News of the Week; June 10, 2015

GAMES

1. Report: some ‘The Witcher 3’ Xbox One owners can’t play the game at all

2. Dota 2 breaks e-sports prize record with $11.5 million crowdfunded pot

3. Steam refunds: Young Horses and The Indie Stone react

4. Desura to devs: “We are not refusing to pay you”

5. ‘Rock Band 4’ not planned for PC, because piracy

6. XCOM 2 vows all-out support of modding

7. Windward is what happens when Sid Meier says it’s ok to ‘copy’ his game

8. Facebook’s Messenger Platform Gets Its First Game

9. Digital-only games account for 66% of console releases – EEDAR

10. Angry Birds strike Lego deal

11. Project Cars sells one million copies

12. Controversial Magic: The Gathering card sells for $14,900 on eBay, half goes to charity

13. Inside the World’s Biggest ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Tournament: Battling it out in Las Vegas with Tarmogoyf, Vraska the Unseen and more than 11,000 card-carrying members of the Multiverse

14. The real scars of Korean gaming

15. Dota 2 tournament prize-pool is the largest in eSports

16. The persistent myth of the “MOBA market”

17. The Witcher 3 sold 4 million in two weeks

18. This Week in Video Game Criticism: From race in Witcher 3 to local level design

19. Ninja Theory’s Hellblade to tackle mental health, backed by Wellcome Trust

20. Paid betas hurt Early Access – Tripwire

21. How Electronic Arts stopped being the worst company in America: Being named the worst company in America two years in a row was a wake-up call for the video game maker. Interviews with current and former executives, employees and partners show how EA changed the way it worked as it tries to redeem itself.

22. The post-apocalyptic dimensional space of Native video game design: First-ever summit explores how games can preserve cultural stories, languages.

23. Super Mario, Pong among World Video Game Hall of Fame inductees 

DIGITAL

1. The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling

2. 2015 is a transition year to the (somewhat creepy) machine learning era. Apple, Google, privacy and ads.

3. Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance

4. Canada greenlights an anti-terror law that hurts internet privacy

5. Erasing History: EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ case will have global ramifications

6. Copyright Board issues landmark decision in government copying proceeding

7. Netflix: piracy helped prepare Spain for watching content online

8. Sorry Bell, accessing U.S. Netflix is not theft: Geist – Mary Ann Turcke’s comments provide evidence of the mounting frustration among Canadian broadcasters over Netflix’s remarkable popularity.

9. Emails between USTR and ESA, MPAA, and RIAA show influence on the Trans-Pacific Partnership

10. Defamation suit against EFF dropped three days after it’s served: EFF is fine and still thinks Scott Horstemeyer’s patent is stupid.

11. The Cuban Internet Crisis: Ninety miles to our south, young people’s dreams are dashed because they have no digital access

12. PSA: net neutrality rules go into effect June 12

13. Man vs. machine: why Apple doesn’t want to pick

+ Flipboard CEO: Apple didn’t surprise us because it’s always been watching us

14. Intel creates $125 million fund for tech firms led by women and minorities

15. Holus Is A Tabletop Device That Turns Digital Media Into A 3D Hologram

16. Weaving The Future of Textiles With Google’s Project Jacquard

17. The Dawn of Virtual Reality

18. YouTube trains its sights on traditional TV: ‘It’s a no-growth business’

19. Mark Zuckerberg, Let Me Pay for Facebook

20. Billboard Cover: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek on Taylor Swift, His ‘Freemium’ Business Model and Why He’s Saving the Music Industry

21. Looking For A Connection In An Infinite Jukebox: With Millions Of Songs At Our Fingertips, Is The Idea Of Owning Music A Thing Of The Past?

22. Why Can’t Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

23. A Periodic Table Of Wearable Technology

24. Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030

25. Artificial intelligence?: AI scares us because it could be as inhuman as humans.

26. The Good, The Bad and The Robot: Experts Are Trying to Make Machines Be “Moral”

27. Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy: New technologies offer important tools for empowerment — yet democracy is stagnating. What’s up?

28. Going for a song: the hidden history of music piracy

29. Stephen Witt: ‘Music piracy is illegal – but morally, is it wrong?’

30. The Emerging Science of Human Computation: The Web has turned the wisdom of the crowd into a valuable, on-demand resource. Now scientists are asking how best to put crowdsourced cognition to work.

31. How To Build A Cutting-Edge Digital Strategy From World-Class Art

CREATIVITY

1. 1 million streams = $90? NeYo reveals the truth about how songwriters get paid

2. The 3 ways women are photographed for the cover of Rolling Stone

3. CBC host Evan Solomon fired after Star investigation finds he took secret cut of art deals: CBC journalist facilitated sales of art to wealthy Canadians he dealt with in his job — including one buyer who had no idea Solomon was collecting a commission.

4. Life after Snowden: Journalists’ new moral responsibility

5. No Money, No Space, No Time: How London Has Forced Out Musicians

jon