Joss Whedon Shows How Being Awesome Rewards Creators   ~ what does it "cost" 2 b nice ?  ...not a fucking thing ! :)

from the gifted-awesomeness dept

Joss Whedon has long held a special place in the hearts of geeks. And not only for producing some real cultural gifts, such as Firefly and the Avengers movies. On top of those achievements, he's also been fairly proactive when it comes to embracing digital business models and treating fans with an unmatched level of awesomeness.

With that in mind, it may not come as a huge shock when David Cortright writes in about Whedon going to some great lengths to show fans his appreciation while also giving them a reason to watch his latest short film and generating a ton of goodwill marketing on top of it.

Most filmmakers are grateful for the support of their audience, but for the past few weeks, Joss Whedon has really been demonstrating his gratitude. Last month, Whedon announced at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of In Your Eyes — the supernatural romance starring Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David and directed by Brin Hill (Ball Don’t Lie), which Whedon wrote and executive produced — that fans could watch the film immediately by renting it for $5 through Vimeo. Since then, Whedon’s filmmaking team has been secretly sending thank-you gifts to a random selection of fans who have streamed the movie.

Those gifts have ranged from planted cacti to cooking grills all the way up to Apple TVs and Xbox Ones. Those thank you gifts were also distributed not only in the United States, but as far away as the UK, Germany, New Zealand and Dubai. How do we know about all this? Was it because Whedon and his team went out of their way to operate this system as some kind of bribery contest to get people to watch the film? No. Instead, we're learning about it because recipients of the thank you gifts are going out of their way to thank Whedon and sharing the acts of awesomeness on social media.

@adriaanbloem: Rented #inyoureyes on Vimeo, and they then sent a "small token of appreciation": an Apple TV! Smart marketing because yes, I'm tweeting this

It's a hell of a promotional tool, to have some of your biggest fans get the word out both about your movie and the kind of behavior that can't help but breed goodwill and positive marketing. In other words, like anything else, this isn't so much altruism as combined marketing efforts between a producer and fans that results from being awesome. By gifting a small and somewhat random number of viewers of a small film, suddenly you have a flurry of attention being paid where otherwise there might be little.

“The idea was we’re doing something a little different, and we just want to say thank you,” said Roiff. “Someone said on social media, like, ‘Oh, it’s almost like they got Kickstarter backwards and they’re doing it in reverse.’ That is sort of what we’re doing, saying, you know what, this is working out, and we want to say thanks and give something back, and try to keep people talking so we can keep doing it this way.”

It's working and it's a lesson to other creators and artists about how much benefit can be garnered simply by treating their fans well.

David Braben, Once Angry At Used Games, Now A New Business Model Embracer

from the good-decision dept

If all you knew about David Braben was what you found via a search on Techdirt, you might think he's someone unprepared for the future of his craft. There's only one article, featuring him many years back in a story in which he appeared to be very angry about the way retailers promoted used-games sales instead of pimping new games. But, as most truly hardcore gamers will know, Braben is so much more than that. Sometimes called "The Godfather of Gaming", Braben was one of the chief creators of Elite, the breakthrough game produced in the 80's that was both wildly successful and still serves as the unacknowledged inspiration behind many present titles.

And now he appears to be recognizing the importance of new business models, while also realizing that piracy isn't the all-out evil many claim. In a fascinating interview with The Telegraph, Braben spoke about Frontier: First Encounters, the latest iteration in the Elite series, which Braben's company funded through Kickstarter.

The project was launched on US crowdfunding site Kickstarter in November 2012 and aimed to raise £1.25m. “Take a ship and 100 credits to make money legally or illegally - trade, bounty-hunt, pirate, assassinate your way across the galaxy,” read the pitch. The project smashed its funding target, raising over £1.5m, and the subsequent media furore saw a further £700,000 (and rising) added to the pot by eager investors. It is the most successful British game ever to raise funds on Kickstarter.

While I wouldn't dream of losing sight of what a sign of the times it is that a legend like Braben is turning to new business models for his company, allow me to highlight the importance of that last bit about investors. As I've suggested in the past, embracing platforms like Kickstarter is wonderful, but it doesn't have to be the first and only step. Building up interest through Kickstarter is also a wonderful way to prove the marketability of a product to investors, whose money and backing can then be used to build up a blockbuster-style budget. This is the answer to the question of, "How is Kickstarter going to fund the next AAA game, or international record release, or $200 million movie?" It isn't, in and of itself, but it can be a demonstrative step one in the process, far more open to the general population than the antiquated process of submitting ideas to traditional gatekeepers.

While that would be enough for a hearty "Huzzah!", no interview with a video game producer would be complete without questions about piracy. Here, too, Braben finds himself looking on the bright side.

“Piracy, while frustrating, can contribute to game evangelism,” he said. “It can also help you reach new territories. For example, we are huge in China now. In the old days of silver discs, it would have been impossible to break the whole country. We would have needed an office in every province but through piracy, our games are circulating and fans are now seeking us out.

“Piracy goes hand in hand with sales,” he continued. “If a game is pirated a lot it will be bought a lot. People want a connected experience, so with pirated games we still have a route in to get them to upgrade to real version. And even if someone’s version is pirated, they might evangelise and their mates will buy the real thing.”

This is the kind of thinking that can create massively wealthy businesses. He acknowledges that, from his perspective, piracy of his games is irritating. I can understand that. Who couldn't? But his ability to put that into its proper perspective while also strategizing a way to turn pirates into customers is a beautiful thing. For it to come from the Godfather of Gaming only makes this more important. It'd be like the largest record labels flipping their script completely and attempting life in the new world for once.

The game, as noted, is already funded, so we're getting it. Here's hoping it proves to be an even bigger success than it is already so it can serve as a beacon to other creators.

Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Software To Grab Photos Of Every Person Attending Local Music Festivals

from the can't-fight-terrorism-without-lots-and-lots-of-pictures dept

Once again, the government is experimenting on the public with new surveillance technology and not bothering to inform them until forced to do so. Boston's police department apparently performed a dry run of its facial recognition software on attendees of a local music festival.

Nobody at either day of last year's debut Boston Calling partied with much expectation of privacy. With an army of media photographers, selfie takers, and videographers recording every angle of the massive concert on Government Center, it was inherently clear that music fans were in the middle of a massive photo opp.

What Boston Calling attendees (and promoters, for that matter) didn't know, however, was that they were all unwitting test subjects for a sophisticated new event monitoring platform. Namely, the city's software and equipment gave authorities a live and detailed birdseye view of concertgoers, pedestrians, and vehicles in the vicinity of City Hall on May 25 and 26 of 2013 (as well as during the two days of a subsequent Boston Calling in September). We're not talking about old school black and white surveillance cameras. More like technology that analyzes every passerby for height, clothing, and skin color.

While no one expects their public activities to carry an expectation of privacy, there's something a bit disturbing about being scanned and fed into a database maintained by a private contractor and accessible by an unknown number of entities. Then there's the problem with the technology itself which, while improving all the time, is still going to return a fair amount of false positives.

Ultimately, taking several thousand photos with dozens of surveillance cameras is no greater a violation of privacy than a single photographer taking shots of crowd members. The problem here is the cover-up and the carelessness with which the gathered data was (and is) handled.

First, the cover-up. Like many surveillance programs, this uses the assumed lack of an expectation of privacy as its starting point. But this assumption only works one way. The public can only expect a minimum of privacy protections in public, but law enforcement automatically assumes a maximum of secrecy in order to "protect" its investigative techniques.

In this particular situation, careless security dovetails directly into the cover-up. Boston's Dig website came across a ton of data, documents and captured video from this program just laying around the web.

Dig reporters picked up on a scent leading to correspondence detailing the Boston Calling campaign while searching the deep web for keywords related to surveillance in Boston. Shockingly, these sensitive documents have been left exposed online for more than a year. Among them are memos written by employees of IBM, the outside contractor involved, presenting plans to use "Face Capture" on "every person" at the 2013 concert. Another defines a party of interest "as anyone who walks through the door."

'Guilty until proven innocent" remains the mantra of mass surveillance. Here, a "person of interest" is also just an "attendee." They are inseparable until the software has done its sorting, and even then, the non-hit information is held onto for months or years before being discarded.

Beyond the documents, there's the captured video, much of which remains online and accessible by the general public.

[M]ore than 50 hours of recordings — samples of which are highlighted herein as examples — remain intact today.

Dig gathered up all of this info and confronted the Boston Police Department about its involvement in this project.

Reached for comment about “Face Capture” and intelligent video analysis, a Boston Police Department spokesperson wrote in an email, “BPD was not part of this initiative. We do not and have not used or possess this type of technology.”

A normal denial and generally solid… except for one thing.

The Boston Police Department denied having had anything to do with the initiative, but images provided to me by Kenneth Lipp, the journalist who uncovered the files, show Boston police within the monitoring station being instructed on its use by IBM staff.

The outing of these documents forced the city to acknowledge its participation.

In response to detailed questions, Kate Norton, the press secretary for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, wrote in an email to the Dig: “The City of Boston engaged in a pilot program with IBM, testing situational awareness software for two events hosted on City Hall Plaza: Boston Calling in May 2013, and Boston Calling in September 2013. The purpose of the pilot was to evaluate software that could make it easier for the City to host large, public events, looking at challenges such as permitting, basic services, crowd and traffic management, public safety, and citizen engagement through social media and other channels. These were technology demonstrations utilizing pre-existing hardware (cameras) and data storage systems.”

The city claims it's not interested in pursuing this sort of surveillance at the moment, finding it to be lacking in "practical value." But it definitely is interested in all the aspects listed above, just not this particular iteration. It also claims it has no policies on hand governing the use of "situational awareness software," but only because it's not currently using any. Anyone want to take bets that the eventual roll out of situational awareness software will be far in advance of any guidance or policies?

Better security is also a must and Boston's -- despite recent events -- seems to be full of holes.

Similarly, [Dig's Kenneth Lipp] easily found his way into lightly secured reams of documents that include Boston parking permit info, including drivers’ licenses, addresses, and other data, kept online on unsecured FTP servers.

“If I were a different kind of actor, a malicious state actor, I could pose a significant threat to the people of Boston because of what I have in the folder.”

Government entities roll out pervasive surveillance programs, almost exclusively without consulting the public, and expect citizens to trust them with the data -- not only what they share and whom they share it with, but to keep it out of the hands of criminals and terrorists. But Boston (and IBM) have proven here that this trust is wholly undeserved.

When the Boston PD lied about its involvement, I'm sure it expected any damning info to be safely secured. Now that it knows that's not true, I wonder if it will be more careful in the future, both with the data it collects on its own as well as its partnerships with third parties.

Unfortunately, as with any mass surveillance, the ease of collecting it all turns everyone into a suspect until proven otherwise. Better targeting and stricter data minimization rules would mitigate this somewhat, but those deploying these programs usually feel it's better to have it all… just in case.

Aborted Human Fetal Cells in Your Food, Vaccines & Cosmetics

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Dr. Eowyn 

Dr. Helen Ratajczak, a former drug company scientist, just published a comprehensive review of autism research. Buried in her 79-page review, on page 70, are five words that reveal a secret Big Pharma has kept from you:

“…grown in human fetal tissue.”

As Dr. Mercola reports for Health Impact News Daily, Dec. 21, 2011, the line reads (page 70):

“An additional increased spike in incidence of autism occurred in 1995 when the chicken pox vaccine was grown in human fetal tissue.”

But that fact is never disclosed in your vaccine consent form, which is why most people are unaware that cell cultures derived from aborted human fetuses have been used extensively in vaccine production for decades. And vaccine makers are just content that most of the public are ignorant of this most inconvenient truth. For if we knew, we might be dissuaded from getting the vaccine.

Why are human fetal cells used in the production of vaccines? Joseph Herrin explains, in his August 14, 2009 article, “Hell’s Pharmacy”:

The traditional process is to inject viral material into chicken eggs and then to harvest the antibodies that are produced. This is a time intensive process, and a way to speed up the production of vaccine has been sought, and has been found.

The foremost way to streamline the process involves taking human cells, instead of eggs, and using them as the medium in which to grow the viral material to produce the desired vaccine. [...] one company in particular has a line of cellular material that they license to other major pharmaceutical companies so that they can create pharmaceutical products. These products include flu vaccines.

The company is called Crucell. It actually has multiple lines of human cell material, but one in particular, called PER.C6, is marketed to be used to develop vaccines. What the company does not announce publicly is that the cell line was derived from an aborted baby.

According to Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (SCPI), the following 24 vaccines are produced using cells from aborted fetuses and/or contain DNA, proteins, or related cellular debris from cell cultures derived from aborted human fetuses:

Bill Gates funds contraceptive/abortion microchip that’s remote controlled

hehe billy's only do~in gods "work" lol me thinks it's that god wit the fucking "S" on the back of his uni ...tho  Oops   ... sick fuck ..yer soooooo worried bout glo~bell  warming ...  u go 1st

... please Oh please God ...let him meet em !  quickly :0

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Dr. Eowyn | 

Melinda & Bill Gates

Bill Gates is the multibillionaire founder of Microsoft, whose net worth is estimated to be a mind-boggling $79.1 billion.
Via his eponymous foundation, Gates is also famous for his philanthropy, a word that the dictionary defines as “the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.”
One of the funding outlets of his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are vaccines for poor people in the Third World. But a Freudian slip that Gates made in a speech at the 2010 TED conference belies the philanthropic purpose of those vaccines.
In his speech, Gates was on the subject of how to reduce global warming by lowering the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) from Earth’s atmosphere. A major way to do that is to reduce the world’s population.
Beginning at the 1:03 mark in the video below, Gates said:

Bill Gates - control population with vaccines, etc - vision to lower CO2

“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a REALLY great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health service, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.”

You heard it. Gates was championing vaccines as a way to lower the world’s population.
Since when do vaccines, which immunize us against diseases, curb reproduction and in so doing reduce the rate of population growth?
Gates’ latest initiative is even more sinister.
Ben Johnson reports for LifeSiteNews, July 8, 2014, that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding the development of a contraceptive microchip that can be remotely controlled to release hormones that can act as abortifacients — drugs that induce abortion — into a woman’s body for up to 16 years.
The chip, which measures 20 x 20 x 7 millimeters (0.79 x 0.79 x 0.28 inches), can be implanted under the skin of a woman’s buttocks, upper arm, or abdomen in 30 minutes. The device contains a 16-year reservoir of the drug levonorgestrel, releasing 30 micrograms a day – but the dosage can be altered by remote control, as well.
The technology was originally intended, and tested, to release osteoporosis medication in elderly women, but Dr. Robert Langer of MIT changed his focus to contraception after a personal discussion with Bill Gates. Gavin Corley, a biomedical engineer, told the BBC the technology could be used to achieve contraceptive targets in the developing world, indicating “a humanitarian application as opposed to satisfying a first-world need.”
The announcement comes as the Gates Foundation is spearheading an international, multi-billion-dollar push for expanding birth control in the developing world, bringing charges from pro-life and political that they are engaged in global population control.
There are at least 4 reasons to object to the Gates contraceptive microchip:

1. The chip isn’t just a contraceptive; it is also an abortifacient

Numerous studies have indicated that levonorgestrel, the hormone used both by this chip and the morning after pill, has a strong anti-implantation effect, meaning it acts in part by preventing a newly-conceived embryo from implanting in the uterus. One study found the hormone only has an “effectiveness rate” of 49% when blocking ovulation alone.
At a minimum, the contraceptive microchip that acts as an abortifacient puts the lie to Melinda Gates’ recent denial that the Gates Foundation “has decided not to fund abortion” as part of its efforts. The Catholic Church is opposed to both artificial contraceptives and abortion; the latter is an “intrinsic,” i.e., non-negotiable, evil. But Melinda professes to be Roman Catholic.

2. The hormones in the microchip can negatively affect women’s health

Fr. Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, warns that “Administration of dangerous hormonal contraceptive drugs, whether through new technologies or traditional oral methods, should not be considered a boon for women’s health, as the serious risks of these drugs are better known every day. Our concerns are only heightened when we see reporters promoting this effort of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation without mention of the harm done to women by other versions of these drugs, as if this only promises good health and empowerment for women. This isn’t reporting; it’s propaganda, and it is especially dangerous given the risks involved.”

3. PRIVACY CONCERNS

Civil libertarians worry about how hackers – and rogue government agencies – could exploit that technology. John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute, warns: “Whatever that chip transmits will go into a government file. The chip may actually know when you’re having sex. So, there will be no privacy, no.”

4. HackERS

One source of privacy violation is hackers.
A remote-controlled computer chip potentially leaves the patient’s health at the mercy of anyone with sufficient computer skills. Dr. Robert Farra of MIT said the subcutaneous computer chip must be given “secure encryption” so that “someone across the room cannot re-program your implant.” To date, that security has not been developed.
In April, Wired magazine reported on a two-year effort led by Scott Erven that successfully hacked hospitals’ drug-infusion pumps, allowing them to alter the amount of morphine administered to patients; accessed defibrilators, creating unnecessary shocks or preventing life-saving shocks to restart a patient’s heart; refrigeration units that house blood, changing the temperature and potentially allowing the blood supply to spoil; viewed X-rays; and had the ability to change patients’ online medical records.
Another is government. Whitehead extensively researched the extent of government surveillance for his new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.
Whitehead warns about the potential for abuse and violations of the Fourth Amendment: “Here’s what I’ve learned about government – whatever technology we have, theirs is much greater. The FBI is collecting a huge DNA database now.” The Supreme Court upheld widespread DNA collection in its 2013 Maryland v. King decision. “I’m afraid the chip could be activated in some harmful way,” such as a future eugenics program. “It could basically bar certain people from having children.” But instead of protecting citizens’ liberties, “Congress has given us no guidelines” about invasive forms of technology. Whitehead believes that is because Congress is “funded by the same groups that are providing the technology.”
Pre-clinical testing of the new microchip begins next year. Langer’s development team at MicroCHIPS Inc., based in Lexington, Massachusetts, hopes to introduce the product by 2018, pending approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Fr. Boquet warns, “The Gates Foundation and its partners are likely to continue this assault on women’s health until a sustained world-wide backlash ensues.”
~Eowyn