Valentines Cuties Talkin' Twitch, AI, CDPR, and Privacy. | Table of Content Episode 34

TABLE OF CONTENT TALKING POINTS Episode 34

2-14-2021

(Host Scene)

Zazz - Welcome to Table of Content. A show by streamers for streamers and the wonderful people who support them. I am Zazzaboo your host and the Editor in Chief of TableOC.com. We have two great streamers here tonight ready to drop their opinions on us about the latest but first

~Welcome Stump

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Intro guests - Joining us again from and undisclosed location in the Rocky Mountains Deviantlostmind.

Making his triumphant return for the first time since season 1 HeyMrTofu

Streaming News

Unionization may be on the horizon for some streamers and content creators. The Screen actors Guild will soon accept influencers into their halls.

From Kotaku

a SAG-AFTRA rep explained that the new agreement will officially designate “influencer-generated branded content” as advertising, which means influencers who create it will qualify for opportunities to earn union income, as well as health and pension benefits. Notably, this will only extend to video ads—not still images—but videos can be as brief as an Instagram story or a TikTok. The content also must be posted to a creator’s social media channels, so appearing in commercials for a company does not fall under the terms of this agreement (SAG-AFTRA has a separate agreement for commercials).

Previously, SAG-AFTRA extended protections to some YouTubers’ brand deals, but the new agreement will cover basically every platform: Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and so on. In a statement to Backstage, SAG-AFTRA president Gabrielle Carteris said the goal is to “support both current and future SAG-AFTRA members in this space and for them to be able to access the benefits of union coverage.”

Some creators are worried about hypothetical situations in which, say, they want to collaborate with a particular YouTuber or streamer, only to find out that they’re not union-affiliated, putting the kibosh on the whole arrangement. And of course, union members have to pay dues, which may represent a high barrier to entry for smaller creators who are already working day jobs to make ends meet.

Deviant - What changes do you see coming to the content creation realm as a result of this?

The twitch Purple screen of death is still rearing its ugly head and has somehow become even more of an annoyance.

From win.gg

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds recently faced some complications due to Twitch's newly implemented anti-adblock measure. Like many similar tournaments, the PUBG Invitational had a stream of the tournament embedded into the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds game client. But Twitch's Purple Screen of Death continued to pop up instead, a bad look for both the game and for Twitch.

Esports insider Rod "Slasher" Breslau was one of the first to report the frustrating new development. He noted that it was probably "not great for the user experience."

Slasher added that the PUBG Invitational wasn't the only event being affected by Twitch's continued fight against ad blockers. MultiTwitch, Team Liquid, HLTV, Juked, individual streamer platforms, the home screens of popular esports titles, and charity websites were all getting negatively impacted by the Purple Screen of Death. All so Twitch "can make a little more ad money," Slasher said.

Ben Goldhaber, Twitch's former senior manager of partnerships and gaming outreach manager, has even spoken out against his former company's anti-adblock campaign. He said on Twitter that the Purple Screen of Death has evolved to impact almost every Twitch embed "everywhere, regardless of where you are viewing them and regardless if you use adblock."

Goldhaber added that the Purple Screen of Death would just be an inconvenience if it showed up for only the first 30 seconds. But it pops up "every 15 minutes," interrupting big battles on stream and other hype moments during esports coverage and similarly intense streaming sessions. The disruption of PUBG's Invitational is one prominent and concerning example of this new trend.

Tofu -Twitch is dominating the Esports scene right now and this could seemingly really hurt them. What do you think Twitch is thinking here?

In our first story, Not only does Twitch overtly ban users with no explanation and block the use of 3rd party sites, they now appear to be shadow banning accounts that use VPN’s to connect to the service.

From our story

As first reported by Win.gg, while the use of VPNs might have been frowned upon by Twitch in circumstances like circumventing govt blocks or IP bans, they have, to date, not made any efforts to block VPN users.

But now this seems to have changed.

So, what exactly have Twitch users been having problems with?

It all comes down to the live chat feature that runs alongside Twitch streams. Users watching the stream can comment on what they are seeing and interact with both the players and other viewers.

This chat feature usually works like any other live chat. But VPN users have noticed that their contributions are not receiving responses from other users.

A bit of amateur sleuthing seems to have determined that while their chat contributions have been appearing in the chat on their own screens, they have not been showing up in the chat streams of other Twitch users.

Hopefully, Twitch will come clean over what is happening and there is no doubt that pressure from their users is growing.

It is still a good idea to use a VPN with Twitch, but if you want to make use of their live chat feature when watching streams, it is worth double-checking that your messages are still getting through.

Stump - What reasoning could they have for intentionally doing this?

Tech/Gaming News

Lastly, More news from the realm of the unreal. This time it's not robots taking over, yet, but our online avatars have gotten an upgrade for when those robots decide to put us in the matrix.

From our piece

Epic Games is taking another step forward in creating digital human images that appear like the real us. On Wednesday Epic unveiled “MetaHumans” through its Unreal video game development engine

In a “sneak peak,” Epic says users can create “high-fidelity digital humans.”

The tool is called MetaHuman Creator, and Epic says it can “empower anyone to create a bespoke photorealistic digital human, fully rigged and complete with hair and clothing, in a matter of minutes.”

The new development comes after Epic acquired real-time facial animation technology startup Hyprsense last November. Hyprsense says its technology will give “Unreal Engine creators the ability to deploy and drive the most advanced character assets, on any platform.”

Achieving “photo realism” was a stated goal of Epic when it unveiled a new version of the Unreal engine last year.

Deviant - What sort of implications do you think this has not only on gaming or streaming but other facets of our digital existence?

The CDRP hacking scandal rages on in our next story from the verge.

Hackers have reportedly sold the game source code and other information stolen from Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 studio CD Projekt Red (CDPR). Cybersecurity firm Kela released screenshots of a post on the hacking forum Exploit allegedly posted by the attackers, saying that they’ve received an offer for the data from outside the forum. They added that they ended the auction at the request of the buyer. Cybersecurity Twitter account vx-underground subsequently confirmed that the auction had closed.

It is not known who purchased the data or how much it was sold for. However, the auction was thought to have included source code for Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales spinoff, The Witcher 3, a ray-traced version of The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and copies of the company’s internal documents. That’s according to screenshots posted by vx-underground. The auction followed a leak of the source code for CD Projekt Red’s virtual card game Gwent, which was verified by Vice.

Kela previously reported that the starting price for the auction was $1 million, with a buy-it-now price of $7 million. These terms were subsequently verified by vx-underground, too.

Although the hackers have not been officially named, one security researcher told Wired he believed it involved the use of the HelloKitty ransomware, which had also been used to hack a Brazilian power company called CEMIG.

Tofu - Who is your guess for who would want to buy this source code?

First, unlike John Cena they can see you and are you using ai to record  and store your features.

From the verge

Clearview AI’s facial recognition amounts to mass surveillance and the company should delete the faces of Canadians from its database, Canada’s privacy commissioners said Wednesday.

Commissioner Daniel Therrien said what Clearview does — scraping photos from social media and other public sites for use by law enforcement — is “illegal” and creates a system that “inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society, who find themselves continually in a police lineup.”

The commissioners released a report that follows a yearlong investigation by several Canadian privacy agencies into Clearview’s practices, which found the company had collected highly sensitive biometric information without consent and that it “used and disclosed Canadians’ personal information for inappropriate purposes.”

According to the investigators, the company maintains that Canada’s privacy laws don’t apply to Clearview since it does not have a “real and substantial connection” to the country, and that consent from individuals was not required because the information it collected was publicly available.

“The Federal Court of Appeal has previously ruled in the privacy context that publicly available information means exactly what it says: ‘available or accessible by the citizenry at large.’ There is no reason to apply a different standard here,” Mitchell said.

Use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition among law enforcement spiked 26 percent on January 7th, one day after a mob of rioters attacked the US Capitol, with several police departments using Clearview software to assist the FBI with identifying the rioters. Clearview also has contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.

Stump - When you think about this tech and the fact that deep fakes are getting more real with tech like metahumans, will this be a viable means of evidence after a while?

Entertainment News

Casting of some of the big Video game Series and movies has ramped up over the last several days.

Pedro Pascal, who you might recognize as The Mandalorian himself, has been cast as Joel in HBO’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us, as first reported by Deadline. The casting was confirmed shortly after by The Last of Us creative director (and an executive producer and writer for the show) Neil Druckmann.

Pascal’s confirmed casting comes just hours after the news that Bella Ramsey, who played the fan-favorite ruler Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, will play Ellie, Joel’s surrogate daughter.

Also, The Borderlands movie had a major role if not its biggest role cast today.

Coming off the heels of Jaimie-Lee Curtis joining the film,  Actor and Jumanji star Jack Black has been cast into the role of Claptrap for the upcoming adaptation of the hit video game franchise, marking the latest addition to the ambitious sci-fi comedy.

The news comes from The Hollywood Reporter, who confirmed the casting choice.  Jack Black will star as the infamous robot with a wild mouth, Claptrap, a comedic companion for the Vault Hunters of Borderlands. Claptrap has been long considered an icon of the Borderlands franchise, known for his absurd humor and wild antics. Claptrap was first introduced in the first Borderlands game in 2009, and has since had a major role in every Borderlands game since, including being a playable character in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

Tofu - Do you worry that too much focus is being put on celeb casting in these movies vs putting out a good story?

Bam Margera has urged fans to boycott Jackass 4 after he was allegedly cut from the movie.

LADBible transcribed two videos that Margera posted on Instagram before they were seemingly deleted. In the videos, the Jackass prankster apparently claimed that Paramount had cut him from the upcoming fourth movie. He alleged that the studio forced multiple breathalyzer tests on him, as well as requesting urine samples and filming him take anti-depressants, per the report.

"Who the f**k cares if I'm drunk as hell anymore? Jackass has put me through hell on f**king wheels for a year-and-a-half," Margera reportedly said. "I wrote them so many ideas, and if I'm not in the movie and they use my ideas, how do you think that will make me feel? The last thing I want to do is be in a courtroom with [director] Jeff Tremaine, I love him. But f**k, man, I'm not in Jackass 4? If anybody cares about me, don't go see their movie, because I will make mine way f**king radder if you just Venmo me a dollar."

Later, Margera stated that he was feeling a lot of "pain" because Jackass was "everything" to him. He then implored people to support him in creating his own production to rival Jackass 4, saying, "If anybody cares about me at all, then throw me a f**king bone and send a dollar to this Venmo and the more you send, the radder s*** we can do, and I give everyone f**king credit for it. Like, I can't compete with their $10m, ladies and gentlemen, but if I had that, I would blow them out of the f**king water."

Deviant - Do you think it's fair for them to just cut him from the franchise that he built?

Playing with Power: The Nintendo Story, a five-part documentary series, will premiere on Crackle on March 1, 2021.

As reported by Deadline, this new docuseries is written and directed by Video Games: The Movie's Jeremy Snead and executive produced and narrated by The Lord of the Rings' Sean Astin.

The Nintendo Story will feature interviews from Wil Wheaton, Alison Haislip, Nintendo of America co-founder Ron Judy, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, and the head of Xbox Phil Spencer.

Astin discussed how chronicling the century-plus history of Nintendo was an "ambitious goal", but "little by little, over four years, the series really came together. I think we’ve created a five-episode journey that will open up the world of video games and this legendary company in a way that most people have never seen.”

Stump - Lets hope Nintendo doesn't get wind of this and sue someone.

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