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Gamers Messed With The Steam Sale, Then Valve Changed The Rules

2014 Jun 24, 3:51

Applied game theory 101: Valve’s Steam Summer Sale involves a meta game with teams of Steam users competing for daily prizes. On Reddit the players join together to take turns winning daily. Valve gets wise and performs an existential attack, changing the rules to make it harder for players to want to coordinate.

Still, that all the players joined together to game the system gives me hope for humanity. Its a self organized solution to a tragedy of the commons problem. Only in this case the tragedy is by design and is updated to be more tragic.

PermalinkCommentsgame video-game game-theory valve

Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem

2014 Jun 24, 3:18

A bogus SoundCloud takedown anecdote and a brief history of and issues with US copyright law.

Another reminder that the rest of the Western world has a public domain day every year in which new IP enters the public domain

PermalinkCommentslaw copyright

From Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot: Wizner had...

2014 Jun 23, 7:04


From Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot:

Wizner had to jump on a phone call during a meeting with his whistleblower client. When he got off the phone, he found that Snowden had rolled the bot into civil liberties lawyer Jameel Jaffer’s office and was discussing the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “It was kind of cool,” Wizner says.

It is neat but they’re marketing video is at times strangely terrifying. Put different music on when the Susan-bot comes up behind the unknowing Mark and this could be a horror movie trailer.

PermalinkCommentsedward-snowden beam robot telepresence

On exploiting security issues in botnet C&C...

2014 Jun 23, 4:26


On exploiting security issues in botnet C&C software:

Hackers “are learning that it’s not so easy to write secure code,” Toro says. “Most of us in the business of securing our applications and systems know that bulletproofing software is an extremely expensive and exhaustive undertaking. Malware creators who have to look to their own defences would have to slow down the production of new attacks.”

FYI, if you want to know what it looks like when you hack a hacker, look no further than the seminal 1995 film Hackers.

PermalinkCommentstechnical security

Netflix API : Retiring the Netflix Public API

2014 Jun 15, 3:02

First they came for our RSS feeds and I said nothing…

PermalinkCommentstechnical Netflix web api api

Mario Maker - Design Mario levels on the Wii U. Time to break...

2014 Jun 10, 3:57


Mario Maker - Design Mario levels on the Wii U. Time to break out my Mario level design documents from when I was 8.

PermalinkCommentsgame video-game Mario Nintendo video

via Gore at Southland on Snowden

2014 Jun 10, 3:14


via Gore at Southland on Snowden

PermalinkCommentsvideo law snowden gore

Netflix responds to Verizon’s cease & desist letter....

2014 Jun 10, 2:54


Netflix responds to Verizon’s cease & desist letter. Somehow I doubt that Verizon will bite on your offer to work together to increase network transparency Netflix. Nice suggestion though.

PermalinkCommentstechnical net-neutrality Verizon Netflix net

mostlysignssomeportents: More than 90% of Americans believe...

2014 Jun 7, 9:55


mostlysignssomeportents:

More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.

Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.

Mayday.US

Please reblog!

PermalinkComments

U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU | Threat Level | WIRED

2014 Jun 4, 6:08

"A routine request in Florida for records detailing the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray turned extraordinary Tuesday when the U.S. Marshals Service seized the documents before local police could release them."

Also what about the part where the PD reveals that its been using the stingray a bunch without telling any court and blames that on the manufacturer’s NDA.

PermalinkCommentstechnical law security phone

JS NICE: Statistical renaming, Type inference and Deobfuscation

2014 Jun 3, 9:36

JS NICE | Software Reliability Lab in ETH

JS NICE has indexed over 10,000 JavaScript projects from GitHub and then probabilistically infers newly suggested names and types for all of the local variables and function parameters of new JS.

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript js coding

A high-profile fork: one year of Blink and Webkit Some stats...

2014 Jun 3, 9:10


A high-profile fork: one year of Blink and Webkit

Some stats and analysis at a very high level of the Blink fork from Webkit.

PermalinkCommentstechnology browser webkit blink apple google

gitfiti - github contributions pane pixel art

2014 Jun 2, 8:07

gitfiti - abusing github commit history for the lulz

A script that abuses github submissions to draw pixel art in your github contributions pane.

PermalinkCommentstechnical humor github pixel art

Morgan Freeman’s unboxing videos. This episode: unboxing...

2014 Jun 1, 1:57


Morgan Freeman’s unboxing videos. This episode: unboxing Gwyneth Paltrow’s head.

PermalinkCommentshumor seven movie film unboxing

MotherJones - Meet the people behind the Wayback Machine, one of...

2014 Jun 1, 4:16


MotherJones - Meet the people behind the Wayback Machine, one of our favorite things about the internet

PermalinkCommentstechnical internet-archive
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