The Nvidia shield, now available for pre-order and set to launch next month. The preorder date for Nvidia’s handheld gaming console entry has been moved up to today, May 17, per an announcement on Nvidia’s site. Originally the Shield, a portable console with a flip-open screen, was going to be available to preorder starting Monday, May 20, but Nvidia seems to have decided to allow customers to strike while the console is on their minds. Nvidia unveiled the unexpected Project Shield at CES in January as console running Android 4.2.2 on a Tegra 4 processor. Nvidia said the system would have a 5-inch 720p display, two analog sticks, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, HDMI output, 2GB RAM, 16GB of storage, and stereo speakers. When not playing its own games the Shield can also be used as a controller for other consoles, said Nvidia, and can stream games to a desktop computer. The company announced on Wednesday that the device will sell for $349 will be released sometime in June. The handheld will be sold online by retailers like Newegg as well as at physical retail stores including GameStop, Micro Center, and Canada Computers. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Apple CEO Tim Cook. lemagit Unlike his predecessor, Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn't appear reluctant to face down a Senate subcommittee: he's due to appear in Washington DC next week to testify at a Senate hearing on offshore profit shifting, and he plans to directly address the concerns Congress is raising: The Subcommittee will continue its examination of the structures and methods employed by multinational corporations to shift profits offshore and how such activities are affected by the Internal Revenue Code and related regulations. Witnesses will include representatives from the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, representatives of a multinational corporation, and tax experts. The roles of "representatives of a multinational corporation" will be filled by Cook, along with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Apple Head of Tax Operations Phillip Bullock. The Senate subcommittee will be grilling Apple on exactly why the company keeps more than $100 billion of its infamous cash hoard in non-US banks. The accusatory undertone is that Apple is engaging in what the subcommittee will almost certainly characterize as tax avoidance (and Apple's issuing of bonds last month to generate additional cash certainly isn't going to help). But in a string of preemptive interviews with publications various and sundry, including the Washington Post and Politico, Cook appears unconcerned. Instead, it sounds like he is viewing the congressional summons as a teaching opportunity. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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One of these things is not like the other. Nintendo has announced a handful of games set for launch on the Wii U through the spring and summer. Releases include the exclusive Sonic: The Lost World, a new version of Super Luigi U, and Mario and Sonic: Winter Games. Some of these unreleased games will be available for play at Best Buy during E3 prior to release. Super Luigi U, which will be available as DLC for New Super Mario Bros. U, will include the character Nabbit from the original game as a multiplayer character that cannot take damage from enemies but is also incapable of getting power-ups. The game will be released as DLC for $19.99 or as a standalone version for $29.99 on July 26 in Europe and August 25 in North America. Nintendo provided few details regarding Sonic: The Lost World except that it will come to both the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, with more details to come during E3 in June. The game represents a partnership between Nintendo and Sega, two formerly feuding companies. As for the Olympics-oriented Mario and Sonic, playable events will include skiing, snowboarding, skating, and bobsledding. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Cinnamon desktop on Linux Mint 15. Linux Mint The Linux Mint project yesterday unveiled version 15 of the increasingly popular desktop operating system, with upgrades to the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments as well as new applications for managing software and drivers. Code-named "Olivia," Linux Mint 15 is based on the most recent version of Ubuntu and will be supported until January 2014. Linux Mint 15 is in the Release Candidate stage, with a final release coming later. Linux Mint also has a version based on Debian which is released on a "semi-rolling" basis while the Ubuntu-based version mirrors Ubuntu's six-month release cycle. "Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project," the Mint announcement states. "MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools, 'Software Sources' and 'Driver Manager,' make their first appearance in Linux Mint." Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Images of Money Pressure is mounting on web giants Amazon and Google as a series of whistleblowers have put a question mark over their UK tax arrangements. Both companies have been accused of disguising the full extent of their UK-based activities to avoid paying tax. At a Public Accounts Committee hearing on May 16 chairperson Margaret Hodges accused Google of "deliberately manipulating the reality of their business" and claimed to have whistleblower evidence that UK Google staff had sold advertising and invoiced UK-based customers. "You are a company that says you do no evil," she told Google vice-president Matt Brittin. "I think that you do evil in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax." Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Dell released its financial report yesterday for the first quarter of the company's 2014 fiscal year and the overall numbers are positively dismal: a 79 percent drop in net income from the same quarter in FY13. In the first quarter last year Dell reported an overall net income (GAAP) of $635 million; this year for Q1, net income has plummeted to $130 million. Reuters, CBS News, and tons of other sites are carrying news of the sharp decrease in earnings along with much speculation on what the report means for the company's future. Company founder Michael Dell is engaged in a war with the company's board of directors and other shareholders over whether or not to take the company private and how much it should cost to do so, and the latest financial statements provide ammunition to both sides in that argument. Yahoo! Finance If Michael Dell is able to get shareholders to accept his $24.4 billion offer to buy back the company it's a virtual certainty that he will push the company to shed its ailing consumer PC manufacturing and sales business. The numbers do indeed show that a strategy focusing on high-end (and high-margin) enterprise services and equipment has some merit. According to the Reuters report revenue from Dell's enterprise solutions, services, and software group actually increased by 12 percent. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Aurich Lawson / Warner Bros. Entertainment The Mac on your desk or on the cafe table next to you has a chip with secret functions that can be unlocked only by inputting a spell from the Harry Potter series. That's right, the SMC, or system management controller, a chip used to regulate a Mac's current and voltage, manage its light sensor, and temporarily store FileVault keys, contains undocumented code that is invoked by entering the word "SpecialisRevelio." Those are the same magic words used to reveal hidden charms, hexes, or properties used by wizards in the Harry Potter series written by author J. K. Rowling. That fun fact was presented Wednesday at the NoSuchCon security conference by veteran reverse engineer Alex Ionescu. While most details are far too technical for this article, the gist of the research is that the SMC is a chip that very few people can read but just about anyone with rudimentary technical skills can "flash" update. Besides displaying the Apple engineers' affinity for Harry Potter, Ionescu's tinkerings also open the door to new types of hacks. But don't worry, they're mostly the fodder for a hacking scene in a James Bond or Mission Impossible screenplay. "The attacks discussed in my presentation are attacks that likely only a nation-state adversary would have the sufficient technical knowledge to implement, and they require precise knowledge of the machine that is being targeted," Ionescu, who is chief architect at security firm CrowdStrike, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "They are perfect, for example, at a border crossing where a rogue country may need to 'take a quick look at your laptop' to 'help prevent terrorism.' I don't suspect most Mac users (and certainly not those that read Ars or other similar publications) would be at a high-profile enough level to warrant such level of interest from another state." Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Today a bipartisan Congressional privacy caucus sent Google a letter with eight questions regarding a topic that's caused a lot of speculation: how will privacy be protected by Google Glass? The headsets can take photos and video in a more discreet manner than raising a smartphone or a camera and pointing it in the direction of a subject. Advances in facial recognition technology, as well as the wealth of data that Google has collected through increasingly consolidated user accounts, have raised the possibility that a stranger could see you on the street and access considerable data about you. Co-Chairman of the privacy caucus Joe Barton (R-TX) and seven other members of the caucus signed the letter, which said, “we are uncertain of Google's plans to incorporate privacy protections into the device.” The caucus demanded that Google address how it would deal with getting consent from non-users who might have their information collected by Glass, how facial recognition would factor into Glass, and whether Google will allow people to store any personal information on Glass itself. The caucus members also asked if the company would limit its technology to protect user and non-user privacy and wanted to know what specific information about users Google intended to collect (Google's current privacy policy says that it may “collect device-specific information”). Google has been given until June 14 to send a response to the caucus. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Alibaba Once it became simple to record, upload, and share digital video over the Internet, gamers quickly became interested in recording themselves playing games—especially with humorous or profane commentary. The phenomenon of creating and sharing so-called "Let's Play" videos took off around 2006 and today has its own channel on YouTube. Practitioners of this self-recording art sometimes refer to themselves as LPers for short. Now, it looks like Let's Play videos are one more piece of content that's being caught up in YouTube's Content ID system. It's an automated copyright-enforcement system that's been glitchy from the start and often criticized for taking down legitimate content. Remixes of cultural icons have been taken down with no good explanation, as well as NASA content that should be in the public domain. Political satire didn't stand a chance either. Until October, there wasn't even a meaningful appeal system for owners of wrongly removed videos. It looks like LPers are the latest victims. A prolific LPer named Zack Scott took to Facebook yesterday to complain that several LPers had experienced takedowns of the videos including Nintendo games. A company fan like himself wasn't the right target for automated takedowns, Scott complained, and he said he'd stop playing Nintendo games until the situation was straightened out. "It jeopardizes my channel's copyright standing and the livelihood of all LPers," he wrote. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google I/O didn't give us the Android update we were expecting—or did it?? Andrew Cunningham Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn't announce was the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that's true, why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic developers? The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem. Consider the full breadth of yesterday's Android-related improvements: you've got an update to the Android version of Google Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There's a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that's to say nothing of the products that affect Google's services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Yesterday, Google announced its new, beefier Hangouts app for Android phones. The newest iteration integrates video chatting, Gmail, and Google's late “Google Talk” app all into one. Hangouts is available for free on all Android devices running Android 2.3 or higher, but if you pay phone bills to AT&T, you can forget about that video chat for now. Slashgear reports that customers trying to access video chat on AT&T are met with a message saying “You must be connected to a Wi-Fi network to join a video call.” The message is reminiscent of news from a year earlier, when AT&T decreed that customers would not be able to use Apple's new FaceTime video chatting over its networks. At the time, AT&T said it would charge customers extra for using the service. The company later sort of relented and said it would make the service free to customers on 3G networks—but only if they were on a shared data plan. (We polled Ars readers last July and 89 percent said they'd never pay extra just to use FaceTime). Amid genuine customer outrage and rumors that it was violating network neutrality rules, AT&T eventually saw a formal FCC complaint filed against it. The company then started independently loosening its restrictions on FaceTime. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Welcome to your new Hangout. SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Yesterday Google rekeased Hangouts, the company's new video, voice, and text chat application. Previously known internally to Google by the codename "Babel," Hangouts consolidates the previously disconnected Google+ video Hangouts, the Google+ Messenger chat application, and the Gmail-connected Google Talk platform into a single app and architecture. Hangouts isn’t just an app—it's an entire real-time communications architecture overhaul with deep hooks into Gmail and Google Drive. And while it doesn't yet span all the real-time communications options—SMS support is reportedly in the works, while support for Google Voice has not been discussed—Hangouts poses a significant challenge both to Apple's iMessage and Microsoft's Skype because of its cross-platform support and relative openness. The extent of that openness wasn't exactly clear from Google's presentation of Hangouts during yesterday's marathon Google I/O keynote presentation. Nothing was said at the time about what the changes would mean for developers and users of software that had previously connected to Google Talk. As it turns out there's good news and bad news. During a "fireside chat" with the Google + Platform team today, Vice President of Engineering Chee Chew cleared the air over questions about how the consolidation of Google's chat applications under Hangouts would affect users of third-party chat tools like Pidgin and Adium. Chew also addressed the matter of businesses which used the Extended Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to connect their private IM systems to Google Talk users in the past. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Password Minder Passwords are a constant headache, a headache that will one day grow so bad that—if infomercials can be believed—your grandmother will pound a table in frustration. How to manage them? Early this year, one of the largest as-seen-on-TV companies produced its innovative answer: the Password Minder. Despite the grandiose name, the Password Minder is a blank notebook. It has a black cover. You write all your passwords in it. It costs $10 (plus shipping and handling). “Who can remember all those tricky combinations?” the infomercial asks. “You’ll never lose critical computer settings again!” it exclaims as a green “Safe Computer Guarantee” appears on the screen. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A white Nexus 4 spotted in the wild. It missed the keynote, but it's apparently still coming. Android and Me It's fair to say that we didn't get everything we wanted to out of Google's marathon opening-day keynote yesterday. Persistent rumors pointed to a possible refresh for last year's Nexus 7 tablet and small tweaks to the Nexus 4. And Android 4.3 was very briefly outed on one of Google's own product pages yesterday. None of this actually happened—yet some rumors die hard. Android and Me reports that it was able to lay hands on a white version of the Nexus 4 at Google I/O and that the phone would be available in the Google Play store on June 10. The phone's hardware is otherwise identical to the black Nexus 4 that has been available (or not available) from Google Play since last November, but the new version of the phone will also apparently bring us the Android 4.3 update that we missed yesterday. Specifics about the next version of Android have been hard to come by. Speculation point to the inclusion of some new Bluetooth features and support for OpenGL ES 3.0 but otherwise we haven't heard much. Even the low-key Android 4.2 update came with plenty of small features and tweaks, though. In the event that the new operating system actually comes to pass this time, expect us to take an in-depth look at it as soon we can. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall runs the popular industry blog Scholarly Open Access. The site maintains a list of open-access journals and publishers that Beall believes engage in predatory practices. For journals and publishers these acts include things like spamming scholars or charging faulty fees for content. The site is known simply as "Beall's list" to followers and its notoriety has earned Beall ink in places like The New York Times. (And yes, now he even receives pseudo-spammer journals who request to be featured on the site without really understanding.) Today The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a less amusing letter Beall received Tuesday. An Indian intellectual property management firm called IP Markets informed Beall that they would be suing for $1 billion in damages and that he could face up to three years in prison for his "deliberate attempt to defame our client." That client is OMICS Publishing Group, an India-based operation profiled several times on the blog. The group requested that Beall remove the posts and e-mail updates to anyone who published his work, yet IP Markets still intends to go through with the suit either way. "All the allegation [sic] that you have mentioned in your blog are nothing more than fantastic figment of your imagination by you," the six-page letter reads according to The Chronicle. "Our client perceive the blog as mindless rattle of a incoherent person and please be assured that our client has taken a very serious note of the language, tone, and tenure adopted by you as well as the criminal acts of putting the same on the Internet." Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A greenhouse in winter, with the rest of the tundra frozen around it. Josh Schimel Although the climate changes that are being driven by human carbon emissions are likely to cause serious disruptions on their own, one of the additional worries is that the initial warming will set off events that keep changing the planet even if humanity gets its carbon emissions under control. So, for example, warming the oceans could heat up the clathrates that exist there, releasing methane that greatly enhances the greenhouse warming. The other place that scientists have been watching nervously is the Arctic. About half the carbon stored in the Earth's soil is in the Arctic, where it's locked in place by permafrost and low metabolic activity caused by the cold. As those regions melt, the worry is that bacteria in the soil will start feeding on the carbon trapped there, releasing it into the atmosphere as CO2 that causes further warming. A new study that looks at 20 years of changes in Alaska, however, suggests that this won't necessarily take place. In the area being studied, the warming temperatures rearranged the ecosystem and redistributed the carbon. But, in the end, there was just as much carbon stored in the soil. What needs to be determined now is just how well this experience will translate to other areas of the Arctic. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Explosion photo by gynti_46 (remixed) LONDON, UK—The four British Lulzsec hackers—Mustafa "tflow" al-Bassam, Ryan "kayla" Ackroyd, Jake "topiary" Davis, and Ryan "ViraL" Cleary—were sentenced today to between 20 and 32 months in jail for crimes committed during Lulzsec's 50 day hacking spree in 2011. Prosecutors described the men as being at the "cutting edge of contemporary and emerging criminal offending known as cybercrime" and as "latter-day pirates." At previous hearings, al-Bassam, 18, of Peckham, London, and Davis, 20, of the Shetland Islands, entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy to commit DDoS attacks against targets including Westboro Baptist Church, Sony, Bethesda, and EVE Online. They also pled to conspiracy to hack targets including Nintendo, Sony (again), PBS, and HBGary. Ackroyd, 26, of Yorkshire, pled guilty only to the hacking charge. For these crimes, al-Bassam was sentenced to 20 months, suspended for two years, and received 300 hours of community service. Davis was sentenced to 24 months in a young offender's institute. Ackroyd was sentenced to 30 months. Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Mobile gaming can be a finicky thing. Not only does any title have to account for varying screen resolutions and multiplayer play, but with such a saturated device market, being able to take a game cross-platform entices both the developer and the player. Switching back and forth between iOS and Android, for instance, can be difficult for some mobile gamers, especially if there are in-app purchases and achievements worth hoarding. As mobile ecosystems grow, so do the users’ needs. Google apparently realizes this since the company is making big strides to ensure that game developers are on board with its mobile ecosystem. It’s introduced a suite of APIs that will enable cloud saves, leaderboards, multiplayer game play, and achievements—all things that will benefit mobile gamers. “The opportunity that exists here is phenomenal for both developers and players looking for interesting and entertaining games,” said Greg Hartell, product manager for Google Play game services. “What it’s really about is creating a cross-platform environment that allows you to build a community of players across different screens.” At first glance, Google’s Play game services appear to be a response to Apple’s Game Center functionality. On iOS, Game Center is featured as a standalone application for players to check on achievements and hook up with friends to play a game. Game Center is also integrated into the games that support it. The Play game services work similarly: users log in with their Google Plus account on the titles that support it. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The D-Wave Two. D-Wave D-Wave's quantum optimizer has found a new customer in the form of a partnership created by Google, NASA, and a consortium of research universities. The group is forming what it's calling the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab and will locate the computer at NASA's Ames Research Center. Academics will get involved via the Universities Space Research Association. Although the D-Wave Two isn't a true quantum computer in the sense the term is typically used, D-Wave's system uses quantum effects to solve computational problems in a way that can be faster than traditional computers. How much faster? We just covered some results that indicated a certain class of problems may be sped up by as much as 10,000 times. Those algorithms are typically used in what's termed machine learning. And machine learning gets mentioned several times in Google's announcement of the new hardware. Machine learning is typically used to allow computers to classify features, like whether or not an e-mail is spam (to use Google's example) or whether or not an image contains a specific feature, like a cat. You simply feed a machine learning system enough known images with and without cats and it will identify features that are shared among the cat set. When you feed it unknown images, it can determine whether enough of those features are present and make an accurate guess as to whether there's a cat in it. In more serious applications machine learning has been used to identify patterns of brain activity that are associated with different visual inputs, like viewing different letters. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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So far this year's Google I/O has been very developer-centric—perhaps not surprising given that I/O is, at the end of the day, a developer's conference. Especially compared to last year's skydiving, Glass-revealing, Nexus-introducing keynote, yesterday's three-and-a-half-hour keynote presentation focused overwhelmingly on back-end technologies rather than concrete products aimed at consumers. There's still plenty to see. All this year we've been taking photos to show you just what it's like to cover these shows—we've shown you things as large as CES and as small as Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference. Our pictures from the first day of Google I/O should give you some idea of what it's like to attend a developer conference for one of tech's most influential companies. You are here I/O is held in the west hall of the Moscone Center, and between the giant Google signs and this real-life Google Maps pin you'd be hard-pressed to miss it. Andrew Cunningham 20 more images in gallery .related-stories { display: none !important; } Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Victor Perez The same judge who handed Viacom another defeat in its copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube last month has denied class-action status to a huge population of video copyright owners whose works were posted on YouTube without their permission. In a case running parallel to the infamous Viacom v. YouTube suit the English Premier League, French Tennis Federation, and various music publishers sued the Google-owned YouTube in 2007 "on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated," and in 2010 formally asked to be certified as a class. The proposed class would contain people or entities whose copyrighted work was posted on YouTube on or after April 15, 2005 without their permission. To be eligible for the class victims of infringement must fall into one of two subclasses. One subclass would include victims of repeat infringers such as people who asked YouTube to take videos down but said videos either remained on the site or were taken down and then posted again. A second subclass would include just music publishers who were victims of copyright infringement on YouTube when the service "knew or should have known" about the infringement because of a notification from the copyright holder, "or because [YouTube] otherwise identified, tracked or monitored it, or could have identified it, including through tools offered to owners of sound recordings of musical compositions." Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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When Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's home was raided in January 2012, US authorities were hoping they'd see him stateside, in court, pretty quickly. It hasn't worked out that way. Dotcom has been smiling on magazine covers and throwing unusual parties to herald his new cloud storage service, Mega. The legal action moves ahead, however, with the US keeping Megaupload under indictment wit its assets frozen, as arguments over Dotcom's extradition move forward. Last word on the extradition trial was that it had been delayed until August 2013. In order to mount what they call a proper defense to the extradition claims, Dotcom's lawyers have been asking to see the US evidence against their client. So far, they've been denied; New Zealand government lawyers have been arguing, on behalf of the US, that he should not be given the right to see those documents and that the extradition issue should be decided without lengthy discovery. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Over half of Americans believe that there’s considerable disagreement among climate scientists about human-caused climate change—perhaps because they've heard that from industry advocacy campaigns and politicians. With so much controversy in the media many assume that the same controversy must exist in the scientific community. In most situations people agree that it’s sensible to go with the majority of relevant experts whether that's in accepting that protons are real or a given medical treatment is effective. Those decisions depend critically on an accurate understanding of expert consensus. Several attempts have been made to shine a light on expert opinions relating to global warming. One such study surveyed about 1,000 active climate scientists, finding that 97 percent of them accepted the evidence for the consensus position that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming observed over the last century. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Bell Labs shut down in 2006. Today, Alcatel-Lucent uses patents that originated at the labs to file lawsuits. Lawrence Aberle / Wikipedia In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit, saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one, they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began, Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com, and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls.  Then things started going badly for the plaintiff. Very badly. Instead of convincing the East Texas jury to hand Alcatel the tens of millions they were asking for—$12 million from Newegg alone—they got a verdict of non-infringement. And as for the one patent they had argued throughout trial was so key to modern e-commerce, US Patent No. 5,649,131—the jury invalidated its claims. Alcatel-Lucent was scrambling. The company's patent-licensing operations were contentious but lucrative, and it surely had plans to move on from those eight heavyweights to sue many more retailers. The '131 patent, titled simply "Communications Protocol" and related to "object identifiers," was its crown jewel. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Riot Games founders and League of Legends creators Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill have encountered bad behavior in massively multiplayer online games since the days of Ultima Online and EverQuest. In all that time, the typical moderator response to the all-too-common racial epithets, homophobic remarks, and bullying that borders on psychological abuse in MMOs has been to simply ban the players and move on. League of Legends definitely could have afforded to go the same route, bleeding off a few bad apples from its 12 million daily players and 32 million active monthly players (as of late 2012) without really affecting the bottom line. But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn’t an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference. Prior to the launch of the formal initiative, Riot introduced "the Tribunal" to League of Legends in May of 2011. The Tribunal is basically a community-based court system where the defendants are players who have a large number of reports filed against them by other players. League players can log in to the Tribunal and see the cases that have been created against those players, viewing evidence in the form of sample chat logs and commentary from the players who filed the reports. Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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