Minecraft Documentary Wants Your Story

A feature-length documentary on Minecraft and developer Mojang's first year has been in the works for some time now. The team behind the the doc, 2 Player Productions, is looking to hear the extraordinary stories some fans have to tell. If you have a story about how Minecraft has impacted your life -- maybe you used the game to propose to your significant other or get a job -- 2PP wants to hear it. If your tale is deemed special enough, it might just make it into Minecraft: The Story of Mojang.

The documentary is being funded by fans. A donation page on Kickstarter for the project shows that more than $210,000 was raised by 3,631 individuals, far more than the goal of $150,000 (which was met back on March 26). A 20-minute version, made before realizing that a more in-depth piece was needed, can be seen here.

2PP explains what fans will get from watching: "For the first time, viewers will be given an in-depth look at both the triumphs and the challenges faced by a studio during their first year in existence. 2 Player will analyze the unprecedented success of Minecraft, gain insight into its impact from journalists and industry professionals, and meet the fans whose lives have been changed by the game."

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China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.

"If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things," he said.

It is known as "gold farming", the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games' makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.

The trading of virtual currencies in multiplayer games has become so rampant in China that it is increasingly difficult to regulate. In April, the Sichuan provincial government in central China launched a court case against a gamer who stole credits online worth about 3000rmb.

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Sony estimates FY 2010/11 net loss, revises from profit

Sony on Monday changed its earnings estimate for the year to March 2011 to a net loss of 260 billion yen ($3.2 billion) from a profit of 70 billion, in the company's first indication of the financial impact of the devastating March earthquake and tsunami.

The company maintained its estimate of an operating profit of 200 billion yen, which compares with analysts' consensus of 197 billion yen, according to a SmartEstimate by ThomsonReuters I/B/E/S. SmartEstimates place additional weight on recent forecasts by top-rated analysts.

The maker of Bravia televisions and Vaio computers is set to announce its January-March earnings on Thursday.

Sony factories in northeastern Japan were among those damaged in the March 11 disaster, which also snarled the electronics industry's supply chain and triggered a plunge in domestic consumption.

Many of Sony's rivals, including Panasonic Corp , have yet to issue forecasts for the current financial year to March 2012, due to lingering uncertainty over the effects of the quake. ($1 = 81.710 Japanese Yen) (Reporting by Isabel Reynolds; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

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The box office grosses of DC and Marvel comic book adaptations graphed out from 1978 to 2010

Two production staff suffered burns in the workshop for Peter Jackson's film 'The Hobbit'

TWO people have been hurt in an explosion at the studios where "The Hobbit" is under production in New Zealand, according to local reports.

Emergency services were called to the Stone Street Studios, co-owned by Oscar-winning producer Peter Jackson about 11.30am local time, the New Zealand Herald reported, as a result of an "industrial explosion."

Two people were taken to hospital, with a fire service spokesman suggesting they had been injured - however Wellington's The Dominion Post reported the pair were hospitalised as a "precaution."

A spokesman for Wingnut Films said the explosion was in a workshop, not on set, and filming was continuing.

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Dead Island gameplay tour trailer

Tags: GameTrailers.com, Dead Island - To Kill Time Gameplay Walkthrough, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Showrunners - New Docco from the Makers of your favourite TV

With Upfront Week in full swing (see Deadline’s extensive coverage here), what better time to peel back the layers on the creative minds behind some of your favorite series of the past few years? The 2012 documentary Showrunners does just that, featuring interviews with the likes of Damon Lindelof (LOST), Jeff Pinkner & J.H. Wyman (Fringe), David Eick (Battlestar Galactica), Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) and more, who spill on everything from daily life as a showrunner on a hit show to what happens when you sign away creative control. TV lovers, you’re going to want to watch this trailer.

Showrunners Trailer from Showrunners Documentary on Vimeo.

New Spielberg TV Show - The River

Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli is behind a new ABC show called The River, which follows the search for a missing nature TV host. Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) directed the pilot from a script by Michael R. Perry and Michael Green, and a trailer has shown up online.

The faux-documentary/’found footage’ aesthetic that Oren Peli has cultivated is put to good use here — I like it applied to TV rather than a movie. Granted, the trailer shows a lot of tricks that will be familiar to anyone who has seen one of the Paranormal Activity films, or any of the many similar movies that exist. But The River looks like it might have a scare or two in store, and if the characters and background story build to anything good, this one could have a couple seasons in it.

The Australian Government Has Axed Voluntary Internet Filter Scheme Funding

In last year’s budget, the federal government introduced a $9.8 million program to assist ISPs in offering voluntary filtering measures. In last night’s budget announcement, that program was scrapped. Turns out, nobody actually wants internet filtering…

According to the Government’s Budget site:

The Government will not proceed with the Voluntary Internet Filtering Grants Program. This will provide savings of $9.6 million over three years.

The Government provided $9.8 million in the 2010‑11 Budget to establish the Voluntary Internet Filtering Grants Program to assist internet service providers (ISPs) to offer customers internet filtering options on a commercial basis. However, consultation with industry has identified limited interest in the grants due to the increasing range of filtering technologies readily available to online users, including browser and search engine filters, and the decision of the three largest ISPs, which account for over 70 per cent of Australian internet users, to voluntarily filter child abuse sites using a list compiled and maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Savings from this measure will be redirected to support other Government priorities.

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Microsoft's acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion becomes official

It was pretty much known about since last night, but Microsoft and Skype have now obliterated any lingering doubt in the matter: the Redmond-based software giant will acquire the internet telephony company for a cool $8.5 billion in cash. Xbox and Kinect support are explicitly mentioned in the announcement of this definitive agreement, as is Windows Phone integration -- both the gaming and mobile aspects being presumably key incentives for Microsoft to acquire Skype. Importantly, this purchase shouldn't affect Skypers outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, as Steve Ballmer's team promises to continue "to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." Skype was first sold for a relative bargain at $2.5b to eBay in 2005, who in turn sold most of it off to Silver Lake in 2009 at an overall valuation of $2.75b, and now Redmond is concluding proceedings by tripling those earlier prices and offering Skype a permanent home. A new Microsoft Skype Division will now be opened up to accommodate the newcomers, with current Skype CEO Tony Bates becoming president of that operation and reporting directly to Ballmer. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year and you can read Microskype's full announcement after the break.

Update: Microsoft has just disclosed a couple more details about the deal. It was signed last night, May 9th, though the price was finalized on April 18th. You can follow a live stream of Steve Ballmer and Tony Bates' presentation right here.

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Games officially declared art in US

NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), which works under the US federal government, has officially recognised video games as an eligible art form under its new grant application guidelines.

NEA issues grants for works deemed as art or works that are about the arts. In digital terms, only television and radio works were acknowledged, but NEA has expanded its guidelines under a new ' Arts in Media' category, which now incorporates: "All available media platforms such as the Internet, interactive and mobile technologies, digital games, arts content delivered via satellite, as well as on radio and television."
NEA issues grants of up to $200k to works of art or works that are about the arts to artists creating outside of the commercial world for support while they create. This would allow small (or individual) developers to create games to offer for free while being funded by the government, as painters and sculptors have been able to for years.

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PSN servers were 'unpatched and had no firewall installed,' security expert testifies

The House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade continues to seek answers regarding last month's breach of the PlayStation Network's security. The one it got yesterday from Purdue professor and security expert Dr. Gene Spafford is troubling, to say the least, if the situation he detailed actually played out as described.

Spafford told the subcommittee that, according to security mailing lists he subscribes to, "individuals who work in security and participate in the Sony network" had learned "several months ago" that PSN was hosted on servers running "very old versions of Apache software that were unpatched and had no firewall installed."

The professor continued, "they had reported these [issues] in an open forum that was monitored by Sony employees, but had seen no response and no change or update to the software." The timeframe for these events was "two to three months prior to the incident where the break-ins occurred," according to Spafford.

It's important to note that his account of the situation and information is second-hand. Still, the potential for this testimony to cause the subcommittee, headed by representative Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), to demand more answers from Sony -- and, more specifically, the individuals mentioned by Spafford -- does exist.

Sony could not be reached for comment.

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Zero Punctuation: Portal 2

Second experiment hints at seasonal dark matter signal

Things just got a little less lonely for researchers who have been insisting for years not only that their experiment has found dark matter, but also that the dark matter signal varies with the seasons. Now a second experiment, called CoGeNT, is reporting similar findings, though both results are in conflict with two other teams' observations.

No one knows what dark matter is – astronomers merely detect its gravitational pull on normal matter, which it seems to outweigh by a factor of five to one. But many researchers believe it is made of theoretical particles called WIMPs, which interact only weakly with normal matter.

Since 1998, researchers running the DAMA experiment deep inside the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy have claimed to have found evidence of WIMPs.

DAMA uses an array of sodium iodide detectors to spot the rare moments when WIMPs slam into atoms in the detectors, producing flashes of light. The number of flashes ebbs and flows with the seasons, and DAMA team members argue that this is because Earth's velocity relative to the surrounding sea of dark matter changes as the planet orbits the sun. They say their observations could be explained by a WIMP weighing a few gigaelectronvolts.

Tense situation

However two other experiments have found no sign of dark matter with their detectors. One, called XENON100, uses 100 kilograms of liquid xenon deep below Gran Sasso mountain, and the other, called CDMS II, uses ultra-pure crystals of germanium and silicon housed in a deep mine in Soudan, Minnesota.

Both experiments are so sensitive that they should have seen dark matter if the DAMA result is due to WIMPs. "The situation has created tension," says Dan Hooper, a theorist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Now another dark matter experiment called CoGeNT has found a seasonal variation in its results, reports team leader Juan Collar, who presented an analysis of 442 days of observations at the American Physical Society meeting in Anaheim, California, on Monday.

"We tried like everyone else to shut down DAMA, but what happened was slightly different," Collar said during his presentation.

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Fleeting antimatter trapped for a quarter of an hour

What can you do with a quarter of an hour? Write a few emails, cook rice – or store antimatter.

The team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have stored atoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds – roughly 10,000 times longer than before. This should help reveal if antimatter and matter are true mirror images.

Antihydrogen atoms are annihilated by hydrogen. The ALPHA team want to keep antimatter intact long enough to study it, so last year they worked out how to hold a cloud of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap. Not for long, though: collisions with trace gases would have either annihilated the anti-atoms or given them the energy to escape, so the team opened the trap after 170 milliseconds and observed the resulting annihilations, verifying that antimatter had been made.

Now they have repeated the experiment, this time waiting much longer before opening the trap. They also cooled the antiprotons used to create the antihydrogen much further, which lowered the energy of the antimatter, allowed more to be squeezed into the trap and raised the chance that some would last longer (arxiv.org/abs/1104.4982).

Antimatter's life extension will permit experiments, such as checking whether antihydrogen occupies the same energy levels as hydrogen, "perhaps within the next few years", says Daniel Kaplan of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, who is not on the ALPHA team.

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Netflix Streaming May be Putting a Hurt on File Sharing

Netflix started life by putting the squeeze on Blockbuster with DVD rentals and soared to unparalleled success with its Watch Instantly platform. Since 2008, Netflix’s library has swelled as the company signed multi-million dollars deals with content providers including Starz and CBS (yeah, we’re still excited about all of Star Trek coming to Netflix, too). With all that content, Netflix has obviously changed the way we watch movies and TV on a daily basis--but just how much has it revolutionized the online landscape?

Two web analytics organizations have weighed in on Watch Instantly’s popularity and its impact on peer-to-peer file sharing. According to one study, bittorrent has taken a big hit since 2007, with Netflix stepping up to fill in the gap.

Wired polled Arbor Network and Sandvine to rustle up any evidence suggesting Netflix’s streaming service has eaten into peer-to-peer movie sharing. With more than 23 million subscribers, Netflix is poised to become the largest subscription-based entertainment service in the US. That popularity has driven Netflix traffic into the stratosphere--it represents something like 20% of US downstream bandwidth during peak hours. According to Arbor Network, bittorent traffic fell from a high of more than 30% of US traffic in 2007 to a mere 8% of 2011’s measured bandwidth.

That 30% included all types of peer-to-peer filesharing, and some of that traffic has doubtless carried over to direct download sites like Rapidshare. Still, that drop in traffic leads us to two possible situations: Netflix’s growth (Arbor measures it at 20% of current US traffic) has actually impacted P2P traffic over the past four years, or non-P2P services have grown so significantly that P2P simply represents less bandwidth by comparison. The real answer probably falls somewhere in between.

The second traffic measurement from Sandvine tells a different story. It shows dramatic growth in Netflix streaming--from 29.5% of North American traffic to 42.7% between 2009 and 2010--but also depicts a rise in P2P filesharing over that same period. Sandvine’s traffic readings indicated peer-to-peer sharing jumped from 15.1% to 19.2% of bandwidth between 2009 and 2010. Obviously there’s no real consensus on Netflix’s mighty influence, but there are two major factors that still make piracy an attractive alternative to Netflix.

Watch Instantly’s library must continue to expand to win out against piracy--even if pirates are willing to pay $8 per month for their video content, they’ll go right back to torrenting if something isn’t available for instant streaming. The second problem, of course, is quality. So far Netflix’s HD support remains limited, and only the PlayStation 3 offers streaming of 1080p video. As long as streaming remains sub-1080p and Blu-ray rips are easy to come by, piracy will own a nice little chunk of bandwidth usage.

Streaming quality will only get better as average broadband speeds continue to improve, but we wonder how much Netflix can offer on Watch Instantly while remaining profitable. The service already contains an obscene amount of content, and Netflix will have to pay hundreds of millions in the coming years to secure new deals with providers like Starz. But if it can conquer that hurdle and by gaining even more subscribers, P2P numbers may look pretty meager within the next half decade.

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