Techdirt’s Mike Masnick and Leigh Beadon teamed up with game designer Randy Lubin for Moderator Mayhem, a swipe-based game about the challenges of moderating a social network. It’s sort of like Reigns, except instead of ruling a kingdom, you’re deciding whether to take down reviews of Cocaine Bear.
A long-running web community enlisted its goons to stop an Imgur extinction event.
The singer-songwriter defeated a lawsuit alleging “striking similarities” between his song “Thinking Out Loud” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” It’s certainly a better outcome than the disastrous “Blurred Lines” verdict, and we wish Sheeran all the best with his continued creative career.
50 Years of Text Games is a newsletter by Aaron Reed (author of the fantastic horror novel Subcutanean) about the history of interactive fiction — from stuff even non-IF fans probably know about, like Oregon Trail, to deep cuts like a version of Doom for blind players and a parser game in a nonsense language. Reed collected the essays into a great-looking 600-page limited edition print run, and there’s still some copies left before it’s set to ship in June.
KOSA is perhaps the biggest of the myriad child safety bills from state and federal lawmakers, and it’s back in Congress after its initial introduction last year. The bill mandates a variety of parental controls and other requirements for online services. Lizzo likes it; about 100 civil liberties and LGBT advocacy organizations don’t.
Why? We don’t know.
The lawsuit will be filed in central Florida, Martin Garcia, chairman of the board for the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, said. It was not immediately clear from Monday’s meeting what the basis of the lawsuit would be.
Law professor Ann Lipton suggests it’s an attempt to get ahead of Disney’s own lawsuit from last week in a more sympathetic state court. We eagerly await the board figuring out some allegations!
I’ve been hearing this as received wisdom for years: never plug your phone into the USB charging ports at hotels or airports, because hackers will hijack it. But an Ars Technica deep dive concludes that while this is possible, it’s very complicated — and for the average person, not much of a threat.
“At a high level, if nobody can point to a real-world example of it actually happening in public spaces, then it’s not something that is worth stressing about for the general public,” Mike Grover, a researcher who designs offensive hacking tools and does offensive hacking research for large companies, said.
I’m pretty bad at bullet hell games, so I’m not sure I’ll be playing Luna Abyss any time soon, but boy the early footage looks great:
Currently in development by Bonsai Collective, in Luna Abyss you step into the shoes of a prisoner who has been sentenced to explore a mysterious megastructure found within the mimic moon of Luna. The ruins are filled with secrets and forgotten technology, but it’s also filled with corrupted souls that don’t take kindly to your visit.
There’s a beta demo available tomorrow — sign up via Discord by clicking the “Accept Mission” link in the announcements channel.