spriteleigh

"Such is the state of online video," reports Wired, profiling Jukin Media, a 100-employee "viral video" farm. Read the rest

Noah from EFF writes, "Online tracking has become a pervasive invisible reality of the modern web. Most sites you load are likely to be full of ads, tracking pixels, social media share buttons, and other invisible trackers all harvesting data about your web browsing. These trackers use cookies and other methods to read unique IDs associated with your browser, the result being that they record all the sites you visit as you browse around the internet." Read the rest

When you play a video game like Super Smash Bros. you generally don’t think about the ramifications of your actions, after all the game stars wacky characters brawling in a virtual space.

However, if your actions were made real, and you could see yourself punching a cute little Kirby from a first person perspective, how would you feel about all that smashing then?

(YouTube Link)

The film nerds at SoKrispyMedia created this fun short film that shows what it'll look like to battle the superstars of the video game world while wearing a VR headset, with player one as Mario.

-Via Dorkly

George Lucas caught a lot of flak from fans when he decided to add a bunch of CGI scenes to the original Star Wars trilogy.

He caught even more heat when he decided to do away with the original versions in favor of his updated editions, leaving future generations thinking Jabba looks like this:

(Image Link)

Unless you’ve scrutinized all three versions of the original trilogy you probably didn’t catch all the changes Lucas introduced into each film, because there are so many it's hard to keep track of them all.

(YouTube Link)

Film fan Marcelo Zuniga has created a set of exhaustive side-by-side comparison videos showing all the changes made to the original trilogy, including the updated Hutt horror.

(YouTube Link)

See Every Change Ever Made To The Original Star Wars Trilogy here

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A "smoking gun" found in a 1927 songbook may prove once and for all that the song "Happy Birthday" is out of copyright. Read the rest

Automattic, WordPress's parent company, has a new transparency report that shows that they've bounced 43% of their 2015 copyright censorship demands for being frivolous or invalid. Read the rest

Peer review and replication are critical to the scientific method, but in medical trials, a combination of pharma company intransigence and scientists' fear of being pilloried for human error means that the raw data that we base life-or-death decisions upon is routinely withheld, meaning that the errors lurk undetected in the data for years -- and sometimes forever. Read the rest

Thanks to a patent troll, dildos won't be allowed to have sex with fleshlights! Annalee Newitz at Gizmodo delivers the bad news: Read the rest

Experimental musician Don Joyce, a key member of collage sound collective Negativland, has died at age 71. Joyce was a committed copyfight activist and artist who coined the phrase "culture jamming." Read the rest

Here is yet another excuse for us to enjoy the amazing visuals of the film Mad Max: Fury Road again with a remix video. As Alex would say (and he probably will), “So shiny and chrome!”

(YouTube link)

The chase scenes lend themselves well to a heavy metal version of "Yakety Sax." The music is by Eric Calderone.  -via Uproxx

However, if you prefer the old school Junior Walker version used as the theme to The Benny Hill Show, here’s the Mad Max video for you.

(YouTube link)

Jamaica now has the third-longest copyright term in the world, and the term extension has been imposed retrospectively, all the way back to works created in 1962, the year ska burst on the public scene.

“Real reform will require changing the way campaigns are funded — moving from large-dollar private funding to small-dollar public funding,” writes professor Lawrence Lessig in a New York Times op-ed today.

Some 1.6 billion of them are yours, courtesy of Archive.org.

This is an archive of Reddit comments from October of 2007 until May of 2015 (complete month). This reflects 14 months of work and a lot of API calls. This dataset includes nearly every publicly available Reddit comment. Approximately 350,000 comments out of ~1.65 billion were unavailable due to Reddit API issues.

You'll be needing about 5Gb, just for the compressed dataset.

Reddit's proposed new policies continue its principled ideological commitment to ignoring problems. But it also wants to do something about copyright infringement. Perhaps Reddit can brush its white supremacy and rape advice subreddits under the rug! But can it live without copyrighted material? Get real, Reddit! Read the rest

The spyware that Impero supplies to UK schools -- which searches kids' Internet use for "jihadi" terms -- uses "password" as its default password, and the company has threatened brutal legal reprisals against the researcher who repeatedly demonstrated their total security negligence. Read the rest

“Watching My Name Go By” is a great half-hour BBC documentary from 1976 about the early days of graffiti culture in New York City. (YouTube, thanks UPSO!)

German MEP Julia Reda’s brilliant recommendations for reforming EU copyright have passed the European Parliament, and the dastardly attempt to make it illegal to take “commercial” photos in public places has been killed.
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You can save the future! EFF pays a competitive wage and offers moving assistance and help with home-buying for its new hires, too. Read the rest

Argentina's crazy copyright laws provide for prison sentences for "intellectual property fraud" -- in this case, rewriting a Borges short story in Borgesian fashion and publishing it in a super-limited underground press edition of 300. Read the rest

Josh Millard's Calvin and Markov uses a small perl script to mine transcripts of Calvin and Hobbes strips using Markov chains to make new, weird, computer humor. Read the rest

Google's Deep Dreaming is an effort to allow computers to visualize the world through neural networks. The result, of course, is the psychotic nightmare landscape of an emergent machine intelligence, where holes become puppy eyes and anything long and thin is interpreted as a shimmering tentacle.

Fallout from yesterday's enormous dump of internal documents from Italy's notorious Hacking Team, a cyber-arms dealer for the world's worst autocratic regimes, is just getting started. Read the rest

Adafruit Industries has been stripped of revenues from its Youtube channel after Rumblefish -- a notorious music-rights agency -- claimed to own the copyright on a public domain, taxpayer-funded rendition of "America the Beautiful." Read the rest

EFF, Mozilla and pals are launching Let's Encrypt, an all-free certificate authority, in September -- but they've released a transparency report months in advance. Read the rest

I guess people faint on live television rather a lot. (more…)