

59. See the beautiful, nightmarish patent illustrations for a Google-funded augmented reality device

60. Why the modern world is bad for your brain: In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll.

61. The Museum of the Future Is Here: Some things belong in a museum. But at the Smithsonian’s recently reopened museum of design, a team has been rethinking what a thing is in the first place.

62. What platishers, like Medium, mean for unknown writers

CREATIVITY

63. Art Spiegelman Criticizes US Press for Not Publishing ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Cartoons

+ A week inside Charlie Hebdo: how the ‘survival issue’ was made

+ Flocking to Buy Charlie Hebdo, Citizens Signal Their Support of Free Speech

+ What the Fashion Industry Should Learn from ‘Je Suis Charlie’

+ Rex Murphy: We are not Charlie Hebdo

+ Lawyer surveillance after Charlie Hebdo

+ Can a city sue a TV channel?

+ U.S. Hacked North Korea Before North Korea Hacked U.S.

+ Microsoft complied with Charlie Hebdo probe, turning over data in 45 minutes: Company lawyer Brad Smith spoke in Brussels about government reactions to terror attack.

64. The Strange Rap-Jihadi Connection

65. France Arrests A Comedian For His Facebook Comments, Showing The Sham Of The West’s “Free Speech” Celebration

66. Why porn is exploding in the Middle East: Data reveal six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. It’s not as surprising as it sounds

67. Waiting for Iran: Censorship is not always visible

68. New Snowden Leak Reveals GCHQ Collected Emails Of Journalists At NYT, WaPo, Guardian, BBC And Elsewhere

69. The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”

70. Past Perfecting: Retouching is not merely servant to photography but is an artistic medium in its own right

71. Why Hollywood’s best directors are ditching movies for the Internet

72. Die Another Eh: What Does It Mean Now That James Bond Is In The Public Domain In Canada?

jon