The Supreme Court previously ruled in 1982 on issues of minors and video games in the case of the City of Mesquite vs. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc. In that case, the court ruled that limitations on minors’ ability to play coin-operated video games violated minors’ rights to free speech and to freedom of association. That case effectively established games as a protected form of free speech.

You can read more about the recent court decision here, and if you’d like to read up on the earlier case I mentioned, the text of the decision is available here from FindLaw.

Hopefully the EC push for standardization will lead to broader standardization as the companies in compliance eliminate their non-standard chargers. Of course, the industry is already claiming standardization is an impossible pipe dream. Read more about it at Telecom Paper.

“…this difference between expectations and reality has led over a quarter of the employees surveyed by Accenture to use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their corporate IT departments. Almost half of all Millennials who use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter do so without support from their IT departments (and often against the IT policies of their companies). Millennials also see no problem with using unsupported mobile phones or instant messaging services at work.”

While the report seems to make much of the fact that these Millennial workers often don’t even know their company’s IT policies, I wonder how many older (or even slightly older) employees are that well-versed in the regulations and guidelines enforced by individual corporations. Further, I’m not sure that the lag between employee preference and company policy is particularly novel. In any case, you can read a lengthier summary of the report here.

Of course, if Obama wins, seeing the president’s face in your video game could very well seem Big-Brother-ish, rather than revolutionary.

I was thinking about this in light of all the press that came out last week around Verizon’s FiOS service, its high speed fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service that is creeping across some cities these days (New York City being one of the latest service areas).  The company is spending $23 billion (yes, billion) on the infrastructure upgrade, and it is the most fundamental infrastructure investment any telecom company has made in some time.  FiOS is readying its network for faster delivery of television; its network offers speeds of around 50 mpbs, compared to a “normal” cable service speed of 6-12 mbps. 

Fiber-based services will be reliable, fast, and no doubt useful, and many of us rejoice that there will be solid competition to cable companies in the Internet domain.  But ubiquity – that’s not FiOS.  It’s broadband with a gold star, but it’s (relatively) expensive, and will only be in cities for the near term.  Ubiquity doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s list of network goals for the near term. 

I think the U.S. will continue to sink on those international broadband ratings from the ITU that politicians hate to see.

How hard can it be, after all, to link a set of searches and transactions to a particular individual? Moreover, what motivation would companies like Yahoo! have to maintain this screen of privacy? Google attempted to distance itself from behavioral targeting last year in the media, after the company came under fire for its purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick. Now that the deal is complete, however, and other giants like Yahoo! and Microsoft are increasingly making use of behavioral targeting strategies, will Google continue to take the high road?

Breakthrough, an organization that does human rights work in both the United States and India, has released a game, ICED (I Can End Deportation) to help players learn the ins and outs of immigration policy and rights. The game, which targets youth, is intended to teach players how unfair U.S. immigration policy is.

The game is available as a free download, and includes educational materials for teachers who might want to use the game in the classroom. It’s an interesting intersection of web activism and educational gaming, to say the least. The amount of collaboration that has gone into the project is impressive — New York City teachers and dozens of students weighed in on the project. A number of organizations have created web-based games related to their pet issues, but ICED is more comprehensive than many of these projects. It’s not just a gimmick to convince players to spend more time at the organization’s web site, and incorporates a great deal of significant information. What remains to be seen is how successful the project will be at reaching its intended audience and what that audience will think of the game.

It might behoove the ACLU, or some organization devoted to civil liberties, to devote some resources to figuring out how to defend speech that is inconvenient to plaintiffs lawyers.

Sandy Szwarc of the excellent blog Junkfood Science has a lengthy and interesting post about a subpoena delivered to the author of Neurodiversity, a website (and blog) focused on providing resources and information about autism.

The subpoena is particularly sweeping, demanding records and documents and citing, of all things, the bloggers listed on the site’s blogroll. Kathleen Seidel, the woman behind Neurodiversity, is fighting the subpoena, noting that she has nothing to do with the case in question. Another blogger has been maintaining a list of responses to the case, and the Wall Street Journal was the first mainstream media outlet to comment — yesterday. The quote at the top is from the WSJ article.

These are exactly the types of cases that will determine the rules of engagement for citizen journalists specifically and for bloggers more generally. Should Seidel be granted the same types of protections as more conventional journalists? If she isn’t, what does this imply about the practicability of blogging that is, as the WSJ puts it, “inconvenient to lawyers” or to other powerful people?

Now, as much as stunts and stories like this may garner publicity for Boll or for other celebrities who find themselves in a similar position, the thought of a coalition of critics, fans, and other viewers being able to quite literally vote against the continuation of someone’s career is a bit unsettling. Would Boll actually quit making films if confronted with a million signatures? I’m not sure. The bigger question is, should he? And, if he were to quit, what would that say about his work as a filmmaker, and about the act of filmmaking in the era of participatory culture?

The documentary looks like it may be covering some of the same territory explored in Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life (which is largely out of print, but available as a free download thanks to the efforts of the author). Although the question of what real means in online environments remains a salient one, as demonstrated by the continuing fascination with online communities that drives works like Second Skin, the division between the “real” and the “virtual” seems increasingly murky as many daily tasks and bits of communication migrate toward the digital.

What utility does the term “virtual” still have with regard to the way people use web media for their daily lives? Does the distinction between the “real world” and the “virtual world” make sense? And, finally, is the distinction something that will diminish over time?