Items tagged with bad ideas
One of the downsides (or upsides, depending on your point of view) of Internet memes is that they're ephemeral. Once-popular touchstones like "All your base," or "Hamster dance" have slunk off to the Island of Forgotten Internet Cliches. But there's one meme -- more of a rule, really -- that continues to wreak havoc on companies and lawyers who don't pay attention to it. We're talking, of course, about the Streisand Effect -- the phenomenon whereby (according to Wikipedia) "an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. Lawyers and executives for the company Medialink...
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On any given day in the United States you will find a number of really, really terrible ideas being floated as smart decisions. Flying to Hawaii to give birth in the ocean surrounded by dolphins. A drunk man repeatedly directing traffic in midtown Manhattan. And, today, from the USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission, a 90 page report on the state of IP around the world, the dangers posed to American IP by the Internet, and one remarkable suggestion on how to fix the problem. Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For...
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There's two bits of Ubisoft news today, one of which we're still investigating. First up, the company apparently payed attention to the outrage of gamers who discovered the DRM in the PC version of Assassin's Creed II would throw them out of game without saving if they lost an Internet connection in a single-player game. AC2 won't be released until March 16, but the company has already issued a patch that will allow gamers to resume playing in the event of a connection break, rather than forcing them back to the last saved game. The second (and amusing) snippet of news is that Ubisoft debuted this new controversial DRM system with the release of Silent Hunter 5, only to have it allegedly cracked...
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