firehose

Edward Snowden, the man who revealed the extent of the US government's massive surveillance efforts and who is now allegedly stuck in Russia, has reportedly sent his first two statements independent of any press organization. In one, hosted at Wikileaks, he claims the US government is violating his human rights by pressuring other governments to deny his petitions for asylum and by rejecting his US passport, leaving him "a stateless person." In the other, hosted by The Guardian, he thanks Ecuador for helping to protect his right to seek asylum.

Snowden invokes Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a United Nations document ratified by the United States, which reads that "everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution" for political crimes.

"The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon."

On the surface, it sounds like a straightforward story: this is how the US government persecutes whistleblowers, and here's Ecuador to the rescue. It's more complex than that. On Saturday, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa revealed that US VP Joe Biden had personally asked him not to grant asylum to Snowden, and on Sunday president Correa left Snowden in Russia's hands. Correa also reprimanded Ecuador's London consul for issuing Snowden a letter of safe passage. In other words, both of Snowden's statements are about Ecuador, and it's not clear that the country will actually help him further. The letters could be both carrot and stick to pressure Ecuador to "do the right thing" now that president Correa seems to be on the fence.

"As is routine and consistent with US regulations, persons with felony arrest warrants are subject to having their passport revoked."

As far as Snowden's passport is concerned, a US state department spokeswoman told reporters that passports are regularly and lawfully revoked when a person has been charged with a felony and a warrant issued for their arrest.

"As is routine and consistent with US regulations, persons with felony arrest warrants are subject to having their passport revoked. Such a revocation does not affect citizenship status. Persons wanted on felony charges, such as Mr. Snowden, should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States. Because of the Privacy Act, we cannot comment on Mr. Snowden's passport specifically," reads the statement.

There's also some debate about whether Snowden wrote these letters at all. Grammatically, journalist Farhad Manjoo calls out his use of plural verbs to refer to the United States. Snowden's statement thanking Ecuador also contains British English variants of words, including "programme," "analysing," and "realise" that seem unlikely to have been written by a man from North Carolina.

Gallery: Super Chibi Knight

Yahoo said today that it paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Bignoggins, maker of popular fantasy-sports apps, in a bid to ensure its leagues remain popular in a world where they are increasingly managed on mobile devices. Bignoggins, a one-person operation run by developer Jerry Shen, created the popular Fantasy Monster and Draft Monster apps for iOS and Android. The apps have been removed from the App Store and Google Play.

Yahoo, which introduced fantasy sports leagues in 1999, was one of the first big sites to harness the potential of online sports communities. Unlike some of its competitors, Yahoo's leagues are free, and they quickly amassed a large and loyal audience. In recent years Yahoo has drawn competition from ESPN, CBS, and the NFL, among others, increasing the pressure to add features.

The average fantasy player spends $95 on a league

The competitors are targeting fantasy's large and growing mainstream audience: 35 million people play fantasy sports in the United States and Canada, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, up from 9 million in 2005. Players tend to be highly engaged, visiting league sites multiple times per day, and collectively they pay millions of dollars for apps, analysis and other fantasy-league services. The average player spends $95 a year on the hobby.

Those players are valuable to Yahoo, which under CEO Marissa Mayer has moved aggressively to improve its mobile offerings. In a blog post, Shen said features from his apps are coming to Yahoo's official fantasy sports products. "For years, players have used Fantasy Monster and Draft Monster to dominate their fantasy leagues," Shen wrote. "The great news is that the technology driving those apps will be integrated into Yahoo's own offerings."

The acquisition of Bignoggins is minor compared to Yahoo's monster purchase of Tumblr, or its rumored bid for Hulu. But it's a strategic move for a CEO looking to acquire technology that will draw in new users and get them using Yahoo services every day.

The Big Six publishers have officially become the Big Five as Random House and Penguin completed a merger this morning. In a statement today, the two companies announced a new group known as Penguin Random House. The new company will include almost every part of both Random House and Penguin, creating a company with over 10,000 employees across five continents.

As mentioned before, ownership of the new company will be split between the two companies' parent entities, Pearson and Bertelsmann, and the new company will publish across a total of roughly 250 imprints. Random House's Markus Dohle will step up as CEO, while Penguin's David Shanks will step down and serve instead as a senior executive advisor to Dohle.

Random House and Penguin's merger was announced as Penguin fought allegations that it had colluded with Apple and others to fix prices — Random House, in fact, was the only one of the Big Six not implicated in a wide-reaching Justice Department investigation. At the time, it seemed possible that regulators would look askance at a deal that would further consolidate power in an industry allegedly plagued by anti-competitive behavior. But the Department of Justice cleared the merger on Valentine's Day of 2012, imposing no conditions on the pair.

Nonetheless, as Forbes notes, the new company will still have to abide by the terms laid out in a $75 million price-fixing settlement from last year. Among other things, that means that it can't enter into new agreements with Apple or others that limit sales or promotion pricing for the next two years. For the next five years, it can't offer "most favored nation" clauses that guarantee a company the lowest price offered to any retailer. However, the merger itself was designed to help Penguin Random House boost its clout against Amazon and other retailers by sharing costs and wielding the combined influence of two major companies.

2K Marin creative director Jordan Thomas left the developer to found an indie studio with an unnamed partner and create an equally unnamed project inspired in part by his time working on the BioShock series, he told GamesIndustry International.

While at 2K, Thomas served as a consultant on BioShock, was the director of BioShock 2 and helped with the story and game design on Irrational Games' BioShock Infinite. Thomas said that his time working on BioShock Infinite was part of what convinced him that he could make the transition from AAA to indie development.

"Without spoiling things for anybody, there are elements of the ending that spoke to me," Thomas said. "And I wanted to make something that evoked those feelings more consistently throughout. And that could be a niche within a niche. I have yet to complete that experiment, but it's something that's really driving me right now."

Though he isn't opposed to creating the project at a AAA development house, he said his plan is to "keep it as lean as possible for now, in the hopes that we're not writing checks our asses can't cash. Indie ambition is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness."

According to Thomas' LinkedIn profile, he began his career at Warren Spector's Austin, Tx. branch of Ion Storm, the developer of Deus Ex and Thief: Deadly Shadows, among other games. After its closure and a stint at BreakAway Austin, Thomas moved on to 2K and BioShock.

For more on the development of BioShock Infinite, be sure to check out Polygon's feature article on Ken Levine, in which Thomas makes a cameo appearance.

It may not be reflected on the Billboard charts, but Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail is now guaranteed to be certified platinum by the RIAA soon after its early release on July 4th. The industry group has decided to alter its longstanding Gold and Platinum (G&P) Program in response to Samsung's unique promotion; the company purchased one million "copies" of Jay-Z's latest album to give away to its customers. "It is a novel and creative marketing move and it has rightly stimulated a healthy conversation about the sale’s meaning and implications for the modern music business," writes Liz Kennedy, director of the RIAA's G&P certification program.

The music business is changing

Prior to today, one G&P requirement was that an album needed to be available for 30 days before it would become eligible for certification. As you'd expect, that rule applies to CDs and vinyl — the RIAA says it helps account for returns of physical media — but it also bizarrely included digital album sales. Citing the vastly different landscape of today's music business compared to 2004 (when the digital rules were implemented), Kennedy readily admits that the policy "no longer makes sense." She goes on, saying, "The reality is that how fans consume music is changing, the music business is changing as labels and artists partner with a breathtaking array of new technology services, and the industry’s premier award recognizing artists’ commercial achievement should similarly keep pace." (The 30-day timeframe will still be applied to physical sales.)

What that means for Magna Carta Holy Grail is that even as consumers are still feverishly downloading the album, Hov can rest easy knowing that he's all but guaranteed platinum status. Yet again.

In February, we got our first look at Mozilla's Firefox OS, a smartphone operating system built on the open web. On the first two phones, the ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch, it was a laggy, terrible experience. We'd hoped that Mozilla would improve that by launch, but apparently not: though the ZTE Open will go on sale in Spain tomorrow, we found the phone as unimpressive as ever at today's Mozilla event.

"We are not aiming high and trying to crash into Fortress Apple, into Fortress Google."

Brendan Eich, co-founder and CTO of Mozilla Corporation, made it clear that Firefox OS isn't going to compete with today's top-tier smartphones. "We are not aiming high and trying to crash into Fortress Apple, into Fortress Google," he said at a San Francisco briefing today. Instead, the company's going after the feature phone market, hoping to entice all those potential buyers who've stuck with dumber, cheaper devices up till now. So far, Apple's interest in that space has been limited to selling older models, though there are rumors that it might release a low-cost iPhone in the future. But what's to keep Fortress Google from nipping Firefox OS in the bud with a wave of cheaper devices?

Eich's argument that Firefox OS could make a dent in the low-end market is that the Android operating system is simply too bloated to run on cheap hardware. In order to build a truly mass-market smartphone, he explains, you need to reduce the amount of memory you use, and select low-end processors (say, a single-core CPU) that silicon vendors can sell much more cheaply because of the binning process. "If you don't balance the physics out, the semiconductor makers lose money," Eich says.

But the latest versions of Android don't run well on such cheap devices, he claims. "Android 4 doesn't run on 256MB of RAM... it really wants a gig." And Eich believes that Google doesn't have a solution for that, other than telling developers to fall back to the lesser Android 2.3, aka Gingerbread. "Gingerbread is still being mass produced this year and will be mass produced next year," he claims, because Google doesn't have anything better to offer. Eich also thinks that Google's app momentum could be its Achilles' heel: "Android can't really slim down... they'd break compatibility."

Of course, Mozilla thinks that Firefox OS has Android beat when it comes to a lightweight smartphone operating system. An Android handset's processor, Eich says, has "three mouths to feed" in that it has to power three separate pieces of software: the Android kernel, Dalvik, and WebKit. By comparison, hardware running Mozilla's Firefox OS only has to power the Gecko web browser rendering engine.

But we've already seen how well Gecko works on cheap commodity hardware, in a $90 phone going on sale tomorrow. It's just not very good. Firefox feels as slow and laggy on these mobile devices as Android does without enough processing power — if not more so.

And what happens after the semiconductor industry has advanced such that dual-core processors and 1GB of memory are the new point of entry, thanks to Moore's Law? "In the future we'll all have Google Balloons and terahertz processors, and life will be great," says Eich, dismissively. Right now Mozilla has a chance to fill a hole in the market, he believes, and if the idea of open web apps catch on, Firefox OS will have been there from the start.

"[Google] turned a blind eye to it too soon, and timing is everything," says Eich. Certainly, Mozilla has quite a few cellular carriers on board, and a pretty clever strategy that could guarantee phones on shelves. But is there ever a right time to ship devices that don't run particularly well?

The second NotGames Fest — a cultural festival of digital entertainment that rejects the traditional structure of video games — is accepting game submissions from now until July 8.

The festival was originally founded by the Cologne Game Lab in collaboration with Bientôt L'été and The Path developer Tale of Tales to challenge what games can be. Using the "Not A Manifesto" document written by Tale of Tales' Michaël Samyn, developers are invited to take part in the design challenge of creating "unique things" with the video game medium.

"One of the motivations for the NotGames thought is the desire to explore the potential of video games as a medium," the document reads. "Video games are software. Software can be anything. There is no need for software to be games. There is no need for video games to be games. Especially not if the games structure may be holding us back, may be limiting the potential of the medium."

The festival will be co-curated by the Cologne Game Lab, Tale of Tales and Simon Bachelier of indie collective One Life Remains. Games that are chosen will be exhibited at the Cologne Game Lab in Germany from August 19-23, with the exhibition tying in with social events like an expo-playground where developers can show their work-in-progress to the public.

Past exhibitors in the NotGames Fest include Dear Esther (The Chinese Room), Trauma (Krystian Majewski), Flight of the Fireflies (Jonathan Hise Kaldma), Amnesia (Frictional Games) and more. Details on the first festival can be viewed here. Games can be submitted here.