Month: March 2017

Enlarge (credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

A 15-year-old girl in Chicago was reportedly recently sexually assaulted by “five or six men or boys on Facebook Live,” according to the Associated Press.

This is the second such reported attack in Chicago that was broadcast on Facebook this year alone. In January, four teens were arrested in connection to a torture video. The Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday that this attack marks "at least the fourth Chicago crime caught on Facebook Live since the end of last October."

Tuesday afternoon, Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman, tweeted that the new investigation was moving forward.

Enlarge / FilmOn CEO Alkiviades "Alki" David at an event in Los Angeles in 2015. (credit: Vivien Killilea / WireImage)

Remember the startup Aereo? That's the Boston-based outfit that tried to sell TV over the Internet for $8 a month before it was stymied by the TV networks. The networks argued that Aereo's system infringed their copyrighted programs. After years of legal battles, the Supreme Court sided with the networks in 2014. The court says that Aereo's system of "renting" tiny antennas to each customer didn't protect it from copyright allegations. In a 6-3 opinion, the high court held that Aereo looked like a cable system, so its users weren't entitled to free over-the-air broadcasts.

Aereo went back and argued that if it was so much like a cable system, it should be allowed to pay the same (low) royalty rates that the cable industry pays. The courts rejected that argument, though. Aereo looked too much like a cable system to have access to free OTA transmissions, but apparently not enough like one to get the state-mandated royalty rates that cable providers pay.

FilmOn CEO Alki David brashly created an Aereo competitor with his own tiny antennas in 2012, even calling it AereoKiller at first. But whereas Aereo and its predecessors had lost their battles to be defined as a "cable system," FilmOn managed to pull out a win in a Los Angeles federal court in 2015, when US District Judge George Wu ruled that the company should be allowed to carry on with its business if it paid the compulsory licensing rate. (FilmOn also rebranded as FilmOn X and dropped the small antennas strategy following Aereo's loss.) Wu acknowledged his decision was in conflict with other district courts, as well as the 2nd Circuit appeals court. So he allowed the TV networks fighting FilmOn to immediately appeal to the 9th Circuit.

(credit: zodman)

The man accused of sending a Newsweek writer a seizure-inducing tweet left behind a digital trail that the Dallas Police Department traced—beginning with the @jew_goldstein Twitter handle, leading to a burner mobile phone SIM card, and ending with an Apple iCloud account, according to federal court documents unsealed in the case.

Rivello with driver's license. (credit: Court documents)

John Rayne Rivello was arrested Friday at his Maryland residence and is believed to be the nation's first defendant accused of federal cyberstalking charges for allegedly victimizing an epileptic with a strobing, epileptogenic online image—in this instance a GIF sent via Twitter.

According to court documents, when Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald of Dallas, Texas opened his Twitter feed on December 15, he was met with a strobing message that read, "you deserve a seizure for your post." Eichenwald, who has written that he has epilepsy, went into an eight-minute seizure where he lost control of his body functions and mental faculty. His wife found him, placed him on the floor, called 911, and took a picture of the offending tweet, according to court records.

(credit: Know Your Meme)

Now that Yahoo is on the verge of being eaten by Verizon, it's hard to remember that the troubled company was once an innovative startup. But Yahoo rocketed to popularity after building the first directory for "homepages" on the 1990s information superhighway. Later, it became a giant of the Web 2.0 generation, partly by gobbling up the era's best inventions, like Flickr. For a brief, improbable moment at the turn of the millennium, Yahoo was everyone's one-stop shop on the Web for news, mail, photos, events, chat, and more.

But let's not kid ourselves into framing Yahoo as some kind of proto-Facebook that came too soon or got unlucky. Yahoo's defining moment had nothing to do with its accomplishments. When we look back on Yahoo knowing what we do today, it's clear that Yahoo's true self was revealed in a single, stark meme. I'm talking, of course, of the infamous Yahoo Answers query "how is babby formed?"

To understand this meme, we must go back to the distant days of 2006, when people occasionally read Yahoo Answers and Quora had not yet been born. Early that year, a person going by the name kavya posed the question "how is babby formed?" This person continued their entry by repeating the question, with an additional query: "how girl get pragnent."

Enlarge / Your companions form the emotional core of Torment and make the less sensible plot points easier to swallow.

Torment: Tides of Numenera opens with a literal bang. A moon explodes over the game's setting (simply called “the Ninth World”), and your avatar comes hurtling out of it toward the ground. Of course, you don't actually see any of this happen. Nearly all of the sometimes slimy, often depressing, and always cerebral story that follows this explosive introduction is conveyed in words, not in images and sounds.

Once Torment begins in earnest, the game assumes the look of any number of top-down RPGs from a bygone era. You could liken it to Baldur's Gate or even Diablo, but the game's name alone makes it clear that this is specifically a successor to Planescape: Torment, and it was even pitched as such in its 2013 Kickstarter campaign. That intention shows in the game, too, in ways both obvious and intentionally obscure.

One of the most obvious callbacks is your main character—"The Last Castoff” is the latest of many nigh-immortal bodies to be created and once inhabited by "the Changing God." Your sire has flitted from body to body for hundreds of years, running from some multi-universal nightmare called the Sorrow. Each time he "casts off" such a shell (every decade or so), that vessel wakes up as a new Castoff with a mind of its own. As such, just like in Planescape: Torment, you begin the game as an amnesiac immortal.