firehose

Valve is removing all restrictions to play Dota 2, the company announced today. No more signups, no more queue system; everyone who wants to is now free to play Dota 2.

On the game's official blog, Valve says it's opening the gates to Dota 2 after having "recently completed a set of server management upgrades as well as released a huge number of enhancements to the new user experience." When Dota 2's beta came to a close in July, Valve started admitting new players in waves as it scaled hardware to meet demand.

Players can now download and play the game on Linux, Mac and Windows PC.

Dota 2 has 6.5 million active users per month, Valve says, an audience that's sure to grow now that playing restrictions have been lifted.

The Dark Knight Rises star Joseph Gordon-Levitt may be jumping from the DC movieverse to a more Vertigo live action landscape. Deadline reports that the 32-year-old actor and director is “finalizing a deal” to team with Dark Knight trilogy co-writer David S. Goyer to co-produce a Sandman film at Warner Bros., based on the 75-issue comic book series and its spinoffs written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by artists including Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Jill Thompson, Shawn McManus, Marc Hempel, Michael Zulli and Dave McKean. What’s more, rumor has it that the deal will see Gordon-Levitt star as Sandman protagonist, Dream, the immortal physical manifestation of dreaming who works to reestablish his role in reality after escaping a 70-year imprisonment at the hands of human occultists.

Badass Digest had the initial scoop for this news back in November, and the details regarding Gordon-Levitt’s level of involvement are just now firming up. No writer has been named for the potential project thus far, but given that Goyer wrote the Blade trilogy, co-wrote The Dark Knight trilogy, and worked on Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Man of Steel and its upcoming sequel (Batman Vs. Superman?), it seems likely that he could lend his pen to this potential Sandman adaptation as well.

This project would be the second director’s credit for Gordon-Levitt, who recently directed and starred in Don Jon (alongside Scarlett “Black Widow” Johansson) and is also still set to star in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame To Kill For in 2014.

This isn’t the first time a Sandman movie has come close to being made, although it may be the most serious effort to date. Jill Thompson illustrated a series of 27 watercolors depicting scenes from the comic book series which were use in a movie pitch in the mid ’90s and both James Mangold and Eric Kripke have tried, unsuccessfully, their hands at adapting the series for television. Lending a bit of extra credence to this latest development is the fact that Hank Kanalz, SVP Vertigo and Integrated Publishing for DC Entertainment, has Tweeted a link to Deadline’s report.

Sandman recently returned to comics with the release of The Sandman Overture #1 by Gaiman and artist J.H. Williams III, which serves as a prequel to the original series. Issue #2 currently awaits release with a planned February debut, following delays.

Gaiman is yet to comment, although this news will surely have his nearly 2 million Twitter followers on high alert.

[Via Deadline]

Failed comic book creator Shia LaBeouf, who we understand was in some movies once, has just released a trailer for a film titled HowardCantour.com. The film, directed by LaBeouf, follows the emotional trials and tribulations of an online film critic as he struggles with the frustrations of his chosen profession, including auteur hero-worship, dreaded press junkets, and interacting with other bloggers, among other frustrations. Starring Jim Gaffigan as Howard Cantour, the film is based on Justin M. Damiano, a short story by cartoonist Daniel Clowes.

Clowes, the creator of the graphic novel Ghost World, has seen his work adapted to the screen in the past. The difference this time? It would appear that LaBeouf, in no way, shape or form, had permission from Clowes to adapt his work. In fact, the two have never even spoken.

Clowes’ short story appears in the Daniel Clowes Reader, published in 2013 by Fantagraphics. Eric Reynolds, associate editor for Fantagraphics, described the short film by LeBouf, in no uncertain terms, as “shameless theft.” In a statement to Buzzfeed, Clowes said he’s never even spoken to LaBeouf, and that he “can’t imagine what was going through his mind”:

“The first I ever heard of the film was this morning when someone sent me a link. I’ve never spoken to or met Mr. LeBeouf. I’ve never even seen one of his films that I can recall — and I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did 6 or 7 years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind.”

The film, which was posted online earlier today but has since been removed, shares several similarities with Clowes’ short story, with lines that are lifted directly from the comic. Yet in an interview with the website Short of the Week, LaBeouf, who has been accused of plagiarism in the past, claims to have come up with the concept for the film organically, having been inspired by negative reviews he received for his lackluster comics work, as well as the films he’s reportedly appeared in:

“I know something about the gulf between critical acclaim and blockbuster business. I have been crushed by critics (especially during my Transformers run), and in trying to come to terms with my feelings about critics, I needed to understand them. As I tried to empathize with the sort of man who might earn a living taking potshots at me and the people I’ve worked with, a small script developed.”

Clowes, one of the most acclaimed and influential cartoonists of the last 25 years, is the creator of the anthology Eightball, for which he has won several awards as well as substantial critical praise. The short story Justin M. Damiano was originally published in The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, and was reprinted with permission by Fantagraphics in The Daniel Clowes Reader earlier this year.

A US district court has ruled that the NSA's bulk collection of phone records is likely unconstitutional. Today, Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction to plaintiff Larry Klayman and a group of other Verizon customers, saying that they were suffering harm from having his records collected and that he had made a strong case that the NSA's secret court orders, which require carriers to provide metadata on virtually all US phone calls, were likely to violate the fourth amendment.

In his opinion, Leon cites the huge pool of numbers that could be included in the three "hops" that analysts are allowed to make beyond a single suspicious number, as well as the mistakes, misconduct, and obfuscations described in declassified documents from the FISA court. Most importantly, he says that the NSA's policy has direct effects on Verizon subscribers — a marked contrast from previous rulings. Because of this, the case can move forward.

Developing...

San Francisco said today that it has launched free wireless Internet on a heavily trafficked part of Market Street, "the City’s busiest and most economically diverse corridor."

The city has been aiming to make Wi-Fi universally available for years. Nearly seven years ago it announced a deal with EarthLink to bring free Wi-Fi to all of San Francisco. That plan didn't pan out, but last year San Francisco had a tentative agreement with AT&T to supply Wi-Fi along Market Street. That didn't come to fruition either, but the failure helped San Francisco realize that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today:

Google may be taking another crack at tracking home energy use. According to The Information, the tech giant is currently testing web-connected thermostats that let users view home energy activity, and make adjustments. If that sounds familiar, it's because Google attempted something similar a few years ago called PowerMeter, a web dashboard that tracked an entire home's energy use. The program was killed off in mid-2011, with Google citing difficulties scaling it up. However the original mission statement for the effort, and what Google reiterated when killing off PowerMeter, was that people could trim energy use by 15 percent if they could see what was happening.

Not the first time for energy savings

This might be a better time for such a service, as indicated by a rising wave of connected home appliances. That includes Nest, which began with thermostats and has since moved onto smoke detectors. It's joined by a host of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected appliances that can pipe information to the cloud, from refrigerators to web cameras. For Google, and others, those devices represent a possible wealth of data. Don't get excited about the premise of a Nexus thermostat, though: The Information reports that Google would source devices from Ecobee, which makes its own line of smart thermostats.