Tag: trolling
Activision is trolling cheaters for research purposes, and it’s glorious
Activision announced its Season 3 Ricochet anti-cheat updates this week, and from the looks of it they’re turning up the heat on MW and Warzone hackers. The post outlines several new approaches to the Call of Duty developer’s anti-cheat approach, all designed to identify and discourage foul play on the…
Unpaid Taxes Could Destroy Porn Studio Accused of Copyright Trolling
Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called “copyright troll,” suing thousands of “John Does” for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio’s website, “X-Art.” Whether defendants were guilty or not didn’t seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio’s litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as “essentially an extortion scheme,” and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions, agreeing with critics who said that Malibu’s tactics were designed to “harass and intimidate” defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements.
By 2016, Malibu started losing footing in this arena — and even began fighting with its own lawyer. At that point, file-sharing lawsuits became less commonplace, with critics noting a significant reduction in Malibu’s lawsuits over the next few years. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Malibu’s litigation machine appears to finally be running out of steam — with its corporate status suspended in California sometime between mid-2020 and early 2021 after failing to pay taxes. Last month, a Texas court said that Malibu has until January 20 to pay what’s owed in back taxes and get its corporate status reinstated. If that doesn’t happen over the next few weeks, one of Malibu’s last lawsuits on the books will be dismissed, potentially marking the end of Malibu’s long run of alleged copyright trolling.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twitter battles hateful trolling campaign following Elon Musk’s takeover
Twitter’s combatting an increase in hateful tweets after Elon Musk officially acquired the company on Friday. Yoel Roth, the platform’s head of safety and integrity, said on Twitter that the company’s taking action against an “organized effort” to spread hate speech on the platform.
According to Roth, a “small number” of accounts posted a rash of tweets containing “slurs and other derogatory terms” over the past two days, with the goal of making users think Twitter’s policies surrounding content moderation have changed. Roth says that just 300 accounts sent out over 50,000 tweets using a “particular slur,” and that almost all of the accounts in question are inauthentic.
Over the last 48 hours, we’ve seen a small number of accounts…
Twitter was targeted by a coordinated trolling campaign following Musk takeover
Following Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter was the target of a coordinated trolling campaign, according to Yoel Roth, the company’s head of safety and security. In a thread spotted by The Guardian, Roth said late Saturday that Twitter was working to stop an “organized effort” by trolls to make people think the company had weakened its content guidelines. “Bottom line up front: Twitter’s policies haven’t changed. Hateful conduct has no place here,” Roth said, adding the company had seen a “small number of accounts” post “a ton” of tweets that included derogatory language.
Let’s talk for a minute about slurs, hateful conduct, and trolling campaigns.
Bottom line up front: Twitter’s policies haven’t changed. Hateful conduct has no place here. And we’re taking steps to put a stop to an organized effort to make people think we have.
— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) October 30, 2022
In one instance, Roth says the company saw just 300 accounts post more than 50,000 tweets using the same slur. “We’ve taken action to ban the users involved in this trolling campaign – and are going to continue working to address this in the days to come to make Twitter safe and welcoming for everyone,” he wrote.
The news of a coordinated trolling campaign comes after a handful of research groups found evidence of bad actors trying to test the limits of Twitter. On Friday, the Network Contagion Research Institute tracked a 500 percent increase in usage of the n-word. The nonprofit linked the increase to posts on sites like 4chan, where users were encouraging each other to post hateful content.
On Friday, Musk said Twitter would not make any major moderation decisions until the company had the chance to form a council with “widely diverse viewpoints.” Before taking control of the company, Musk had said he wanted to do away with permanent bans, noting he would “err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist.” More recently, he floated the idea of allowing users to split off into different sections of the platform where they could add content ratings to their tweets.
Yaddle Speaks Normally In Tales Of The Jedi, So Yoda Was Probably Trolling Us
When Yoda was introduced to the Star Wars universe back in Empire Strikes Back in 1980, the one thing that really stood out about him was the way he spoke. Sometimes, he spoke relatively normal, and other times, he tossed in the verbs for his sentence right at the end, but we all just assumed that is how every person of Yoda’s species talked. After an episode of Tales of the Jedi released on Disney+, we now know that’s not the case at all.
Meet Yaddle, the female of Yoda’s species. Well, it’s more like “re-meet Yaddle,” as she appeared a couple of times in Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, but she never spoke. She also looked a bit rough. Yaddle is voiced in the one episode by Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World), and she speaks like everyone else who speaks Galactic Basic–the common language in the Star Wars universe. That’s right, she doesn’t say things like, “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try” or “The greatest teacher, failure is.”
I HAD to post Yaddle’s lightsaber picture 💚 Who watched #TalesOfTheJedi last night? All episodes are now streaming on @DisneyPlus! @TheCloneWars @starwars ✨ pic.twitter.com/02KE0cjLgu
— Bryce Dallas Howard (@BryceDHoward) October 26, 2022
Not everything Yoda said was jumbled, but his most memorable quotes are. Yaddle, on the other hand, says things like, “Whatever lies he’s told you, whatever you have done, you can make up for it now by bringing him to justice.” No riddles. Completely coherent.