Red Equal Signs: A Study in Sorting?

(Now that the bar exam is over and I have had time to sort out a number of personal and professional items, this blog is being revived. Sorry for the suspense.)

Odds are, you have a Facebook account. No, really. Over 50% of Americans have Facebook accounts. So, odds are, you have a Facebook account. (25 other countries are also over the 50% threshold, including the United Kingdom and Canada.) So, odds are, you've seen a red equal sign in the last few days.

In the extremely unlikely event you don't know what I'm talking about, here's what happened. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court, highest court in the country, heard challenges to the laws known as Proposition 8 (the California law prohibiting the performance of same-sex marriages in that state) and the Defense of Marriage Act (the U.S. federal law restricting federal marriage benefits from same-sex marriages*). Among the many memes and other trends on the Internet relating to the cases, Facebook was awash in red. The Human Rights Campaign urged followers to change their profile pictures in support of marriage equality, and it caught on. I haven't seen any estimates of how many people changed their pictures, but it was a lot. It also spawned a number of spoofs, from Ernie & Bert to corgis to bacon.

This is not a post about marriage equality. Sorry to disappoint. But I am going to talk about Facebook and social sorting, so click on!

Take This DRM. It's Dangerous to Distribute Games Alone.

(I am back after a couple of weeks of intense thesis immersion.  So let's talk about The Legend of Zelda.)

Let's be honest: If you never wanted to erase Navi, link's fairy companion in The Ocarina of Time, then you never played The Ocarina of Time.  If I had to make a list of the top modifications I wanted to otherwise great games, deleting Navi would top the list, and it wouldn't even be close.  If I had the time, energy, and technical skill, I would go back and erase Navi from the game myself, just to be able to go back and play the game without her.

Entrepreneur, gamer, and candidate for Dad of the Year Mike Hoye recently modded his own copy of The Wind Waker, Link's first adventure on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda series.  He didn't remove the fairy companion; to the best of my knowledge (I don't own a GameCube), there is no fairy companion in The Wind Waker.  Instead, he painstakingly changed the dialogue to change protagonist Link's gender from male to female.

Hoye enjoys playing video games with his daughter, but was frustrated by the lack of positive female role models in games.  So he did the sensible thing, and built one.  He didn't change the plot or the function of the game, just a few words here and there to make the game more accessible to his daughter.  He also made his modifications available to the public for other concerned parents.

But this isn't a post about gender in video games.  Everyone knows that video games have done a terrible job of handling gender in any sensible way, with very few and limited exceptions.  No, I want to talk about copyright.  Mike Hoye's labor of love is demonstrative of why our copyright system isn't just broken; it's insanely broken.

Why?  Hoye's brilliant Zelda hack is probably illegal.

Is Not Even Space Safe ... from Fake Nigerian Princes?

So, I really don't even know what to say about this, except for the fact that I couldn't help but laugh:

Won’t you help a poor Nigerian astronaut who just wants to come home from space?

In reality, this type of scam, known as a "Nigerian 419 scam", is a huge deal on the Internet. It's a modern-day version of the classic Spanish Prisoner scam, an advance fee confidence fraud where the con convinces the mark to send him money on a promise that he will be repaid at a premium later. We laugh at 419 scams (in at least two episodes of The Office, Michael Scott has revealed that he is a continuing victim to them), but in reality they are very effective.