An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Kyle Milliken, a 29-year-old Arkansas man, was released last week from a federal work camp. He served 17 months for hacking into the servers of several companies and stealing their user databases. Some of the victims included Disqus, from where he stole 17.5 million user records, Kickstarter, from where he took 5.2 million records, and Imgur, with 1.7 million records. For years, Milliken and his partners operated by using the credentials stolen from other companies to break into more lucrative accounts on other services.

If users had reused their passwords, Milliken would access their email inboxes, Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace accounts, and post spam promoting various products and services. From 2010 to 2014, Milliken and his colleagues operated a successful spam campaign using this simple scheme, making more than $1.4 million in profits, and living the high life. Authorities eventually caught up with the hacker. He was arrested in 2014, and collaborated with authorities for the next years, until last year, when it leaked that he was collaborating with authorities and was blackballed on the cybercrime underground....

In an interview with ZDNet last week, Milliken said he's planning to go back to school and then start a career in cyber-security... [H]e publicly apologized to the Kickstarter CEO on Twitter. "I've had a lot of time to reflect and see things from a different perspective," Milliken told ZDNet. "When you're hacking or have an objective to dump a database, you don't think about who's on the other end. There's a lot of talented people, a ton of work, and even more money that goes into creating a company... there's a bit of remorse for putting these people through cyber hell."
He also has a message for internet uesrs: stop reusing your passwords. And he also suggests enabling two-factor authentication.

"I honestly think that the big three email providers (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google) added this feature because of me."

The BBC reports that Kickstarter has been accused of "union-busting" after firing three employees: Taylor Moore, the company's head of comedy and podcasts, tweeted that he and another employee were fired on Thursday, while tech and design lead Clarissa Redwine was fired last week. All three were heavily involved in the formation of a Kickstarter union this year, Mr Moore added.

Kickstarter confirmed the employees were fired, but denied that it was because of their union activity.

Mr Moore tweeted that he had worked at the company for six years. He said that when Kickstarter fired him they "offered me no real reasons, but one month's severance for signing an NDA" -- a non-disclosure agreement. "I will not be signing it... The union busting campaign that Kickstarter management is engaging in is illegal and wrong," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes Slate: The overall argument of Billion Dollar Bully, the new documentary about Yelp released on Amazon and iTunes in May, is that Yelp extorts small business owners for advertising fees in return for helping to manage and improve reviews on their platform... Yelp has fought back against the allegations made in the film, arguing that "There has never been a connection between ratings and reviews on Yelp and buying advertising...." But the issue for small business owners has always been broader than advertising: Local businesses feel that Yelp offers no due process to resolve disputes and misunderstandings. That's because the company's standard position is to absolve itself of any responsibility to get involved....

Yelp is combating the claims made in the film by purchasing the domain BillionDollarBully.com and redirecting it to a Yelp page that explains that the company does not extort local businesses to manipulate ratings.
The Hustle argues that despite "legions" of anecdotal evidence from business owners, "the linkage between these two things ultimately can't be proven without transparency around Yelp's filtering algorithm." This is apparently leaving some restauranteurs feeling powerless and angry: In isolated bids to circumvent the "oppression" of online reviews, business owners have plunked "NO YELPERS" signs in their windows, shamed rude reviewers on Instagram, and launched anti-Yelp websites. Dan Neves, a waiter at a fine dining establishment in Austin, Texas, created YELP BULLIES EXPOSED, a private Facebook group that tracks down rude Yelpers and sends them a one-pound bag of animal feces... "I've had friends get fired over bad Yelp reviews, even if the review was untrue," says Neves.
ReviewFraud.org investigated the people interviewed for the documentary, and suggested that in some cases the real victims may be Yelp's unsuspecting reviewers. "A few negative reviewers claimed that the owner harassed them or contacted their employer to have them fired." Billion Dollar Bully raised money on Kickstarter. I was excited to see this film see the light of day. Sadly, I was disappointed... not all businesses are good, not all business owners are reputable, and not all pieces of investigative "journalism" are credible. Had the filmmakers taken a closer look at these business and other review platforms, I doubt that this movie would have been made. I've made that clear by looking at the reviews of those claiming extortion. For me, this was a massive failure and should be titled A Billion Dollar Scapegoat.

Razer, the gaming hardware manufacturing company that purchased Ouya's software assets in mid-2015, announced today that the crowdfunded Android console will cease functioning on June 25th. "That date will mark the unremarkable end of what began as a runaway Kickstarter success story: the inexpensive Ouya mini-console was powered by Android and introduced games such as TowerFall," reports The Verge. "But despite being positioned as the indie console, Ouya never quite took off after its $8.5 million crowdfunding campaign. The goal was to move Android's indie gaming scene to TV screens -- with exclusive Ouya-only titles mixed in -- but the execution didn't pan out." From the report: The hardware has been discontinued ever since Razer acquired Ouya's software assets in 2015. So it's somewhat surprising that the platform has continued to plod along for nearly four additional years. But that all ends next month. Accounts will be deactivated on June 25th. After that, Razer says "access to the Discover section will no longer be available. Games downloaded that appear in Play may still function if they do not require a purchase validation upon launch." But by and large, games on the Ouya platform will stop working after the cutoff date.

Razer notes that some developers might choose to help their Ouya customers by activating the same game on some other platform (i.e., Google Play) where available following the shutdown. Razer's own Forge TV device will continue functioning as an Android TV set-top box, but the Forge TV games store is also going offline come the 25th. Part of Razer's thinking behind the Ouya acquisition was to propel its long-term Android TV gaming ambitions. The company has clearly shifted its priorities over the last few years, as indicated by the decision to finally shut down Ouya once and for all.

According to the findings of Pen Test Partners, a U.K.-based cybersecurity firm, the "unhackable" eyeDisk, an allegedly secure USB flash drive that uses iris recognition to unlock and decrypt the device, is hackable. From a report: In its Kickstarter campaign last year, eyeDisk raised more than $21,000; it began shipping devices in March. There's just one problem: it's anything but "unhackable." Pen Test Partners researcher David Lodge found the device's backup password -- to access data in the event of device failure or a sudden eye-gouging accident -- could be easily obtained using a software tool able to sniff USB device traffic.

Salon writes that Silicon Valley tech workers are "defying their overlords," arguing that recent unionization attempts by Kickstarter employees may be only the beginning: The workers' Kickstarter campaign is not the first attempt, though, or even the first time rumblings of unionization, have circulated among programmers. In 2018, software engineers at the startup Lanetix announced their intent to unionize -- and were promptly fired by management (It is illegal to fire employees for trying to unionize). The National Labor Relations Board intervened, and ultimately forced Lanetix to pay the 15 fired engineers a total of $775,000. The show of worker power at Lanetix may have paved the way for Kickstarter's workers. Similarly, workers across the video game industry -- generally among the most overworked, underpaid workers within the tech industry -- have been making steps towards unionization. Game Workers Unite, profiled by Salon last year, is building a grassroots movement to organize the ranks of video game makers.

Together, this suggests that a small but visible movement for white-collar software engineers unionizing has been gaining steam in the Valley over the past few years -- suggesting that the people who make up the tech industry, once a bastion of libertarianism, are starting to understand the often subtle ways that their employers exploit them... For decades, libertarianism was part and parcel to the tech industry. Despite a grueling work culture and a high-profile collusion scandal among major tech corporations to suppress software engineers' wages, tech workers were more likely to see themselves as future founders than an exploited underclass -- a point of view encouraged by employers through high wages and generous, often absurd office perks. Recent developments suggest such endearing tactics are no longer working.

MoviePass's original founder and CEO is launching a new company, reports IndieWire, "to score viewers movie tickets for the low, low price of sitting through 15 to 20 minutes of advertisements." Before you point out that everyone already does that when they watch trailers in the theater, know this: PreShow wants to utilize facial recognition and track how much attention you're paying to each ad. "If it weren't for facial recognition, I don't think we could still do it," Stacy Spikes, PreShow's founder and chief executive, said in an interview with CNET last week. "If not, they could game this all day long."

Here's how it works, per CNET: "Forgoing a password, PreShow's app will only unlock with your phone's facial recognition technology. And while you're watching the ads to earn that free ticket, your phone's camera monitors your level of attention. Walk away or even obscure part of your face? The ad will pause after five seconds."
It's being launched through a Kickstarter campaign, which describes PreShow as "the first ad-supported moviegoer network," saying that the service will be available this July. It also promises that the ad content "is high quality, entertaining, and is an entertainment value in and of itself..."

And though it monitors your face, "Privacy is a top concern. Nobody is recorded, no personally identifiable data is shared, all data is aggregated and anonymized to brand partners."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The staff of Kickstarter announced plans to unionize today. If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representation in the United States. Members of the union, which goes by Kickstarter United, say they want to improve inclusivity and transparency at the company. To unionize, they're working with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153. In a statement, the union said: "Kickstarter United is proud to start the process of unionizing to safeguard and enrich Kickstarter's charter commitments to creativity, equity, and a positive impact on society. We trust in the democratic process and are confident that the leadership of Kickstarter stands with us in that effort. Kickstarter has always been a trailblazer, and this is a pivotal moment for tech. We want to set the standard for the entire industry. Now is the time. Come together. Unionize."

In a world of Facebook and Twitter, Kickstarter feels almost quaint in its mission -- "to help bring creative projects to life" -- and in its charter as a public benefit corporation, which means that the company is "obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders." Its staff unionizing means the company will also have to consider more seriously its responsibilities to its employees. It also means that its fellows in Silicon Valley and beyond could be next. Kickstarter is fundamentally a tech company, and its staff unionizing with the OPEIU shows a way forward for other employees in the space. Kickstarter's staff is unionizing because they want to "promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table," the organizers write, noting that in the decade that Kickstarter has been around, it's democratized crowdfunding and brought more than 150,000 projects to life. "Kickstarter's efforts are incomplete, and these values have failed to manifest in our workplace. We can do better together -- for ourselves and our industry."

MySpace may have lost your digital memories in a server migration. From a report: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace," it said in a note at the top of the site. "We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com."

Andy Baio, one of the people behind Kickstarter, tweeted that it could mean millions of songs uploaded between the site's Aug. 1, 2003 launch and 2015 are gone for good. "Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists," he wrote Sunday. "I'm deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than 'we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s,'" Baio noted.

CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons "has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity." The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in darkness is over. More than 40 years after the first edition of "Dungeons and Dragons" hit shelves, video platforms Twitch and YouTube are leading a renaissance of the fantasy roleplaying board game -- and business is booming. "DnD has been around for 45 years and it is more popular now than it has ever been," said Greg Tito, senior communications manager, at Wizards of the Coast. In each of the last five years, sales of "Dungeons and Dragons" merchandise has grown by double digits.

The company, owned by toymaker Hasbro, attributes this massive sales boom to the launch of the fifth edition of the game in 2014 and to "Critical Role," a weekly show on live streaming video platform Twitch that features voice actors from TV shows and video games playing "Dungeons and Dragons...." "When a new edition for a game like this releases, there is that flurry of activity, people get really excited about it and then, historically, that excitement has waned," he said. "The fifth edition has completely blown that model out of the water. With the release in 2014, it has grown and only continued to grow. Every kind of statistical model we've been able to to use from the history of 'Dungeons and Dragons' has been broken at this point. So, we are in uncharted territory...."

"Critical Role" has become so popular that when it launched a Kickstarter last week to create an animated special based on the characters from the first campaign, it was funded within one hour. The team behind the web series had wanted $750,000 to fund the endeavor. With 33 days remaining in the crowdfunding campaign, "Critical Role" has raised more than $7.3 million from 53,000 backers.

It is now the most-funded film/video project in Kickstarter history.
Over the years Dungeons & Dragons -- and the people who played it -- have usually been played for laughs in TV sitcoms like Freaks and Geeks, several episodes of Community, and an episode of Big Bang Theory with William Shatner, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Smith, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Scott Blew, an entrepreneur and engineer, recalled an article he'd recently read in WIRED about a new kind of film that blocked the light emitted from screens. He wondered if the same technology might work on a pair of glasses, to block the screens that seemed to be everywhere. From a report: He contacted Steelcase, the company that made the Casper screen-blocking film, and ordered a sample. Then he popped out the lenses in a pair of cheap sunglasses and replaced them with the film. Amazingly, it worked: Blew could look through the lenses and see everything -- except for screens, which turned black. Now, Blew and a small team are turning that concept into a real product. Their IRL Glasses, which launched on Kickstarter this week, block the wavelengths of light that comes from LED and LCD screens. Put them on and the TV in the sports bar seems to switch off; billboards blinking ahead seem to go blank. Within three days of launch, the project had surpassed its funding goal of $25,000.

AmiMoJo quotes Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Sandbox space sim Limit Theory has been cancelled, six years after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, because main developer Josh Parnell is simply exhausted from working on it for so long. He's spent, he says: emotionally, mentally, physically, and financially. "Not in my darkest nightmares did I expect this day to ever come, but circumstances have reached a point that even my endless optimism can no longer rectify," Parnell said on Friday. He plans to release the source code for folks to poke around but makes clear "it's not a working game."

Though Limit Theory blew past its $50,000 goal, drawing $187,865 in pledges (and remember Kickstarter takes a cut), development has gone on years longer than anticipated. Costs have burned through that initial cash and started eating into Parnell's personal savings but, more than that, he's just exhausted.

All Kickstarter campaigns are getting a show of support, according to a new web site. "Every day, The Creative Fund backs all newly launched projects based on our current patronage." It's the newest offering from BackerKit, which also makes a data management platform for crowdfunding campaigns, and so far they've pledged $1 to 10,594 different Kickstarter projects.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: One dollar doesn't seem like a lot, but it's just a start. BackerKit cofounder Rosanna Yau says that this is more of a proof of concept, to see if their community is willing to rally around the idea. She and cofounder Maxwell Salzberg have set up a Patreon, a monthly subscription service that enables people to support creators directly. All the donations they receive from that platform will be distributed among Kickstarter projects, and the goal is to make sure all projects have at least one pledge....

Yau says that the company is open to contributing more than a $1 in the future. Its Patreon guidelines say that for each $2,000 milestone reached, the fund will pledge $1 more to all Kickstarter projects. If something doesn't get funded, the fund's pledges will get recycled and re-donated to new projects.
A Medium post says the new fund "supports the entrepreneurial spirit of all independent creators, one dollar at a time....

"Everyone deserves some inspiration and a virtual high-five."

L-One-L-One writes: Most IoT home projects today are based on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and friends. But this is not always the ideal solution: you end up swapping batteries frequently, which becomes annoying quite quickly. You also have to deal with signal strength issues and interferences. To address this problem, a new Kickstarter campaign called NoCAN is proposing an Arduino-compatible internet-of-things platform based on wired connections that combine networking and power in one cable. The platform uses a set of cheap Arduino-compatible nodes controlled through a Raspberry Pi. The network uses CAN-bus and offers a publish/subscribe mechanism like MQTT and over-the-network firmware updates. It can also be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. Even with such features, can it succeed in going against the all-wireless trend? We'll know in a few weeks.

As spotted by PetaPixel, Canon this week announced with no fanfare that it's sold its last film camera. TechCrunch reports: The model in question is the EOS-1V, which, incidentally, the company actually stopped making a full eight years ago. Since it has simply been selling out the rest of its stock, which, it seems, has finally depleted. It's less of a bang than a prolonged whimper, but it's the end of an era, nonetheless, marking the first time Canon hasn't offered a film camera since the 30s, when its parent company started offering a device called the "Kwanon." Those who are feeling suddenly nostalgic, you can likely pick one up used fairly easily (though this news might bump up their premium a bit), and I'm sure the inevitable Kickstarter project to revive the technology can't be too far off, because that's how these things go now. Canon will continue to offer repair on the EOS-1V until October 31, 2025, "though that could end as early as 2020 for some, if parts and inventory run out sooner," adds TechCrunch.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Crowdfunded space simulation game Star Citizen has launched its $27,000 Legatus Pack, which includes nearly all its spacecraft plus extras. Only players who have already spent $1,000 in the game can access the pack. Cloud Imperium, the creators of Star Citizen, has received more than $200m in crowdfunding since launching a Kickstarter campaign for it in 2012. According to its website it has more than two million players, although the game itself is still in development. Star Citizen aims to create a vast science fiction universe that can be explored in dozens of spaceships, with first-person space combat, all online and multi-player.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Ossic raised more than $3.2 million in crowdfunding for its Ossic X, which it touted as the "first 3D audio headphones calibrated to you." But after delivering devices to only about 80 investors who'd paid at least $999 to for the "Developer/Innovator" rewards level on Kickstarter, Ossic announced Saturday it had run out of money -- leaving the more than 10,000 other backers with nothing but lighter wallets.

Ossic, which The San Diego Union-Tribune notes was founded by former Logitech engineers Jason Riggs and Joy Lyons, had excited gamers, audiophiles and other sound consumers by creating headphones that used advanced 3D audio algorithms, head-tracking technology and individual anatomy calibration to "deliver incredibly accurate 3D sound to your ears," according to its funding campaign on Kickstarter. In less than two months in 2016, it was able to raise $2.7 million from more than 10,000 backers on Kickstarter. It raised another $515,970 on Indiegogo. "This was obviously not our desired outcome," the company said in a statement. "To fail at the five-yard line is a tragedy. We are extremely sorry that we cannot deliver your product and want you to know that the team has done everything possible including investing our own savings and working without salary to exhaust all possibilities."

British electrical engineer John Barstead created a sonar alarm system that will warn parents or nearby sunbathers if a small child has accidentally fallen into a pool. The Dolphin Alarm, as it is called, is currently raising production funds on Kickstarter. New Atlas explains how it works: When small children who have no business going into the pool on their own are out playing near it, they wear a special wristband. If they should fall in, the wristband will generate a three-tone sonar signal as soon as it's immersed in the water. That signal will be detected by a hydrophone contained within a receiver unit that floats in the pool. When that happens, the unit will emit a 131-decibel alarm. It will also transmit an alert to an indoor remote unit located up to 150 m away (170 ft), which will likewise sound an alarm of its own. While there are other child-in-the-pool alarms, most of them are wave-activated and have to be shut off when other people are using the pool.

"The folks at Nightdive Studios this week released the source code for a Mac version of Looking Glass Studios' 1994 classic System Shock," reports Gamasutra. Friday the game's new owners unveiled on GitHub "the original, unaltered source code that was discovered by OtherSide Entertainment and graciously shared with us a few months ago... We have been hard at work updating this code and plan to release a new version of System Shock: Enhanced Edition as well as the code in the near future." We've gone back to the original vision we shared with you at the start of our Kickstarter campaign -- this time with more reliable performance and higher fidelity visuals thanks to the Unreal Engine... We have been able to re-use the majority of work we've done over the past year and we're making significant progress in a very short amount of time. With that said we'll be inviting our highest tier backers to privately test the game beginning in September at which point we estimate that the game will be fully playable, from start to finish. The majority of the art won't be finished, but we'll be ready to start high-level testing.
Going forward there's even a Twitch component. "In an effort to remain transparent throughout development we're going to begin streaming on a regular basis and inviting the backers to join us." And the audio department has also revealed some of the music from the medical deck.

After their Kickstarter was funded, Nightdive had explored making a "bigger, better game" after receiving a verbal commitment from a game publisher, but then "were left high and dry after making crucial, consequential changes in staff and scope... We still have the funds necessary to complete the game, but the timeline will inevitably move back with our shift in direction..."

"This will be closer to a 1:1 remake with updates to the weapon/character designs but without altering the core gameplay of the original."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Six technology companies, including Kickstarter, Foursquare and Etsy, have launched a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in an effort to preserve net neutrality rules. The companies, which also include Shutterstock, Expa and Automattic, on Monday filed their petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The companies join Vimeo and Mozilla, as well as several state attorneys general who have also filed lawsuits against the FCC in support of the net neutrality rules. Like the other lawsuits, their new case hinges on the Administrative Procedure Act, which they argue prevents the FCC from "arbitrary and capricious" redactions to already existing policy. "Already, over 30,000 Etsy sellers participated in the FCC's public comment process, and tens of thousands more reached out to Congress in support of net neutrality. Now we're bringing their stories and experiences to the courts," said Althea Erickson, head of advocacy and impact at Etsy.