News of the Week; February 25, 2015

GAMES

1. “Suspicious male in possession of flight simulator game” lawsuit moves ahead: Wiley Gill drew cops’ attention as Muslim convert; feds can’t dismiss his case.

2. Super Mario 64 and ‘mod’ culture: meet the man behind the high-def makeover: The revered video game is being re-imagined by Aryok Piñera, who started the project alone but now leads a motley crew dozens strong. The legality of such ‘mods’ is murky, but that won’t affect its practitioners’ passion for perfecting

3. People Are Already Making Bizarre Mods For Dragon Ball Xenoverse

4. What A Strong Modding Community Can Do: How Doom Has Been Yanked Into The Selfie Age

5. Makers Of Flow Free® Mobile Game Sue Cloner For Copyright And Trademark Infringement

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

7. Death threats prompt PAX East exit for Brianna Wu’s Giant Spacekat

8. SCEE president: Gamergate “absolutely horrible”

9. Video Games’ Blackness Problem

10. The Order: 1886 Dev Says “Internet Is The New Playground For Bullies”

11. Troll deletes 11-year-old’s Destiny characters: “Henry has learned his lesson the hard way.”

+ Man Accused Of Deleting 11-Year-Old’s Destiny Data Also A Victim

12. Canadian Games Industry Wants Improvements To Temporary Foreign Worker Guidelines

13. Fake ‘Darkest Dungeon’ Game Pulled From Windows Game Store

14. Tim Schaefer Defends Peter Molyneux

15. PS4 to outsell Xbox One by 40% through 2018 – Report

16. King reigns as Zynga slumps – but why?

17. You got TV in my video game: Telltale, Lionsgate partner for episodic hybrid

18. Sega Networks purchases Demiurge Studios

19. Is Sega the next Atari?: Former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske bemoans 20 years of wrong decisions from the Sonic maker, weighs in on whether Nintendo should go mobile

20. Diablo gets microtransactions as Blizzard experiments

21. Nintendo has started making bad free-to-play games like everybody else: Pokemon Shuffle brings the worst of mobile gaming to your 3DS

22. How Monopoly Helped Win World War II

23. How Madden Ratings Are Made: The Secretprocess That Turnsnfl Players Into Digital Gods

24. AI masters 49 Atari 2600 games without instructions: Brain-like artificial intelligence almost as good as professional games tester.

DIGITAL

25. You Had One Job, Lenovo: And it didn’t involve sneaking malicious adware onto your customers’ computers.

+ Superfish: A History Of Malware Complaints And International Surveillance

+ Thought Komodia/Superfish Bug Was Really, Really Bad? It’s Much, Much Worse!

+ EFF unearths evidence of possible Superfish-style attacks in the wild: Crypto-busting apps may have been exploited against visitors of Google and dozens more.

26. Yahoo exec goes mano a mano with NSA director over crypto backdoors

27. The Great Sim Heist: How Spies Stole The Keys To The Encryption Castle

+ NSA’s Stealing Keys To Mobile Phone Encryption Shows Why Mandatory Backdoors To Encryption Is A Horrible Idea

28. Google: Proposed government-sanctioned hacking is a threat to us all – “The implications of this expansion of warrant power are significant.”

29. “Total Information Awareness”: The Disastrous Privacy Consequences of Bill C-51 (Michael Geist)

30. Humiliating Admission By UK Government That Yet More Of Its Surveillance Was Unlawful

31. Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails In Secret Security Sweep

32. Is Retweeting ISIS ‘Material Support Of Terrorism’?

33. World Wide Web Foundation: It’s Time The Internet Became a Basic Human Right

34. UK’s House of Lords Calls For Reclassification Of Internet Access As A ‘Public Utility’

35. We must bulldoze what’s left of the nerdy white men’s Internet

36. What’s Really at Stake in Ellen Pao’s Kleiner Perkins Lawsuit

37. Women are leaving the tech industry in droves

38. The big money behind Iran’s Internet censorship

39. Governance of Online Intermediaries: Observations from a Series of National Case Studies (Urs Gasser & Wolfgang Schulz)

40. Nominee For Attorney General Tap Dances Around Senator Franken’s Question About Aaron Swartz

41. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada releases research report on privacy and cybersecurity (Timothy Denton)

42. Facebook’s Updated Privacy Policy Breaches EU Law, Belgian Study Claims; Other Countries Investigating

43. Be Careful What You Wish For: Bell Launches Legal Challenge Against CRTC Net Neutrality Decision (Michael Geist)

44. Something Is Going Right: Net Neutrality and the FCC (Lawrence Lessig)

45. Despite What The FCC Says, Some Carriers Still Make It Hard To Unlock Your Phone

46. The “Browsewrap”/”Clickwrap” Distinction Is Falling Apart

47. Nvidia hit with class-action lawsuit over graphics card RAM issues: Slow RAM partition in the GTX 970 leads to false advertising claim.

48. Ontario Securities Commission Updates Rules on Equity Crowdfunding, Startup Capital

49. Virtual currency ATM providers and trading platforms must now be authorised in Quebec

50. Why one photographer decided to fight a patent on online contests: EFF’s newest client: “How can you have a patent on a contest? It’s not logical.”

51. Reddit bans nude images posted without consent

52. Study shows patent licenses don’t lead to tech transfer

53. Apple ordered to pay $533-million for patent infringement

54. Machinima gets another $24 million in funding from Warner Bros.

55. The Gig Economy Won’t Last Because It’s Being Sued To Death: If Uber, Lyft, and others don’t stop relying on contract workers, business could crumble. Is it time for a new definition of employee?

56. 10 Fair Use Misconceptions

57. A Decade Later, YouTube Remains a Mystery, Especially to Itself: It’s way too complicated to explain this marvelous history quickly, but let’s try anyway

58. How a 13-year-old’s one-line blog post became a worldwide meme

59. Look Ma, No Hands: Drones You Can Pilot With Your Mind

CREATIVITY

60. Why Is Fair Use Good For Authors? (Pamela Samuelson)

61. Copyright Mixtape: How The “Blurred Lines” Lawsuit Could Change Music Forever

62. German court limits performances of Brecht play: Berthold Brecht’s heirs and notorious theater director Frank Castorf have reached an agreement over a controversial production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal.” The production will only be shown two more times.

63. Oscars: A Guide to Best Picture Intellectual Property Litigation

64. Judge tosses ‘Frozen’ lawsuit filed by N.J. author who accused Disney of ripoff

65. How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played: Decades before 3-D printers brought manufacturing closer to home, copiers transformed offices, politics and art

66. Martin Mills: New Billboard Chart Risks Dumbing Down Music

67. The Dangers Of Digital: Brian Eno On Technology And Modern Music

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