News of the Week; February 18, 2015

GAMES

1. Apple removing guns in iOS App Store promo screenshots: You can have guns in your game, but just don’t show them off, OK?

App Store devs report crackdown on images of guns and violence

Developers Say Apple Is Rejecting Games For Having Images Of Guns

2. Report: Valve Censoring Messages About Torrent Site in Steam Chat

3. ESA Downplays Its Level of Cooperation With The Administration On Cybersecurity Efforts

4. Zenimax Sends Cease & Desist Letter to ‘Fortress Fallout’ Makers

5. Law & Order SVU takes on GamerGate, everyone loses: Swatting, doxing, social justice warriors, and Ice-T whining about “campers.”

6. Mortal Kombat X Female Characters Will Be More Realistically Proportioned

7. Borders between devs, players blurring – Raymond

8. EA must lead on digital games transparency

9. Molyneux on Godus: “I made some horrendous mistakes”

Could Godus’ failure fuel a crowdfunding backlash?

On Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux: The structure of crowdfunding encourages overpromising and under-delivering.

Peter Molyneux Won’t Do Interviews After Death Threats

10. YoYo Games sells to PlayTech for $16.4 million

11. Nintendo cancels TVii for Europe

12. Zynga loses $226m in 2014, shutters Zynga China

Analyst calls for Zynga to fire Mattrick

13. Report: eSports revenues to hit $465m in 2017

14. World Of Warcraft pet raises $1.9m for Ebola

15. This Immersive Michael Jordan Simulator Is the World’s Coolest Basketball Court

16. Abstract Announcement for International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS) 6(4)

DIGITAL

17. How tech trials force a choice between bad people and bad law

That 😉 You Type Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law

18. Patent troll claims to own Bluetooth, scores $15.7M verdict against Samsung

19. Europe: Now is the time to fix copyright!

20. Why the Copyright Board of Canada Needs a Leafs-Style Tear-Down

21. Fox hurts America yet again, losing fair use sj motion (Rebecca Tushnet)

22. All of This Has Happened Before and All of This Will Happen Again: Innovation in Copyright Licensing (Rebecca Tushnet)

23. Facebook still suspending Native Americans over ‘real name’ policy: Unlike Katy Perry’s Left Shark, many have to provide multiple forms of ID to prove they are who they say they are in latest row over controversial policy

24. Facebook legacy contact can keep your profile updated after you die: Rolling out in the U.S., users can choose legacy contact or opt to have profile deleted forever

25. How Google determined our right to be forgotten: Google has acted as judge, jury and executioner in the wake of Europe’s right to be forgotten ruling. But what does society lose when a private corporation rules public information?

26. Samsung Television Spies on Viewers

Samsung Tweaks Television Policy Over Privacy Concerns

27. Russia Reaches The Censorship Endgame: Banning VPNs, Tor And Web Proxies

The Anti-Information Age: How governments are reinventing censorship in the 21st century

Glavin: The fiasco of bill C-51

+ Bill C-51 Backgrounder #1: The New Advocating or Promoting Terrorism Offence (Craig Forcese & Kent Roach)

Bill C-51 Backgrounder #2: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s Proposed Power to ‘Reduce’ Security Threats Through Conduct that May Violate the Law and Charter (Craig Forcese & Kent Roach)

Obama Signs Executive Order Encouraging Private-Sector Companies To Share Cyber Security Information

Did British Spies Use NSA Data to Spy on You? (Quinn Norton)

Apple CEO Tim Cook Makes It Clear That He’s Not At All Interested In Giving The Government Backdoors To iOS Encryption

Thank Snowden: Internet Industry Now Considers The Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner

How “omnipotent” hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years—and were found at last: “Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered.

28. Why Bell’s Targeted Ad Approach Falls Short on Privacy (Michael Geist)

29. Why we need social media: Press freedom is still declining rapidly

30. Notorious 8chan “subboard” has history wiped after federal judge’s doxing

31. Report: Millions stolen from banks through sophisticated malware

32. Corruption in Internet Governance – Bribery, Cronyism and Nepotism (Ewan Sutherland)

33. Megaupload Programmer Takes Plea Deal, Though It’s Still Unclear What Criminal Law He Violated

34. Your cable company hates you: Why Comcast abuses its customers – That customer service call wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s just part of a depressingly effective business model

35. The Future of Crime: Smartphone Tracking, Neurohacking, and AI Assisted Murder

36. How the NBA became the first major sport to embrace VR: Will intimate access make it more than a gimmick?

37. The revolution wasn’t televised: The early days of YouTube

38. Modern Family’s new episode never leaves the screen of a MacBook Pro: ‘Connection Lost’ feels like a half-hour Apple commercial — but it actually works

39. How Silicon Valley’s counterculture went corporate and ruined everything

40. The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, By Ants

CREATIVITY

41. Journalists Face Increasing Danger As Press Freedoms Collapse Worldwide

42. The Untold Story: How Radius Brought the Edward Snowden Doc ‘Citizenfour’ to America

43. Dan Gilbert Didn’t Like A Yahoo Blog Post, So Yahoo Deleted It

44. Dear Elon Musk: Please Put SpaceX Photos In The Public Domain

When SpaceX Takes Photos on a NASA Mission, Copyright Law Explodes

45. The Canadian Privacy Cases of 2014

46. Aural, erotic, outrageous: From Madonna to Miley, how video changed the love song

47. How networks speed up TV shows to shove more ads in your unsuspecting face

jon