Nintendo Hates You And The Company Most Certainly Does Not Want You To Co-Stream 'Nintendo Direct'

from the direct-as-in-direct dept

If you're a fan of gaming giant Nintendo, you really should know by now that Nintendo hates you. More specifically, when Nintendo is presented with a choice to either allow its rabid fans to express their fandom in new and interesting ways or attempt to exert iron-fisted control over every last thing, the company will always, always, always choose control. From taking down fan-games, DMCAing let's plays and much-loved video game music from its properties, or shutting down fan-projects for fiction or movies, the company behaves as though it just can't help itself. To be clear, Nintendo is typically within its rights in taking these actions, but it doesn't have to. This is a choice, not a necessity.

And now, on the cusp of this year's Nintendo Direct, the company's E3 presentation that serves essentially as one giant commercial for what's coming out from Nintendo in the near future, the company has put out a statement in Japan insisting that nobody co-stream the event.

Leading up to the event, the Kyoto-based game company has issued a request on its Japanese Twitter account: Do not co-stream our presentation.

“Please refrain from mirroring Nintendo Direct footage and sound during the Nintendo Direct livestream,” the tweet reads. Nintendo will allow simultaneous viewing (reactions, basically) without mirroring—and thus, without streaming sound or footage.

Nobody seems to be sure if this applies in other countries, such as America, as well. Even if this is limited to just Japan, or perhaps especially if this is limited to just Japan, this makes little sense. The very idea behind big productions like Nintendo Direct is to generate massive amounts of interest in future Nintendo projects. Why in the actual hell would the company not want that production disseminated as far and wide as possible? Why limit the avenues by which people can watch what is essentially a commercialized hype-video for its own products?

This is something akin to when companies have on occasion DMCA'd their own commercials on sites like YouTube, except those are typically done in error. I guess some should take this as a sign that maybe Nintendo doesn't actually want you to watch Nintendo Direct this year.

Filed Under: control, fans, streaming
Companies: nintendo

Police Union, Lax Oversight Allow Florida Cop To Survive Three Arrests And Seven Firings

from the when-you-think-'The-Shield'-is-something-to-aspire-to dept

How do you respond if you've just been notified you lead the state in discipline cases? Well, if you're Sergeant German Bosque of the Opa-Locka (FL) police department, you take perverse pride in your inability to be a good cop.

“I can’t believe that,” he said. “I’m not trying to smile. I just ... damn!”

That was in 2011, when Sgt. Bosque wasn't seen as quite as terrible as he is now. At that point, the officer who seemed to see himself as the second coming of Vic Mackey only had five firings (and three arrests) to his name.

Accusations of misconduct have piled up against this officer. The Herald-Tribune found 40 internal affairs cases involving Bosque, including multiple excessive force claims. Those reports found that Bosque head butted a man, splitting his lip open. Or that he cracked open another man's head with a leg sweep. Or the time he smacked a juvenile detainee. On top of that they note that he's been caught defying orders, lying to supervisors, and falsifying paperwork. His off-duty life seems just as horrifying, with Bosque facing multiple accusations from women alleging domestic violence and stalking.

He was apparently bounced out of the police academy twice and still somehow managed to become an officer. One of his early exits was prompted by his arrest on charges of stealing a car and impersonating an officer. I guess the Opa-Locka PD figured it was better to have him become an actual police officer, rather than allow him to roam the city pretending to be one.

Since his hiring in 1998, Bosque has been accused of engaging in pursuits in violations of direct orders, something he apparently tried to cover up by making an "anonymous" 911 call from his personal phone after the suspect crashed into a tree. He also was accused of falsifying his report to cover up his continued pursuit of the suspect.

Following a string of incidents that finally led to his suspension in 2008, Bosque's vehicle was inspected by officers who found an empty vodka bottle, cocaine, and crack pipes. They also found a bunch of IDs Bosque had apparently unlawfully seized.

That led to one of Bosque's firing. But the police union got him his job back, and the state's law enforcement commission took no action to strip him of his certification despite -- as the 2011 investigation by the Herald-Tribune notes -- Bosque's police record more closely resembled a rap sheet.

By all appearances, Bosque hasn't improved over the last ten years. First reported by the Miami Herald (and amplified by the Daily Beast), Sgt. Bosque has again been fired.

German Bosque, the Opa-locka police sergeant who became notorious for repeatedly getting fired and getting his job back, has been canned yet again.

“I’ve lost count. I don’t know if it was the seventh or eighth time,” Bosque said when reached on Wednesday evening. “It’s a wrongful termination. Again, I’ll be getting my job back again.”

It's Bosque's seventh firing. His latest involves more claims of lies and shady behavior. It also involves what appears to be some incredible incompetence by officers handling criminal evidence.

It stems from a shooting that happened back in October, when a gun believed used in the incident was discovered under a boat in someone’s back yard in Opa-locka. Officer Luis Serrano was assigned to watch the gun until Miami-Dade detectives got there to process the scene. But Serrano left to go to his police car briefly — and someone on the street took the gun and replaced it with a toy pellet gun.

Sgt. Bosque arrived on the scene and began mentoring Officer Serrano as only Bosque could. The body cam recording caught Bosque telling Serrano to make up a story about why he left the gun unattended.

“What do we tell them you get to get in the car?” he asks, according to body-camera footage. When Serrano repeated that he’d gone to the car to look [for] some paperwork, Bosque said “No. No. Something else, anything else ... you thought it was going to rain and you came to get a tarp.”

For all the cops who complain the "system" allows criminals to get off on "technicalities" (the nickname cops give Constitutional rights), they seem to lack the self-awareness to recognize they have their own set of technicalities that frequently allow them to escape punishment for their actions. And here it is, via Andrew Axelrad, Bosque's police union attorney.

“The idea that the department is going to terminate him for this is truly unbelievable ... I have very little doubt that he will be reinstated,” Axelrad said. “”This is more a function of his reputation.”

That seems about right. Bosque's reputation is garbage and has been for a couple of decades. The only thing slightly surprising about this is that he actually was fired. If history is any indication, Bosque will be back on the streets before too long.

And Bosque's own lack of self-awareness is pretty notable.

“It’s sad because I love policing,” he said. “I don’t like corrupt cops. I hate when I’m portrayed as a dirty cop who slipped through the cracks.”

But that's exactly what Bosque appears to be: a dirty cop who slips through the wide crevasses his union and his supposed oversight create for him. No matter how much the PD and the city want him gone, they can't seem to get rid of him.

Then there's the question of how much the PD actually wants him gone. Sure, it's been forced to reinstate him thanks to the union's continuous intervention, but if it really wanted Bosque gone, it could have made it happen. Years of indifference by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement -- which has continually refused to strip Bosque of his certification -- has turned a bad hire into permanent Opa-Locka urban blight.

Then there's the officers he works with. Some, if not most, must be ok with Bosque's behavior. No officer has stepped forward to offer their commentary on his actions. And it appears some officers take pride in being bad. Law enforcement has cultivated an us vs. them attitude that takes all the wrong messages from pop culture icons like Dirty Harry and The Punisher and applies them to their daily work. Everyone who isn't a cop is an enemy in a war zone. Busting heads and breaking rules is perceived to be the most efficient way to enforce the law. Violence is encouraged in training and rewarded with wrist slaps, reinstatements, and shit tons of exonerative reports and public statements.

Bosque is a symptom of the disease. And he didn't make it in the law enforcement business for 28 years without the help of those around him. Most of us can go 28 years without being arrested or fired once. A public servant entrusted with this much power shouldn't be tolerated for this long ever.

Filed Under: firings, florida, german bosque, opa-locka, police misconduct, police unions, reinstatements

Consumer Groups Get Punchy As Biden Team Lags On Staffing FCC, Restoring Net Neutrality

from the taking-your-sweet-time dept

Last December the Trump administration rushed the appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC last year, despite Simington having absolutely no real experience or qualifications for the role. That's because Simington was appointed for two other reasons. One being the silly (and utterly hypocritical if you tracked the net neutrality fights) effort by the Trump administration to try and have the FCC target Section 230, which was derailed by Trump's election loss.

But the other purpose of Simington's rush appointment was to ensure the FCC would be gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners. Like the FTC, the FCC is comprised of a 3-2 partisan makeup depending on who controls the White House. And while Biden could have easily appointed a new FCC Commissioner to break that gridlock, we're now six months into his tenure with no movement on this front.

Granted there are a lot of fires the Biden administration is tasked with putting out. But having a gridlocked FCC during a health and economic crisis where broadband is playing a starring role still isn't a great look. As a result, a coalition of more than 50 consumer groups and unions wrote the Biden camp last week asking for something vaguely resembling urgency on the FCC front:

"As we move toward the second half of 2021 with no nomination for the fifth and final commissioner, the Federal Communications Commission remains below full capacity, which is incompatible with the goal of delivering open, affordable and reliable high-speed broadband to every home. This is all the more urgent given the fact poor families and people of color are disproportionately disconnected from high-speed internet access, compounding grave inequalities that were made worse during the pandemic.

Given the legislative calendar and the diminishing number of days for hearings and confirmation votes, we have reached a critical point to guarantee the agency charged with ensuring affordable communications access can do its work during your administration. Failing to nominate a fifth commissioner leaves the FCC less than fully operational and limits its capacity to most effectively.

Consumer groups are being overly polite here because they tactically need to be, but there's no reason for this to be taking this long, even with everything on the Biden team's plate.

I bring this up a lot, but that's because I still see a lot of folks who seem to think the net neutrality repeal didn't really matter much because the internet didn't immediately implode in a rainbow of color.

But it mattered because the repeal didn't just kill net neutrality rules, it effectively gutted the FCC's consumer protection authority, leaving it ill-equipped to police basic things like rampant telecom industry billing fraud. It shoveled any remaining consumer protection oversight to an FTC with limited authority over telecom, and that's too understaffed and underfunded to tack "hold telecom monopolies meaningfully accountable" on top of its existing, massive workload. It's precisely why the telecom lobby pushed for this. And the Biden team's lack in doing anything on this front for six months reflects a failure to understand any of this.

This regulatory lobotomization also occurred right before a crisis showcasing the essential nature of broadband for stuff like education, healthcare, and overall opportunity. The ridiculously named Trump/Pai "restoring internet freedom" repeal even tried to ban states from protecting broadband consumers (though the courts haven't looked too kindly on this last part). Needles to say, the combination of limited competition and regulatory capture isn't a good thing, and if you think it is, you've not spent much time on the phone with Comcast support, or trying to use an aging, expensive DSL line.

All of this also still matters because all of the justifications for the repeal, including claims of amazing job growth and ramped up broadband network investment, wound up being a lie. We effectively gutted oversight of a broken and heavily monopolized US business sector -- entirely because a handful of monopolies and their various policy tendrils promised all manner of amazing outcomes. When a long parade of experts pointed out the repeal was based on bullshit and would be harmful, we... ignored them. And when the amazing promised outcomes never materialized... we ignored that too.

And while many insist that Congress should just pass a net neutrality law and end this "regulatory ping pong," that (usually intentionally) ignores the fact that this telecom campaign-cash slathered Congress is never going to hit the 60 votes necessary to pass a law of any worth. That leaves us with a choice: either an FCC that's too feckless and pathetic to be able to stand up to AT&T and Comcast, or an FCC that at least has the authority and voting majority to occasionally hold these giants accountable.

Filed Under: biden administration, fcc, gridlock

Biden, DOJ Say No More Targeting Journalists, But Aren't Doing Anything To Keep It From Happening Again

from the first-step-toward-doing-better-is-actually-doing-something dept

The tail end of the Bill Barr/Donald Trump DOJ has been marred (I mean… more so…) by a quick succession of reports detailing its targeting of journalists' communications in order to sniff out the source of leaks.

The Trump Administration was plagued by leaks and Trump suggested it would be cool if the FBI would go after some journalists. The FBI apparently also thought this was cool. And so the DOJ sent out subpoenas demanding information about phone calls and emails and pinned gag orders to them, keeping targeted journalists from being notified the government was trying to obtain these records.

The targets were journalists employed at the papers on the top of Trump's shit list: the New York Times and the Washington Post. (The DOJ also targeted a CNN journalist.) And, in a weird twist loaded with the same First Amendment concerns, the FBI tried to obtain records pertaining to readers of a USA Today article about the killing of two FBI agents during a child porn raid.

After the first couple of revelations, President Joe Biden said the DOJ would no longer target journalists.

When asked if Biden would prevent his Justice Department from seeking reporters’ phone records, Biden responded: “I won’t let that happen.”

Unfortunately for Biden, the DOJ's rules absolutely permit it to target journalists. It has done so for years and made quite the negative impression during the Obama years, assisting an administration nearly as interested in hunting down leakers and whistleblowers as Donald Trump's.

Biden's statement suggested his DOJ would do things differently, but the DOJ hadn't actually said anything at that point, and was, in fact, carrying on with some of the Trump DOJ's secretive targeting of journalists. As late as March of this year, the DOJ was still seeking New York Times' journalists' records while swearing the NYT's legal counsel to secrecy.

The DOJ finally stated it wouldn't target journalists a few days after Biden said he wouldn't allow it. The DOJ's spokesperson said the DOJ respected the First Amendment and the free press. But it's apparently a newfound respect, rather than a respect the DOJ has always held.

All well and good except that neither the DOJ nor President Joe Biden have done anything other than say the things that have happened for years will no longer be happening. There hasn't been much action. Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post points out that all anyone's been given are assurances that will remain empty until someone in the administration is willing to do something about it.

In an opinion piece published over the weekend, Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan argued that the revelations of recent weeks demonstrate that the Biden administration actually intensified the assault on First Amendment rights before backing down.

He described how, after The Post learned of subpoenas to obtain email information and home, cell and office telephone records of three Post reporters from 2017, the paper’s leadership demanded answers and a meeting with the attorney general — and have so far received none.

Getting some face time with the DOJ would be a good start. But the DOJ isn't going to ditch something it finds useful -- or, at least, convenient -- when engaging in leak investigations. It will continue to target journalists unless it makes it impossible to do so.

Sullivan says the DOJ's Inspector General needs to look into this and publish the findings. More essential, though, is establishing solid deterrents. The DOJ may say it will no longer target journalists, but without meaningful consequences in place for those who violate this promise, it will continue to happen. Suspensions, firings, demotions: these should all be options when prosecutors and investigators cross the line.

Biden and his DOJ need to be better at this than their predecessors. But not just a little better. The DOJ should make this standard operating procedure going forward. And it needs to lock these rules in, preventing future administrations from deciding Constitutional rights are just privileges that can be waived whenever investigators are trying to figure out where the federal government has sprung a leak.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, doj, journalists, targeting

Daily Deal: Alpe Audio -- Bite-Size Audio Courses On the Go

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Master new topics in your spare time. Alpe Audio courses make sure you can learn and complete courses like Pricing Strategy, Mastering Marketing, Product Management, and The Entrepreneurs Growth Playbook during your daily commute, chore time, or workout. By learning during your spare time , you'll be able to master complex topics and apply them at work. Building a lifelong learning habit isn't easy, but it's been proven to lead to a higher quality of life. Alpe Audio helps you build that learning habit so that your learning compounds and sticks. Three subscription options are on sale: 1-year subscription for $30, 2-year subscription for $50, or lifetime subscription for $100.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

If David Cicilline Gets His Way; It Would Destroy Content Moderation

from the consequences dept

Last week we looked at the various antitrust bills written by House Democrats (though with Republicans co-sponsors conjured up at the last minute with an assist from Rupert Murdoch), and noted that none of them seemed likely to really solve the problems of internet consolidation. The crown jewel bill comes from Rep. David Cicilline, who is spearheading this entire antitrust effort. We discussed some of the problems with his bill last week, but a closer reading suggests that it would also create a disaster for content moderation. The bill reads:

It shall be unlawful for a person operating a covered platform, in or affecting commerce, to engage in any conduct in connection with the operation of the covered platform that—

(1) advantages the covered platform operator’s own products, services, or lines of business over those of another business user;
(2) excludes or disadvantages the products, services, or lines of business of another business user relative to the covered platform operator’s own products, services, or lines of business; or
(3) discriminates among similarly situated business users.

This language is clearly designed to target things like Google offering its own local reviews and listings rather than Yelp's or TripAdvisor's. And there are reasonable arguments to be made that a company like Google maybe should just use its own search ranking algorithm to see whether or not users prefer those 3rd party listings to its own.

But... the overly broad language in the Cicilline bill seems likely to have massive unintended consequences regarding content moderation in ways I don't think Cicilline would support. Indeed, for unclear reasons, an early draft of Cicilline's bill had more limiting language on part (3) above, such that it only covered "material" discrimination over services involving "the sale or provision of products or services." But the final language is much more broad and says it's an antitrust violation if there's "discrimination among similarly situated business users."

But here's the thing that people who have no experience with content moderation never seem to realize: everyone who is on the receiving end of a moderation decision they disagree with, insists that they are being treated unfairly compared to some other "similarly situated" user, even if the reality (and context) suggest otherwise. But by saying that it's an antitrust violation to discriminate between "similarly situated" business users, that's going to make those claims become particularly legally fraught.

That's going to open up a massive loophole regarding content moderation. Let's take a few examples, starting with Parler. As you may recall, Parler was kicked off AWS for hosting, and also kicked out of both the Google Play Store and the Apple iOS App Store (though it has since returned to the App Store).

Parler sued Amazon, claiming it was an antitrust violation, which got laughed out of court. But, if Cicilline's bill becomes law, suddenly this becomes an open question again. Parler could easily argue that the removal was discrimination under the definition of the bill. After all, a key point in Parler's lawsuit was that Amazon treated Twitter differently than it treated Parler.

And, under the definition in (3), Parler could say that Amazon discriminated against it as compared to the "similarly situation business user" Twitter.

This might not impact Parler's lawsuit specifically, since enforcement of Cicilline's bill falls on government entities rather than private parties, but it opens it up to "any Attorney General of a state," and I can pretty much guarantee that there are a bunch of state AGs who would happily step in and claim that these moderation efforts against Parler violated the law.

But it goes even further than that. Suddenly Twitter banning Project Veritas or Facebook shutting down events created by Infowars would raise the same questions. And all they'd need to do is find a friendly state AG to take them on.

In short, this antitrust bill would open up a huge loophole for propaganda or garbage fire websites that were banned (or even just diminished) to claim it was an antitrust violation, because they were treated differently than "similarly situated business users."

Just think of how the PragerU lawsuits against YouTube would appear very different under this bill as well.

It seems odd that a Democrat like David Cicilline would want to put in place an antitrust bill that would make it open season for Republican propaganda outfits, and their supportive AGs, to force social media companies to not just host, but to promote, their content (not doing so might be seen as "discrimination" compared to similarly situated websites), but it seems like that's what he's done. Perhaps that's the compromise that it took to get a Republican co-sponsor on board, but it's hard to see how this is a worthwhile trade-off.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, content moderation, david cicilline, discrimination
Companies: amazon, apple, facebook, google, parler

Add Microsoft And Another Congressional Staffer To The List Of Entities Targeted In Trump DOJ Leak Investigations

from the just-waiting-on-the-yahoo!-revelations-now dept

The hits just keep on coming. Gag orders are being lifted or expiring and we're finding out even more about DOJ leak investigations under Trump. Under AGs Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the DOJ targeted journalists, Congressional reps... even readers of USA Today.

The DOJ went after journalists working for the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN while trying to hunt down the source of leaks, sending subpoenas to third party service providers hoping to acquire phone records and email metadata.

The most recent revelation exposed the DOJ's targeting of Rep. Adam Schiff -- one of Trump's many, many punching bags -- in a leak investigation. The DOJ sent a grand jury subpoena to Apple, seeking metadata for 109 identifiers, specifically 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses. The information sought covered not only Schiff but his staffers and family members. Another Congressional Rep, Eric Swalwell, was targeted by the same subpoena.

It appears no third party was left out of the DOJ's attempt to hunt down leakers. The latest news on the DOJ's leak hunting pulls in Microsoft.

Microsoft in 2017 received a subpoena for a congressional staff member's personal email account, a company spokesperson said via email. The staffer hasn't been identified.

This subpoena came with a gag order attached.

The spokesperson added: "In this case, we were prevented from notifying the customer for more than two years because of a gag order. As soon as the gag order expired, we notified the customer who told us they were a congressional staffer."

And another two years before it was actually made public. I assume this didn't seem newsworthy to the staffer in 2019 when they were informed of the subpoena by Microsoft. But in 2021, with news about the DOJ's questionable investigative techniques breaking almost daily, it apparently seemed relevant enough to bring this to the media's attention.

Both President Biden and the DOJ have promised to stop seeking information about journalists and their sources during future leak investigations. Presumably government employees like the Congressional reps and staffers are still considered valid investigational targets when the DOJ looks for leakers. Whether this will continue to include family members of government employees remains to be seen.

The Inspector General of the DOJ has opened an investigation into these investigations. This will possibly result in even more information about its targeting of journalists coming to light. Unfortunately, it may also result in an exoneration of the DOJ, as its guidelines for seeking information about journalists were, until recently, pretty expansive. This means the DOJ could cause considerable constitutional trouble without breaking the rules it wrote for itself. If nothing else, we can hope the DOJ's promise to exclude journalists from leak investigations outlasts the current administration.

Filed Under: adam schiff, doj, eric swalwell, gag order, jeff sessions, leak investigations, surveillance, whistleblowers, william barr
Companies: apple, microsoft

Geigner's Effect: CDPR Breach Worse Than Originally Reported, Because Of Course

from the this-is-the-way,-unfortunately dept

There has been a theorem proposed on these pages, originally by Mike himself, for a long time that goes something like this: when a data breach is first reported in the news, the severity of the breach is always, always, always underreported and there will eventually be an admission that the breach was much worse. Despite this not having been my original idea, I nonetheless slapped my name on it and called it The Geigner Effect. If that sort of name-slapping is good enough for former US Presidents, it's damned well good enough for me.

Anyway, an example of this is Ninteno's 2020 breach, where user data for the Nintendo Network was stolen, with the number of reported accounts effected magically doubling from 140k to 300k after a few months. It's also happened with Equifax, TJX, and even our own federal government. Perhaps most infamously, it also occurred when Yahoo acknowledged there was an email breach of a few hundred thousand accounts in 2013 that grew and grew over subsequent reports until, eventually in 2017, Yahoo acknowledged that literally every account had been affected.

In February, game studio CD Projekt Red acknowledged a breach of their corporate network. That breach was mostly for corporate assets, including source code for several games along with data from CDPR's "accounting, administration, legal, HR, investor relations, and more". Held for ransom, there was no mention in the ransom note one way or the other if user data was effected. CDPR for its part indicated it would not be giving into any monetary demands by the nefarious actors, but indicated it was working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the incident.

“We will not give into the demands nor negotiate with the actor, being aware that this may eventually lead to the release of compromised data,” the company writes. CD Projekt Red writes that it does not believe the breach contains personal data from players.

“We have already approached the relevant authorities, including law enforcement and the President of the Personal Data Protection Office, as well as IT forensic specialists, and we will closely cooperate with them in order to fully investigate the incident,” the company writes.

And, well, that's been it since February. For the lay observer, this looked like CDPR's systems and data had been restored from backup and that whatever work the authorities had done must have had a good effect, as no more information was released. For all the world, it appeared as though there was no real fallout from any of this.

Until this past Thursday, "coincidentally" the same day that E3 kicked off, when CDPR came out and admitted that the fallout from the breach both very much happened and is still going on.

As the entire gaming world laser-focused on Geoff Keighley’s sartorially questionable sneakers during the Summer Game Fest Kickoff Live! event, Cyberpunk 2077 studio CD Projekt Red released a statement regarding a February cyberattack against the company. Turns out, that data breach could not be contained.

“Today, we have learned new information regarding the breach, and now have reason to believe that internal data obtained during the attack is currently being circulated on the internet. [...] We are not able to confirm the exact contents of the data in question, though we believe it may include current/former employee and contractor details in addition to data related to our games,” CDPR wrote in a tweet published at 2:39 p.m. ET, smack in the middle of today’s hotly anticipated showcase of video gaming advertisements.

This is the gaming industry equivalent of the old axiom: if you have to break news you really want to bury, break it at 5p on a Friday. In this case, CDPR was obviously attempting to limit the exposure of this news by announcing it just as the entire gaming world was focused on the start of E3. Why?

Well, perhaps it has something to do with just how vague CDPR is still being about what it lost in this data breach.

Today’s statement doesn’t say whether or not players of CDPR’s games were affected. Representatives for CDPR did not immediately respond to Kotaku’s request for comment.

That silence is not a good sign. Either CDPR doesn't know if user data was included in the breach, or it does know and doesn't want to say. That would indicate that the answer to the question of whether CDPR's customers' data is out there in the wild is somewhere on a spectrum of "yes" and "maybe".

And if the Geigner Effect holds true, one could expect a follow up post to this one on exactly that topic.

Filed Under: breach, breach reporting, geigner's effect, under-reporting
Companies: cd projekt red

Study Shows Disney, Netflix Continue To Dominate Traditional TV In Customer Satisfaction

from the give-them-what-they-want dept

There's just something about terrible customer service, high prices, and sketchy product that consumers oddly don't like. American consumers' dislike of traditional cable TV providers was once again made clear this week in a new study by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which tracks US consumer approval of companies on a 100 point scale. As has long been the case, the full report shows most traditional cable TV, satellite, or IPTV providers languishing somewhere in the mid 60s -- scores that are bested by a long line of industries and government agencies (including the IRS).

While the report shows that streaming did drop 2.6% to a score of 74 (thanks in part to COVID-era network strain and demand), that's still significantly better that most broadband and cable TV ratings, which remain mired in the 50s and 60s:

Compare that to streaming, which provides consumers with cheaper service, greater flexibility, and better customer service:

The cable industry was already struggling in early 2020, when a record number of cable customers "cut the cord" and flocked to over the air or streaming alternatives. That was before a pandemic came to town. But with live sports less consistent and folks desperate to cut costs as they struggled to pay rent, the trend simply exploded in the second half of last year. The number of folks still paying for traditional cable has now dropped more than 22.8% from pay TV's peak back in 2014. But by the end of 2024, analysts expect that fewer than half of US homes will subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.

One survey predicts that 27 percent of US households are planning to cut cable TV from their budgets this year. That's quite an explosion for a trend that cable and broadcast executives have spent a decade pretending wasn't actually happening (it was), wasn't a big deal (it was), was only something poor losers do (studies repeatedly proved this claim false) or would rebound once Millennials began seriously procreating (that didn't happen).

It's an ongoing lesson for the oodles of cable and broadcast executives who have been wrong about this phenomenon. For giant telecom incumbents their only saving grace is the fact that their monopolies over broadband access in many markets means the bloodshed isn't quite as bad as it otherwise would be, as they can simply extract their pound of flesh via price hikes on your broadband bill.

Filed Under: customer reputation, customer satisfaction, customer service, streaming, tv, video
Companies: comcast, disney, netflix