News of the Week; November 30, 2016

GAMES

1. ASA Ruling on Valve Corporation and Hello Games Ltd
2. No Man’s Sky’s Steam page didn’t mislead gamers, rules UK ad watchdog: ASA rejects complaints, citing game’s procedural generation as valid defense.
3. Hello Games didn’t falsely advertise No Man’s Sky, says ad regulator
4. Advertising Standards rules No Man’s Sky Steam page did not mislead consumers: After detailed defence from Hello Games.
5. Insider Trading Claims Levied Against Ubisoft Executives: Regulatory body claims five Ubisoft executives sold stock before the company delayed Watch Dogs and The Crew.
6. Ubisoft’s developers “can’t live with the threat” of Vivendi takeover: Michel Ancel explains the difficulty of staying focused in a time of great uncertainty
7. Zynga Sues Rival Under Federal Trade Secrets Law
8. Zynga sues 2 former employees over alleged massive data heist – Before returning work laptop, employee searched: “How to erase my hard drive.“
9. Zynga sues two former employees over data theft: Both creators now at rival firm Scopely
10. Game Developer Updates Game To Remove Denuvo DRM As Fans Cheer
11. Google DeepMind could invent the next generation of AI by playing Starcraft 2: How Google’s AI research team has teamed up with Blizzard to further deep learning in AI.
12. Gaming Technology for Patenting Inventions
13. Hello Games responds to “intense and dramatic” reaction to No Man’s Sky: And responds in the best possible way – with a huge content update – “a foundation for things to come”
14. Weak AAA launches are a precursor to industry transition: As top games under perform, the industry must prepare to shift with consumer behaviour
15. HTC calls on co-operation with PlayStation and Oculus: “We need to help consumers navigate this world that might be initially confusing”
16. “It made me feel less alone, realising other girls want to make video games”: Last month’s XX+ Game Jam was a new initiative to bring more women into games development, but what impact did it have for its participants?
17. UKIE exhorts British officials to jumpstart the UK’s eSports scene
18. Signing a Free Agent in Esports—A Practical Guide for Teams
19. Treadmills to endless hallways, tech has some sick solutions for VR nausea: Startups and researchers aim to blur the lines of reality for your subconscious.
20. Adaptive music in competitive games

DIGITAL

1. Adding Derogatory Caption To Photo Meme Can Be False Light–S.E.V. Chmerkovskiy
2. Quebec Court Awards Damages to Canadian Artist for Wrongful Copyright Takedown Notice by Record Companies
3. Adblock Plus wins its 6th court case, brought by Der Spiegel: Eyeo GmbH has beaten back German court cases seeking to shut down its business.
4. Russia Draws On Chinese Expertise And Technology To Clamp Down On Internet Users Even More
5. With Trump win, the Internet Archive wants to move to Canada
6. Ahead Of President Trump, The Web’s One And Only Backup Wants To Make A Backup Of Itself (In Canada)
7. Internet Archive preps Canadian safe haven to swerve Donald Trump: Asking for donations to head north
8. The Entire Internet Will Be Archived In Canada to Protect It From Trump
9. The Internet Association Sends Trump Its Wish List: The letter papers over the tech industry’s discomfort with the President-elect’s incendiary stances on social issues and tries to get down to business.
10. US election recounts campaign—citing hack attacks—raises $3M in one day 
11. Donald Trump’s Twitter lies need to be taken seriously
12. Why fake news stories thrive online
13. Beyond fake news: the “constructed realities” of the polarized world
14. This Hyperpartisan Conservative Facebook Page Owner Says Facebook’s Fake News Plan is “Terrifying”
15. Mossberg: Facebook can and should wipe out fake news – You’re a media company now, Facebook. Behave like one.
16. How to solve Facebook’s fake news problem: experts pitch their ideas: A cadre of technologists, academics and media experts are thinking up solutions, from hiring human editors, to crowdsourcing or creating algorithms
17. Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV: We need more text and fewer videos and memes in the age of Trump.
18. Breitbart declares war on Kellogg’s after brand pulls advertising
19. Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart
20. Reddit CEO who altered comments apologizes, unveils subreddit filtering: Huffman says the current climate of disrespect on Reddit “is not sustainable.”
21. How Google is tackling fake news, and why it should not do it alone: What can Google do to combat fake news? Columnist Ian Bowden illustrates some ways the search giant can tackle — and already is tackling — this problem.
22. Social media loves echo chambers, but the human brain helps create them
23. A new study suggests online harassment is pressuring women and minorities to self-censor
24. People Censor Themselves Online for Fear of Being Harassed: New research reveals that when tech companies don’t police abuse, it can put a damper on free speech.
25. Has the internet become a failed state?: The internet was once a land of promise, with few fears about crime or privacy. Thirty years on, scammers, thieves and spies have created a place of chaos
26. Cameroonian Government Calls Social Media A ‘New Form Of Terrorism’
27. Confessions of an Instagram Influencer: I used to post cat photos. Then a marketing agency made me a star.
28. Technology for inequality: how chatbots can help shape an (even more) uneven world
29. Adblock Plus wins its 6th court case, brought by Der Spiegel: Eyeo GmbH has beaten back German court cases seeking to shut down its business.
30. It will soon be illegal to punish customers who criticize businesses online: Consumer Review Fairness Act bans customer gag clauses, awaits Obama signature.
31. The Subtle Ways Your Digital Assistant Might Manipulate You
32. Magic Leap – Separating Magic and Reality
33. Why Deep Learning Matters and What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence
34. Cyber college for wannabe codebreakers planned at UK’s iconic Bletchley Park: Plan is to enroll 500 students each year and put them on a heavy diet of infosec.
35. How Facebook has rewritten the rules of love and dating
36. Controversial New AI Can Tell Whether or Not You’re A Criminal
37. Another Nation Has Developed a National Currency That’s Entirely Digital
38. Apple is in the midst of removing outdated games and apps from the App Store
39. CNN buys YouTuber Casey Neistat’s company Beme to start extension brand: CNN hopes to bring in millennial viewers by letting Neistat shape a new media brand.
40. Four Lessons for Silicon Valley from Its First Startup: A new book on Hewlett-Packard’s management history offers cautionary tales for today’s leading tech companies.
41. Facebook Must Stay Out of China: A Faustian pact with Beijing would almost certainly make user behavior around the world visible to Chinese state security.
42. One App, Two Systems: How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally

CREATIVITY

1. SiriusXM Settles Turtles’ Copyright Lawsuit for $99 Million: Band led class action suit against satellite radio giant for playing songs recorded before 1972 without paying
2. Jersey Boys Creators Guilty of Copyright Infringement: A Nevada court finds that the show copied unlawfully from an unpublished biography.
3. Prince Estate Sues Tidal, The Streaming Service That’s Kind To Artists, For Copyright Infringement
4. Corporations Have No Moral Rights over Works in France, Even if They Commissioned It
5. Legal Drama at the 2016 World Chess Championship
6. Jayme Gordon Guilty On All 4 Counts Of Wire Fraud In Scheme To Sue Dreamworks For Copyright Infringement
7. What is “Fair Use” in the Defence of Comparative Advertising to Trade Mark Infringement in Singapore?
8. No copyright over our judgments: SC
9. Richard Prince May Offer the SDNY Another Chance to Define Transformative Use of a Work
10. “Litigation, Jim, but not as we know it”: Dr Seuss, Star Trek and Copyright Infringement in the US
11. 8th Wonder Entertainment, LLC v. Viacom International, Inc.
12. The Icelandic government is suing Iceland supermarket over the use of its name
13. Police in Canada have a new punishment for suspected drunk drivers: Listening to Nickelback
14. The Globe And Mail Tries Something Revolutionary: Actually Giving A D–n About User Comments & Conversation
15. Referring To Your Unenforced Trademark As A ‘Lottery Ticket’ Is A Great Way To End Up With Nothing
16. Nestlé Loses Another Battle to Protect KitKat Design as a Trademark
17. Former CNN anchor: 4 things media must do when covering Trump
18. Trump’s threat to democracy isn’t free speech, it’s this
19. Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age
20. Revolution at The Washington Post
21. The Odd Case of Dennis the Menace
22. Incredible discovery of 40,000-year-old tools for art and engineering: Humans began making paint and glue at roughly the same time with the same tools.
23. (Ir)Rational Choice Theory: Prof. Chris Buccafusco’s Search for the Biases of Creativity

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Melanie Joly’s Tough Choice on Canadian Content: New Thinking or New Taxes (Michael Geist)
2. Interplay between Broadcasting Act and Copyright Act Considered in Respect of Retransmission: 2251723 Ontario Inc. v Bell Canada, 2016 ONSC 7273
3. Competition Bureau’s scrutiny of BCE-MTS deal goes into overtime
4. Protectionism in Reverse: Treaties drafted to protect Canadian investors from erratic regimes are now backfiring, as investors abroad, like Wind Mobile’s former Egyptian backer, take aim at Canada’s ‘cultural protectionism.’
5. Catch Me If You Can: Broadcaster Settles Long-Running Investigation into the Use of Pseudonyms in FCC Applications
6. The limits of AT&T’s DirecTV Now: No DVR and limited ability to pause live TV: DirecTV online lacks key functions, and AT&T is vague on when it’ll be fixed.
7. AT&T Just Showed Us What The Death Of Net Neutrality Is Going To Look Like

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Appeals court: It doesn’t matter how wanted man was found, even if via stingray – Dissenting judge: “It is time for the stingray to come out of the shadows.”
2. Brazil Superior Court Rules in Google’s Favor, Against ‘Right to Be Forgotten’
3. Facebook could face ‘additional action’ for WhatsApp data sharing policy
4. Libraries promise to destroy user data to avoid threat of government surveillance: New York Public Library changed its data retention policies, and the American Library Association apologized for ‘normalizing’ the Trump administration
5. 1 million Google accounts compromised by Android malware called Gooligan: 86 apps available in third-party marketplaces can root 74 percent of Android phones.
6. US Navy warns 134,000 sailors of data breach after HPE laptop is compromised: Names and social security numbers accessed by “unknown individuals”—probe underway.
7. FBI and NSA Poised to Gain New Surveillance Powers Under Trump
8. Game over: New US computer search law takes effect Thursday – Senate declines to vote on proposals to block or delay the administrative rule.
9. FBI’s NIT Hit 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries… As Did The Child Porn It Was Redistributing
10. Canada’s Police Allowed Journalists to ‘Embed’ to Argue For More Surveillance
11. Uber begins background collection of rider location data
12. Locky ransomware uses decoy image files to ambush Facebook, LinkedIn accounts: Low-tech malware snares users via flaws in social networks’ code to spread automatically.
13. Your Earbuds Can Be Made Into Microphones With Just A Bit Of Malware
14. Webcam blackmail linked to four suicides, reported cases double in the UK: 864 cases this year, and massive under-reporting means true figure likely much higher.
15. Lawyer who argued for landmark SCOTUS privacy decision says Trump “is a moron”: Pivotal judge in 1967 Katz case says privacy will be a “tough ride” from here.
16. Lawyer in pivotal snooping case: Privacy will be a “tough ride”: Harvey Schneider, who argued for appellant in 1967 Katz case, is worried.
17. Key Congressional Staffers Who Helped Rein In Surveillance Overreach In The 1970s Ask Obama To Pardon Snowden
18. The European Court of Human Rights and Access to Information: Clarifying the Status, with Room for Improvement

jon