I've been stuck in the same dilemmy in Germany now for more than ten years, and how crazy this whole legislation is and has always been never occurred to anybody in public.

This goes so far that the rates are actually too low to really complain about, but high enough to be a big headache for small concerts and stuff.

If an artist is signed with GEMA (so, get's money from them), he even has to pay GEMA fees in case he organizes a concert himself, for himself, only playing his own songs.

He will get the money back later, of course - but subtract bureaucracy fees. Same goes on for CDs!

It's just completely crazy. So as an artist, you are either "in" - and pay to eventually get paid - or "out" - and you never get paid at all.

The winners? Big acts, as usual.

First thing, Heise will not sell this information, they are basically the good guys, protected by several laws and priviledges they would loose by such action, plus widely financed - they dont need to do so.

Their main interest is to expose something bad going on, which is just living up to their journalist role. Good stuff.

Facebook is already retreating, they know they can only loose, and Heise is - in Germany - very, very big (I think every techy guy/girl in Germany at least pays minimum attention to their news feed, plus one of the multiple print magazines they publish). They also have a history of going to court, and going there sucessfuly, fighting for publicists rights regarding modern technology issues (patent/copyright gags and stuff) and net freedom.

People have been asking for how they do the Facebook "masking" (reportedly, already over 500 official requests), and Heise said they are already working on creating a documentation on how to do it.

Facebook should not even try to stop this, war is already lost, at least throughout Europe. The whole "like" system outweighs "hidden tracking" by far in value, and with criticism rising constantly in public media (!) plus privacy jurisdiction evolving badly for them in Europe, they will have to be very careful to not loose everything.

As you said: to big to fail. Not.

... called "Anonymous". A group is defined as not only people sharing the same motives and taking concurrent actions, but also some "working together" routine, organization, and structure.

All of this is missing in Anonymous; it's more like a swarm, then a group.

This critic is similar to that one could state against the idea of having a "Anonymous Leader" arrested in Spain.

There is no defined leader in a swarm of birds, as they are not really a group; they just coincidently fly together into the same direction. If you are interested in such logical rule-based swarm "auto"-coordination, check out the Sanderling, which is a little bird occupying many seasides. You will see hunt through flat waters in something that looks like "groups" of birds, but in reality, those are not at all tied together, and just coincidently appear in the same place at the same time doing the same thing.

I'm reading /. on my well-known brand ?phone, at 7:40 am naturally... in bed.

Either I'm doing something very right, or very wrong.

I let you decide ;)

While the project is based upon a gaming engine, and is "set up" as a classical game, the whole intention of the project differs totally from what is widely found as the "definition of gaming". (which is: having fun by pushing buttons to move dumb objects on a screen)

The basic concept here is to use a computer game as a media or communication platform, to use it educationally - and to use it to make people remember the BAD things that happened in history.

And you know, it works. People here in germany did not discuss the Mauer shootings for several years on such a broad base for years, and now it's all over public media again - which is basically even MORE than the author of the work could have hoped to gain with it, but it was exactly what was on his mind - maybe on a smaller scale.

In general, it's time that public opinion recognizes games as more than "a funnny thing to relax". It's an art form, it's about communication, socializing, and live in general. The understanding of a "game concept" finally has to change, but I think this will come with the next generations, who understand a "computer game" not only as an evolved version of "Pong".