Daily Deal: Pay What You Want Graphics And FX Mastery Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Create stunning new worlds and visually arresting special effects with the Graphics and FX Mastery Bundle. Pay what you want and get access to two courses covering SilhouetteFX and Sony Vegas Pro 13. If you beat the average price, you unlock access to 6 more courses covering game development, app development, visual effects training and more. After over 186 hours of training, you'll be ready to unlock your creativity and create your own beautiful games.

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Filed Under: daily deal, development, video games

Phew: Appeals Court Says Having 'Dirt' In Your Domain Name Doesn't Remove Safe Harbor Protections

from the lucky-us dept

We've been covering the bizarre case of Sarah Jones v. TheDirty.com for a while now. Jones, a high school teacher and Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader, was (perhaps reasonably) offended by some posts and photos by users of TheDirty which made potentially defamatory claims about her. The whole case got off on the wrong foot when Jones' lawyers accidentally sued a totally different site, TheDirt.com, rather than TheDirty.com, which is how the case first drew our attention (also partially worrying us that they'd eventually accidentally sue Techdirt as well). Given the situation, though, it seemed pretty clear that Section 230 protected the site from liability (though not the original people who wrote the allegedly defamatory content). Except, Jones never bothered to go after the users, insisting that TheDirty.com and its founder Nik Richie were liable for the comments. Stunningly, the district court judge rejected the Section 230 defense, arguing that, in part, because the site had "dirt" in its name, Section 230 safe harbors didn't apply. As you might imagine, that hit home for us.

The ruling went a bit deeper than that, obviously, claiming that by republishing and adding commentary to the original submitted comments, TheDirty.com gave up its Section 230 protections, because it was "encouraging" defamation. Because of this, a jury awarded Jones $338k from TheDirty.com and Richie. However, thankfully, this morning the Sixth Circuit appeals court has overturned the district court and issued a nice, clean Section 230 ruling that highlights the importance of Section 230 safe harbors in protecting free speech online, and demonstrating how and why the district court got it so wrong.

The ruling goes through a nice history of the case and Section 230, and then notes the district court's wholly made up "encouragement" test to remove Section 230 safe harbors doesn't make much sense, noting that it was based on misreading existing case law elsewhere. It notes that an "encouragement" test would go against numerous other court rulings that found Section 230 safe harbors valid and would obliterate the purpose of Section 230:

More importantly, an encouragement test would inflate the meaning of “development” to the point of eclipsing the immunity from publisher-liability that Congress established. Many websites not only allow but also actively invite and encourage users to post particular types of content. Some of this content will be unwelcome to others—e.g., unfavorable reviews of consumer products and services, allegations of price gouging, complaints of fraud on consumers, reports of bed bugs, collections of cease-and-desist notices relating to online speech. And much of this content is commented upon by the website operators who make the forum available. Indeed, much of it is “adopted” by website operators, gathered into reports, and republished online. Under an encouragement test of development, these websites would lose the immunity under the CDA and be subject to hecklers’ suits aimed at the publisher. Moreover, under the district court’s rule, courts would then have to decide what constitutes “encouragement” in order to determine immunity under the CDA—a concept that is certainly more difficult to define and apply than the Ninth Circuit’s material contribution test

As the appeals court notes, this clearly goes against what Congress intended:

Congress envisioned an uninhibited, robust, and wide-open internet,... but the muddiness of an encouragement rule would cloud that vision. Accordingly, other courts have declined to hold that websites were not entitled to the immunity furnished by the CDA because they selected and edited content for display, thereby encouraging the posting of similar content. ... (“Such weak encouragement cannot strip a website of its section 230 immunity, lest that immunity be rendered meaningless as a practical matter.”); ... We do the same.

This is important for a variety of reasons. Just this morning, I saw a debate break out on Twitter about whether or not someone is liable for retweeting a defamatory tweet. In other parts of the world the answer, ridiculously, is yes. Thankfully, this ruling highlights why that's not the case here in the US. Merely selecting and editing content for display does not remove your safe harbors. In this case, the court goes even further in noting that "ratifying or adopting" others' statements in no way makes you suddenly liable for those statements:

An adoption or ratification theory, however, is not only inconsistent with the material contribution standard of “development” but also abuses the concept of responsibility. A website operator cannot be responsible for what makes another party’s statement actionable by commenting on that statement post hoc. To be sure, a website operator’s previous comments on prior postings could encourage subsequent invidious postings, but that loose understanding of responsibility collapses into the encouragement measure of “development,” which we reject.... As other courts have recognized, the adoption theory of “development” would undermine the CDA for the same reasons as an encouragement theory

And thus, Dirty World is protected here:

Dirty World and Richie did not author the statements at issue; however, they did select the statements for publication. But Richie and Dirty World cannot be found to have materially contributed to the defamatory content of the statements posted on October 27 and December 7, 2009, simply because those posts were selected for publication.... Nor can they be found to have materially contributed to the defamatory content through the decision not to remove the posts.... The CDA expressly bars “lawsuits seeking to hold a service provider liable for its exercise of a publisher’s traditional editorial functions—such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone or alter content.”

Also, thankfully for us at Techdirt in particular, the court points out that Dirty World's name doesn't remove liability just because it has "dirt" in it:

Nor does the name of the website, www.TheDirty.com, suggest that only illegal or actionable content will be published.

The court also notes that while Richie's additional comment "why are all high school teachers freaks in the sack" may be "absurd," it does not "materially contribute to the defamatory content." Nor, by the way, did Jones claim that Richie's own comments were ever defamatory -- the lawsuit was entirely focused on the content written by others. Instead, Jones' lawyer tried to claim that Richie's non-defamatory comments contributed to the defamation, and thus took away his safe harbor protections. But the court points out how absurd this is:

Richie’s remark was made after each of the defamatory postings had already been displayed. It would break the concepts of responsibility and material contribution to hold Richie responsible for the defamatory content of speech because he later commented on that speech. Although ludicrous, Richie’s remarks did not materially contribute to the defamatory content of the posts appearing on the website. More importantly, the CDA bars claims lodged against website operators for their editorial functions, such as the posting of comments concerning third-party posts, so long as those comments are not themselves actionable.

And, the court also offers a pretty direct dig at Jones and her lawyers for targeting the wrong party (not the original lawsuit which totally targeted the wrong site, but for going after the site instead of the original commenters):

We note that the broad immunity furnished by the CDA does not necessarily leave persons who are the objects of anonymously posted, online, defamatory content without a remedy. In this case, Jones conceded that she did not attempt to recover from the person(s) whose comments Richie elected to publish. She conceded that she did not attempt to subpoena Richie or Dirty World to discover who authored the defamatory posts. Instead, she sued Dirty World and Richie. But, under the CDA, Jones cannot seek her recovery from the online publisher where that publisher did not materially contribute to the tortious content.

All in all, this is a good win for Section 230 safe harbors for online publishers, and a good win for free speech. This case should have gone this way at the district court level -- and it only went sideways because of a confused judge who basically misread or ignored pretty much all precedent on the issue.

Filed Under: cda, defamation, development, encouragement, free speech, safe harbors, sarah jones, secondary liability, section 230
Companies: thedirty.com

Is Nvidia Playing Fair With Their New Development Tools?

from the dirty-tricks dept

There's some heavy details in all of this, many of them at least somewhat technical, so let's dispense with the typical introductions and get right to the meat of this GPU industry sandwich. It's no secret to anyone paying attention to the video game industry that the graphics processor war has long been primarily waged between rivals Nvidia and AMD. What you may not realize is just how involved those two companies are with the developers that use their cards and tools. It makes sense, of course, that the two primary players in PC GPUs would want to get involved with game developers to make sure their code is optimized for the systems on which they'll be played. That way, gamers end up with games that run well on the cards in their systems, buy more games, buy more GPUs, and everyone is happy. According to AMD, however, Nvidia is attempting to lock out AMD's ability to get involved with developers who use the Nvidia GameWorks toolset, and the results can already be seen on the hottest game of the season thus far.

Some as-brief-as-possible background to get things started. First, the GameWorks platform appears to be immensely helpful to developers creating graphically impressive games.

Developers license these proprietary Nvidia technologies like TXAA and ShadowWorks to deliver a wide range of realistic graphical enhancements to things like smoke, lighting, and textures. Nvidia engineers typically work closely with the developers on the best execution of their final code. Recent examples of Nvidia GameWorks titles include Batman: Arkham Origins, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and this week's highly anticipated Watch Dogs.

Now, while this is and should be a licensing-revenue win for Nvidia, aspects of the agreement in using GameWorks may actually seek to extend that win into a realm that threatens the larger gaming ecosystem. As mentioned previously, both Nvidia and AMD have traditionally worked extremely closely with developers, even going so far as assisting them in optimizing the game code itself to offer the best experience on their respective cards. How? Well, I'll let PR lead for AMD, Robert Hallock, chime in.

"Gameworks represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products (40% of the market) to widen the margin in favor of NVIDIA products," Hallock told me in an email conversation over the weekend. But wait, it stands to reason that AMD would be miffed over a competitor having the edge when it comes to graphical fidelity and features, right? Hallock explains that the core problem is deeper: "Participation in the Gameworks program often precludes the developer from accepting AMD suggestions that would improve performance directly in the game code—the most desirable form of optimization.The code obfuscation makes it difficult to perform our own after-the-fact driver optimizations, as the characteristics of the game are hidden behind many layers of circuitous and non-obvious routines," Hallock continues. "This change coincides with NVIDIA's decision to remove all public Direct3D code samples from their site in favor of a 'contact us for licensing' page. AMD does not engage in, support, or condone such activities."

In other words, the dual symbiotic relationships that have always existed between developers and both Nvidia and AMD becomes one-sided, with AMD being locked out of the process in some very important ways. It means that an essential information repository and communications lines for development and game code optimization nearly become proprietary in favor of Nvidia. And, lest you think one shouldn't simply take the word of a rival PR flack on this kind of thing, other tech journalists appear to not only agree, but have predicted this exact outcome nearly a year ago when the GameWorks program was first rolled out.

"AMD is no longer in control of its own performance. While GameWorks doesn't technically lock vendors into Nvidia solutions, a developer that wanted to support both companies equally would have to work with AMD and Nvidia from the beginning of the development cycle to create a vendor-specific code path. It's impossible for AMD to provide a quick after-launch fix. This kind of maneuver ultimately hurts developers in the guise of helping them."

Forbes' Jason Evangelho then digs into the title du jour, Watch Dogs, an Ubisoft production developed within the GameWorks platform. When a tech journalist is this surprised by how stark the difference in performance is between two rival GPU manufacturers, it's worth taking him seriously.

I've been testing it over the weekend on a variety of newer AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, and the results have been simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. It's evident that Watch Dogs is optimized for Nvidia hardware, but it's staggering just how un-optimized it is on AMD hardware. I guarantee that when the game gets released, a swarm of upset gamers are going to point fingers at AMD for the sub-par performance. Their anger would be misplaced.

The graphic above may not appear all that staggering at first, until you understand the cards involved and what it actually represents. The two cards in question aren't remotely in the same category of power and cost when compared to one another. That AMD card that is barely keeping up with the Nvidia card is a $500 workhorse, while the Nvidia card is a mid-range $300 staple of their linecard. Both cards were updated with the latest drivers for Watch Dogs prior to testing. The problem, as suggested above, is that the level of optimization done for the Nvidia cards far outpaces what's been done on AMD's end and it is thanks to the way the GameWorks platform is licensed and controlled. Games outside of that platform, with the exact same cards being tested, tell a far different story.

To further put this in perspective, AMD's 290x graphics card performs 51% better than Nvidia's 770 on one of the most demanding PC titles around, Metro: Last Light — which also happens to be an Nvidia optimized title. As you would expect given their respective prices, AMD's flagship 290x can and should blow past Nvidia's 770 and compete with Nvidia's 780Ti on most titles. To really drive the point home, my Radeon 290x can hit 60fps on Metro: Last Light with High quality settings and 4x anti-aliasing, at a higher resolution of 1440p.

There's some history here, with Nvidia having a reputation for being more proprietary than AMD, which has always been seen as more of an open-source, open-dialogue, open-competition company. Indeed, Nvidia even has some history with trying to hide colluding with competitors behind trade secret law. But if it's allowed to simply lock up the open dialogue that everyone agrees makes for the best gaming ecosystem all around, the results could be quite poor for the PC gaming community as a whole. Particularly if upset AMD GPU owners who aren't aware of the background end up pointing the fingers at their co-victims of Nvidia rather than the villain itself.

Filed Under: development, gameworks, gpus, optimization, video games
Companies: amd, nvidia

WIPO's Development Agenda At The Crossroads: Does IP Or Development Take Priority?

from the crunch-time dept

One reason why agreements like ACTA, TPP, TAFTA/TTIP and TISA have proliferated in recent years is that the US, EU and allies are losing their tight grip on international bodies like the WTO. That means they are unable to use traditional fora to draw up trade agreements that largely serve their interests. Instead, they have started forming ad hoc invitation-only groups that can negotiate in secret, without needing to accommodate the views of emerging economies that are starting to assert themselves.

That tussle between the old and the new power blocs has now spread to WIPO, as Intellectual Property Watch's report on a recent meeting of the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property reveals:

At the heart of the power struggle is the Development Agenda of the organisation. Adopted in 2007, it aimed at instilling a development dimension in all WIPO activities. However, the interpretation of this development dimension and how it should be implemented is regularly an object of friction.

Last night, after a tense week, final statements sounded warning signs of a deep political divide on the orientation of the organisation, which developed countries underlined was financed by users of the global IP system, and whose main goal is the promotion of the protection of intellectual property, and developing countries recalled is a United Nations agency with development at its core.

There are two world-views colliding here. The first, held by the US and the EU for example, is that WIPO's central task is to spread and strengthen intellectual monopolies around the world, since these, they assert, are inherently desirable. The second, espoused by emerging economies, is that such monopolies are not an end in themselves, but tools for enhancing economies and the well-being of the public. That implies monopolies that cause harm -- for example, pharma patents that lead to unaffordable drugs for the vast majority of the world's population -- should be reined in, rather than encouraged. Naturally, that does not sit well with nations like the US and EU whose priority is how much money patent and copyright monopolies can generate for the companies that own them.

The shifting mood among some at WIPO is clear from this statement made by South Africa during the meeting:

Although regretting the absence of agreement over the week, "what we cannot run away from is the fact that there are some delegations who hold the view that the organisation can go back to pre-2007," he said. "This is something my delegation will fight to the end for!"

"We understand the WIPO Convention," he said, "but this organisation is not a company and we are not part of a board of directors who need to answer to someone. We answer to the public," he said. The people of South Africa are "the only people that we answer to, irrespective of who funds the organisation or where the funding comes from."

South Africa may be in the vanguard in expressing so forcefully its views on the need for a new kind of WIPO, but it is not alone. That means we can expect yet more private agreements among the old guard who increasingly find that they are unable to have their way at traditional organizations like WIPO.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: development, development agenda, intellectual property, public interest, trade agreements, wipo

TrueCrypt Page Says It's Not Secure, All Development Stopped

from the uh... dept

Last fall, we noted that the popular disk encryption software TrueCrypt was undergoing a security audit, inspired by the Snowden revelations. At issue: TrueCrypt is open source and widely used and promoted (hell, Snowden himself apparently taught people how to use it), but no one really knew who was behind it -- raising all sorts of questions. A little over a month ago, we noted that the first phase of the audit didn't find any backdoors, but did note a few (mostly) minor vulnerabilities.

However, a little while ago, TrueCrypt's SourceForge page suddenly announced that " WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues" and furthermore: "The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP." While some initially questioned if this was a hoax, others quickly noted that a new version of the program was signed with the official TrueCrypt private key -- meaning that it's either legit, or TrueCrypt's private key has been compromised (which would obviously present another serious issue). If you happen to use TrueCrypt, you should be very, very careful right now.

Filed Under: development, disk encryption, encryption, privacy, security, truecrypt

'Bay Of Tweets Invasion' Legitimizes Nearly Every Crackpot Anti-US Claim From Dictators Around The Globe

from the a-complete-disaster dept

Last week, we wrote about the Associated Press's Hollywood script-like story of how USAID, who is not supposed to be engaged in intelligence activities, apparently set up a Cuban version of Twitter, called ZunZuneo, designed to give more Cubans a way to communicate with each other -- but also to foment a pro-democracy movement and spy on certain Cubans. While the concept of encouraging democracy and open communications may be good, the fact that it was done via a series of secretive shell companies and that it was used for spying and subversive anti-government efforts is just incredibly stupid. As we noted in our original piece on it, this would likely create huge headaches around the globe for legitimate US humanitarian efforts, because foreign governments will now point to this story as a reason to distrust USAID and pretty much any other US activities.

In fact, the impact is being seen already. Remember how we'd just been discussing Turkey's latest attempt to ban Twitter? Zeynep Tufecki explains how this latest news has played right into the hands of Turkey's Prime Minister, noting that the Twitter ban was actually a calculated strategy to appeal to the fears of lower- and middle-class Turks that Twitter was part of an American plot to foment unrest. To have the ZunZuneo story come out days later simply serves to better confirm that plot:

Until now, though, in trying to paint their online critics as “foreign agents,” these governments were grasping at straws. For example, lacking a better model, Ankara’s AKP mayor, Melih Gokcek, who became the Turkish government’s most vocal spokesperson during the Gezi protests, kept referring to OTPOR — the small, insignificant and defunct Serbian activist organization that received USAID funding in the 1990s — as supposedly the power behind all global protests, including Gezi.

I suspect there will be no more grasping at straws after ZunZeneo. Secretly funded by the U.S. government? Check. Aimed for regime change? Check. Collected information from unsuspecting users for political purposes? Check. Tried clumsily to hide its tracks? Check. The “Cuban Twitter” was a dictator’s fever dream made real.

Meanwhile, what seemed like wacky conspiracy theories a month ago concerning USAID's efforts in Ukraine to overthrow the government there, suddenly seem more legitimate. In fact, most of the claims do appear to be nothing more than crazy conspiracy theories, but prior to the ZunZuneo story coming out, most people would have assumed that that, too, was a crazy conspiracy theory. And that's the huge problem here. Even if most of what USAID does is really important and valuable work for truly noble purposes, the ZunZuneo story undermines all of that, by making any conspiracy story seem legit. Last year, people thought Bolivian President Evo Morales was crazy for expelling USAID, claiming that it was seeking to "conspire against" the Bolivian government. Suddenly it's tough to assume that his claims weren't accurate. Similarly, with this story, there are suddenly additional stories coming out of highly questionable activities by USAID, which often look quite a lot like intelligence activities to undermine foreign governments.

In fact, Glenn Greenwald is reporting that the ZunZuneo story is just a drop in the bucket of US propaganda efforts around the globe.

These ideas–discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets–appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

And, once again, even if the actual impact of these programs is limited, the mere perception that the US government is engaged in these kinds of practices helps push along pretty much any conspiracy theory about US government involvement, no matter how wacky or ridiculous. So, in a bumbling effort to spread a pro-US, pro-democracy message, USAID appears to have done the exact opposite, and handed crackpot authoritarian dictators ever more ammunition to crack down on actual American humanitarian aid and tools for communication.

Filed Under: conspiracy, development, diplomacy, usaid

DailyDirt: Big Data On Kid Development

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Long term studies of children are expensive, but the data collected may be invaluable -- especially if wide-ranging policies are based on them. The amount of data Facebook is collecting on kids may be massive, but it'll probably only be data mined for marketing purposes. Here are just a few examples of some kid research that could influence the way people raise their kids.

• Measuring the difference between heart rates when a baby inhales and exhales could lead to predictive indicators for whether or not that kid will overcome poverty. For "sensitive" babies, where the difference is large, a stable environment may have a greater effect on the child's future well-being. [url]
• Preschool seems to be important for disadvantaged kids, but the benefits for middle class kids are not as clear. So flip a coin, tiger-moms, but some economists might have a good argument for government funded access to preschool for at-risk toddlers. [url]
• The 7 Up documentary began in 1964 and followed seven year old kids from different economic backgrounds as they grew up. The latest installment, 56 Up checks in on these people now as they face retirement (or not) -- and presents a fascinating snapshot of society. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: 7 up, babies, data, development, kids, prediction, preschool

Obama's Techies Want To Open Source Their Work, But Politicians Want To Keep It Secret

from the techies-vs.-politicians dept

Right after the election, we noted the stories showing how Obama's technology advantage was impressive, while the get-out-the-vote technology that the Romney campaign built up appeared to fail spectacularly. However, there's an interesting post mortem to this, which shows how techies and politicians still usually come from very, very different worlds. The world class team of technologists who helped build up Obama's campaign tech are trying to release their work as open source -- but Democratic Party operatives are trying to keep it secret, believing (almost certainly incorrectly) that this gives them a proprietary advantage:

But in the aftermath of the election, a stark divide has emerged between political operatives and the techies who worked side-by-side. At issue is the code created during the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign: the digital architecture behind the campaign’s website, its system for collecting donations, its email operation, and its mobile app. When the campaign ended, these programmers wanted to put their work back into the coding community for other developers to study and improve upon. Politicians in the Democratic party felt otherwise, arguing that sharing the tech would give away a key advantage to the Republicans. Three months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided. It’s a choice the OFA developers warn could not only squander the digital advantage the Democrats now hold, but also severely impact their ability to recruit top tech talent in the future.

The politicians who want to keep it locked up are making a huge mistake for a very large number of reasons that people who are steeped in technology understand. Let's list out some of the ways in which it's stupid to keep this secret:

1. It basically makes the technology useless. As one of the techies who worked on the project notes, the software "will be mothballed," meaning that four years from now it'll be useless. What the politicians see as keeping an advantage is really just squandering a useful framework.
2. It completely misunderstands how technology advances and works. No one expects software from today to be the same four years from now. By mothballing the tech, it will mean that the next campaign will effectively be starting from scratch. Open sourcing it would allow additional work to continue on this.
3. You can learn from others as well. The really shortsighted part is this insistence that open sourcing it "helps the other side." Again, what will be used four years (or even two years) from now will be quite different as the technology advances. And having it open sourced means that lots of folks can jump in and build on the tech in the meantime. And, yes, even Republican techies might work on it, and the Dems can learn from them as well.
4. Keeping it closed pisses off the techies, who will be less likely to contribute or join the team next time around.
5. If the Democrats believe they have stronger technologists, then next election they should still be able to make innovations faster than their opponents.
6. It quite possibly violates some open source licenses, since much of the code was built on open source software, some of which requires any additional work to also be open sourced.
7. Keeping the tech secret also means that other campaigns (beyond just elections) can't make use of the technology as well, which could actually hurt causes that the Democrats support.

In many ways this is the same old battle we've seen from legacy companies vs. more open upstarts for years. The legacy players think their advantage is in keeping the code secret. The upstarts know that's wrong: the pace of innovation and the rate of change means that by being open you can better keep up and do more. Keeping it closed guarantees stagnation and falling behind.

Filed Under: democrats, development, obama, open source, politics, techies