The Guardian
By Tania Branigan
In the opaque world of Chinese censorship, a few red lines shine through the murk. One of the clearest is: no gossip about top political leaders, their families or internal party affairs.
Have you ever wanted to see current or potential innovations for poverty or the environment without having to do a lot of researching or reading? Have you ever thought of an idea and wanted to tell the world about it and get feedback? Howitcouldbedifferent.org was founded for these purposes - to enable people to easily see, share, and suggest ideas in different categories.
Trash Tycoon is an upcycling social network game developed by Guerillapps. The game applies traditional social gameplay features to highlight real-world issues such as waste, water, and “green” activities. Gameplay includes cleaning trash, recycling, and constructing products and decorations out of recycled material.
Sojo Studios, a new entertainment company, made plenty of headlines this week with its first social game, WeTopia. The studio is gaining plenty of attention with news of its $8 million arsenal, a roster of partnerships with non-profits like Save the Children, Children’s Health Fund and buildOn, consumer brand advertisers, and Ellen DeGeneres as one its business investors and partners.
A couple of weeks ago, a group of activists working with Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance campaign hit the streets of San Francisco to bring a little truth about Bank of America’s misdeeds to its customers—not in the lobbies of the bank’s local branches, but at its ATMs throughout the city.
Media@McGill will be hosting The Participatory Condition, an International Colloquium, which will be held in Montreal at the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC) on November 15 and 16, 2013. The Colloquium’s main objective is to assess the role of media in the development of a principle whose expansion has become so large as to become the condition of our contemporaneity.
From Konami Digital Entertainment (makers of Dance Dance Revolution, Castlevania, and other hits) comes a significant expansion of their long-running support of the World Food Programme’s gaming initiatives. The result is the re-emergence of Food Force, one of the most successful early games for change titles.
In the past few years we have seen a growing awareness and concern with Internet freedom and privacy, fuelled by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the vast U.S.
Located within Boston’s historic (brick) core, and using the history of Boston as example, this kinetic, site-specific, public art installation is a humorous commentary on our use and trust of the internet for learning.
Fundacion Via Libre is an Argentinian digital rights group that advocates for more user awareness of internet surveillance and policy. To build this awareness the group not only conducts activist projects and attend events, but they also work with legislative bodies to reflect the growing technology and protect users.
The elimination of Net Neutrality is a much bigger issue than most people would like to admit. This issue stems far from just an issue dealing with an open internet, free from biased control of the internet service providers, whom which we rely on.
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense.
War Drags You Out is a project by artist "Saint Hoax" looking at the similarities between defining characteristics of Drag Queens and Political Leaders.
Text from St. Hoax's website:
"After attending a drag show for the first time, I was struck by the richness of this glamour oriented culture.
I took a minute to actually look at the faux queens and deconstruct their main components.
Games for Change is a community of game designers, activists, artists and individuals focused on creating and using digital games for purposes of social change. Games for Change is a large and loose community, but it has a major nonprofit organization at its center, who organizes the majority of the meetups and work of the movement.
"Dark Side of the Prism" is a Firefox Add-on that provides a soundtrack for our surveilled internet meanderings.
The public recently learned that the US National Security Agency's on-going internet surveillance program, Prism, collects data from users of major websites.