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Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang wants your data to be your property
Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur turned Democratic presidential hopeful, may not be a leading candidate in the race, but he has gained attention for his unique ideas about how to address technology -- the companies behind it and the impact it's having on the country. He has proposed giving every American $12,000 per year to soften the blow of jobs lost to automation, and he has toyed with campaigning via hologram. While these ideas have come out in bits and pieces, Yang officially revealed his comprehensive tech policy today.
Democratic hopeful Tulsi Gabbard sues Google over alleged censorship
Tulsi Gabbard, one of the many Democratic presidential hopefuls, is suing Google for at least $50 million. Gabbard filed a federal lawsuit against the company today, claiming that it suspended her campaign's advertising account for six hours following the first Democratic debate. Doing so, the lawsuit reportedly states, infringed on Gabbard's free speech.
Apple News debuts a guide to the 2020 Democrat hopefuls
Apple wants you to take its news service seriously. To demonstrate its potential beyond a simple headline aggregation platform, it's launched its own candidate guide ahead of the 2020 Democratic debates. The guide contains facts, biographies and candidate positions on key issues, and will be supplied with what Apple says is "timely, trusted and comprehensive" information about those taking part, via providers such as CNN, Axios and The New York Times.
Donald Trump commandeers Jebbush.com
The domain Jebbush.com redirects to the official campaign page for Donald Trump's presidential bid. The URL has been up for grabs since April, at least -- at the time, CNN Money reported it was on sale for $250,000 via hosting service Fabulous.com. Apparently Bush, who's running for the Republican nomination alongside Trump and a (large) handful of other candidates, didn't think it was worthwhile to invest in his own-name dot-com domain. His official website is Jeb2016.com.
Jeb Bush's email transparency experiment goes horribly wrong (update)
Today Jeb Bush posted archives containing thousands of emails from his time as governor of Florida for public viewing. That's great as a push for transparency from a potential presidential candidate, however as The Daily Dot and The Verge have found, the release leaked private info from thousands of people who never knew their messages would be released in this manner. The information contained includes email address, home address, phone numbers, social security numbers, job information, medical info and more. At least some of the governor's responses mention that messages are a part of the public record and may be released, but it's still troubling to have the information out there.
EVE Evolved: CSM 7 candidate roundup
EVE Online is unique among MMOs, and nowhere is this more evident than in the political struggles that take place every day in New Eden. Just this weekend, I spent long hours negotiating the surrender of a friend's wormhole starbase with an Elysian Empire diplomat, only to have his CEO overrule the decision because he wanted to get the killmail for blowing the starbase up. For EVE's more ambitious political machinists, perhaps the greatest challenge of all is to be part of the democratically elected Council of Stellar Management (CSM). The council functions as an advisory board to CCP and a mechanism through which players can get their views and ideas across to developers. Last year's CSM was instrumental in forcing CCP's hand and making the company refocus development on EVE Online. With this year's ambitious plans to revamp all ships and forms of PvP, and DUST 514 due for a summer release, the stakes for this year's council are even higher. Voting is now underway to select the team of players who will represent the EVE playerbase to CCP for the coming year. In this week's EVE Evolved, I round up all of this year's candidates to help you choose whom to vote for.
Candidates announced for EVE's sixth CSM
Over the past few years, EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management has been making an increasingly large impact on the game. Every year, thousands of players vote in the CSM elections to select nine volunteers who can represent the interests of EVE's players. The council's job is to collect together details of issues players are having with the game, from bugs and balance issues to widely supported gameplay suggestions. Twice per year, the council members meet with CCP's developers in Iceland for the CSM Summit. It's here that the issues players have raised are discussed and prioritised. As CCP's advisory council on game design, the CSM has been placed in a position of significant influence over EVE Online's development. Early last month, CCP put out the call for players interested in running for election to sign up and declare their intent to join the council. The entry period is now over, and a list of the approved candidates we'll soon be voting on has been published. Of the 72 players who applied, only 57 met the role's criteria for eligibility. Among those accepted are four previous council members hoping to continue their stay in the group and two former alternates. Each candidate has prepared a short statement on his or her reasons for standing for election, and many will be running campaigns on the forum and in-game in the weeks running up to the vote.
Candidacy opens for EVE Online's sixth CSM term
While many MMOs have a community team whose job it is to bring issues affecting players to the attention of developers, EVE Online goes one step further by involving players directly. Once per year, players vote on whom they want to represent the playerbase in meetings with CCP Games as part of the democratically elected Council of Stellar Management. During its 12-month term, each edition of the CSM works hard to compile a list of issues players are having with the game or its development, including balance issues, bugs and ideas for changes the developers might not have considered. The most important of these are scheduled for discussion at one of the twice-yearly CSM council summits in Iceland, in which the council converses directly with developers. The fifth council session will soon be coming to a close, and as with the previous councils, it has had both high points and low points during the year. The council's poor treatment in the summer summit and the subsequent player uproar was followed up with some positive changes at CCP and a complete turnaround in the winter talks. With the fifth council session ending, CCP has issued an open call for candidates for the sixth council. To submit yourself for consideration and public voting, read the official conditions in the latest EVE devblog and then head over to the submission page on the EVE website. Among the terms and conditions this year is a new requirement that makes a campaign message mandatory. The last election saw several players enter the running without any campaign message, so this is a welcome change from last year's submission rules.
Voting for EVE's second Council of Stellar Management begins
This has been an important week for our American readers in terms of elections, but now that the minor distraction of real-world governance has been dealt with, it's time to focus on governance in the MMO space. You've got to keep those priorities straight, after all.The polls are now open in EVE Online's second Council of Stellar Management (CSM) election, where players can vote for candidates to represent their interests before CCP Games... and potentially impact how the game evolves. We can already sense the impulse someone, or several someones, out there has to comment below: "But why should I bother voting? What do they even do?" And to be fair, it's not been very transparent what the CSM has been up to (aside from the meeting minutes), but more so what effect they've had on EVE and its development pipeline.
EVE's second CSM election process begins
CCP Games announced that it's time for EVE Online's next Council of Stellar Management election process to begin. Here's the message from the Council Election page: "The second democratic elections in EVE will start the 7th of November. Here you can enter your application to run as a candidate for the election. You will run under your real name with an EVE identity for others to relate to. You will have to be ready to appear in public or in mediums. Your account has to be older than 30 days. You are required to put effort into your position. Yet serving the EVE population is well worth it. Get all the necessary information here. Throw your hat in the ring and make history." Interested candidates will need to have their information submitted to CCP no later than October 17th (extended from their previous announcement that stated October 10th). The application, which requires a candidate to scan and submit an image of their passport, states: It is important to notice that your real life name, country, character name, campaign webpage and campaign message will be made public and available for everyone to see. Players elected to the Council of Stellar Management may also be required to appear on EVE-TV (should it make a comeback) and E-ON magazine, in addition to being willing and able to make the trip to Iceland.
EVE Online's first CSM term ending, next approaching
The latest EVE Online dev blog deals with the forthcoming changing of the guard, in terms of the player-elected Council of Stellar Management (CSM). EVE dev CCP Xhagen touched upon the fact that in the nearly 4 months that the first CSM has held office, it became clear(er) to the developers that their own views on some aspects of the game can be differ from how the players see it. While CCP Xhagen didn't list the CSM's accomplishments, he said that some of what the CSM brought to CCP Games won't be implemented until well after the new Council is elected, due to the time it takes to implement changes in the development pipeline. However, some of their efforts "will start to become visible in WAR 1.2 and the winter expansion." He also announced the dates and details for the second Council of Stellar Management, with a few changes made to the rules. CCP Xhagen said, "... the chairman is eligible for the chair-position again should he decide to step down as such and have the CSM vote a new one; 25% of actual voters are required to force a topic up to the CSM; the biggest change is the 21 year age limit to be a valid candidate." In addition, the timetable for the existing CSM stepping down and the newly elected Council moving into their role is as follows:
McCain campaign releases facebook game: Pork Invaders
While most of our time on popular social networking site Facebook is spent trying to impress our cohorts with our favorite bands and films or attempting to propel porpoises into the far reaches of the spiral galaxy, we recently took notice of a new application added by Republican presidential hopeful John McCain's campaign staff: a simple flash game titled Pork Invaders, an obvious parody of the similarly titled arcade classic.Don't mistake the game's title to mean the Arizona senator harbors any disdain for unkosher meats -- rather, the act of firing vetoes at familiar patterns of descending pigs symbolizes the candidate's contempt for pork barrel spending -- the earmarking of funds for seemingly unnecessary projects. It's not a particularly good game, though it is worth noting when the U.S.'s prospective new leaders enter the intimidating world of game development. We hope for a swift response from the presumptive Democratic candidate's campaign -- Obomberman, perhaps?[Via GamePolitics]
Huckabee decompresses after election defeat with lasagna and Rock Band
Following the primary elections of Vermont, Rhode Island, Texas and Ohio on March 4, a date affectionately known by many political junkies as "Super Tuesday 2: Electric Boogaloo", the Republican party found themselves with a candidate presumptive in John McCain following Mike Huckabee's resignation. How did the former Arkansas governor recover from watching his presidential aspirations crash and burn, you ask? He did what any of us would do -- he played some Rock Band, and he macked on some 'zanya.It was a fitting end for the bass-slapper-turned-presidential-candidate, as his staffers gathered around to enjoy the layered Italian treat, and to witness Huck's well-documented aptitude with peripheral-based rhythm games. Regardless of your political views and endorsements, we think we can all agree that the gaming community would be well-served by a president that shared Huckabee's fervor for video games of any kind. His reported Garfield-esque penchant for lasagna, however, we could take or leave.
Texas e-voting machines count votes three times for good measure
If you thought that November 7th was the final day that you'd hear about e-voting zaniness, you'd be incorrect. While a myriad of states (and foreign locales) have had their bouts with Diebold and other electronic voting machines, the internet hunting state is now reporting an oddity of its own. Apparently, voters using machines built by Election Systems and Software in Williamson County, Texas showed up three separate times to legally cast their votes for the same candidate, or performed some sort of "human malfunction" in order to make the machines think so, anyway. While we're inclined to think that the actual machines were the culprit, the company still insists that some form of "user error" caused each vote placed to be counted three times. Although the triplicates did not skew the percentages of votes cast for each candidate, it still seemingly signifies an apparent flaw in the e-voting system, yet election officials were quoted as saying that they'd "review their training procedures" -- you know, so we can all work together to circumvent the problem.[Via TechDirt]
Punchscan incorporates cryptography into e-voting
Considering the disaster that has been e-voting, we're not surprised to see another firm stepping forward with a slightly less complex alternative to confidently casting your ballot. Reverting back to the less problematic methods of paper-and-pencil voting, yet offering up a way to electronically store and track each vote, David Chaum and his research team have unveiled the Punchscan system to hopefully solve the world's e-voting woes. The cryptographic solution involves a double-sided ballot which is split into two halves using a hole punch, giving you one side to take home. The "receipt" reportedly doesn't disclose which candidate you voted for, and allows you to logon once home to verify that your vote was indeed cast, and cast for the intended party. So if you're worried that your hard-earned vote may be heading to File 13 rather than being counted, maybe you should start politicking to get Punchscan going in your neck of the woods, and if you're still confused about how this two-faced encryption dealio works, just peep the video, yeah?[Via Slashdot]
