Dangerous prank brings SWAT team down on gamer

A Littleton, Colorado man named Jordan Mahewson was raided by a heavily armed SWAT team thanks to a false shooting and hostage report, and all the chaos was captured on a Twitch game stream (see below). During a Counter-Strike session, Jordan “Kootra” Mathewson — a founder of The Creatures — suddenly noticed things around him were amiss. “Uh oh. This isn’t good. They’re clearing rooms. What in the world, I think we’re getting swatted,” he says in the video. Luckily, Mathewson stayed calm throughout the ordeal and was released a short time later.

On top of invading his offices, police locked down several schools and businesses in the Littleton, Colorado area. Suffice to say, the situation was extremely dangerous, and the police chief said “we have real guns and real bullets, and there’s potential there for some tragedy.”

Sadly, Mathewson’s ordeal isn’t an isolated one: “swatting” is the act of calling in false reports to draw real SWAT teams to a target’s house, and is often inflicted on rival gamers. As Vice News pointed out recently, the phenomenon is fairly new and can easily result in deaths, especially when malicious calls involve shots fired. There’s no word yet on who perpetrated the hoax (despite one claim) but police said they’ll prosecute whoever it was “to the fullest extent of the law.”

A similar event occurred recently to Sony Online Entertainment head John Smedley. A flight he was on was diverted after a group known as “Lizard Squad” sent a Twitter message to American Airlines warning of (false) explosives on board. Like the “swatting” action above, real people were put in real danger because of these malicious pranks.

Filed under: Gaming

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Via: Sky TV

Source: The Creatures (YouTube)

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Inside Goodwill’s game-filled tech thrift shop, The Grid

Thrift stores: better known for dusty shirts, potential Halloween costumes and used Jenga sets. Well, Goodwill wants to change that a bit with its recent launch of The Grid, a dedicated electronics and video game specialty shop located in North Carolina. The outfit tells IGN that not only will it sell video game hardware itself, but it’s arranged a deal with vendors to supply each console (even retro units) with new power and A/V cables — stuff that can often be a bear to source. Oh, and there’s Raspberry Pi and a selection of flat-screens on offer too. But what if console gaming isn’t your bag? The Grid also sells laptops and gaming PCs, and, as the video below shows, even has an Oculus Rift demo station set up.

As local outlet Lake Norman News notes, the store serves a few different purposes. For one, it helps reduce e-waste by offering a viable alternative to dumping old tech in a landfill. And given that GameStop isn’t really interested in selling anything that’s particularly “old,” having an option that’s better organized than some local thrift stores is good news for everyone involved. It’ll probably also give Mackelmore a new place to check out on his next tour, too.

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: IGN

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Steam competitor GOG is getting into the movie selling business

The generous group over at Good Old Games is prepping to bring another medium into its trademark DRM-free digital distribution platform: movies. Starting today, you can head over to GOG.com and download or stream a handful of gaming-and-geek focused documentaries. What’s on tap? Art of Playing, TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard and Indie Game: The Movie (seen above) among others, and you can check out the first two flicks in this list absolutely free of charge. If none of those strike your fancy the company promises more titles will be added on a weekly basis. Don’t expect to see Guardians of the Galaxy pop up on the site’s digital shelves in the coming months, though.

GOG says that it offered major studios to get in on the action but that they weren’t interested in being part of the first wave — they’d rather someone else gnaw on the rock and prove that selling DRM-free movies works. “Their reaction was kind of funny because … they know that DRM doesn’t work because every single movie is on torrent sites or illegal places at launch or even before,” Marcin Iwinski, CD Projekt RED and GOG joint-CEO tells us. He says that the problem with current digital platforms (Ultraviolet, especially) is how cumbersome they are. “Ultraviolet has five DRMs. How crazy does that sound?” he asks. When you have to register with a few different sites, then enter a download code on top of remembering your account password, any hiccup along the way provides a roadblock between you and watching a movie — it’s just easier to throw a Blu-ray into your Blu-ray player.

That frustration is what drives people away from collecting digital movies in a legal manner and drives them toward piracy, Iwinsky says. “The fundamental fact is that they usually pirate the content because that’s the most easy and user-friendly way to access video content. It’s kind of scary, actually.” Studios are reticent to give up DRM, though, because it keeps the lawyers happy by showing that, despite being a vain attempt, they’re protecting the intellectual properties.

GOG’s move to digitally distributing movies shouldn’t come as a surprise either, Iwinski thinks. His reasoning, however, might be a bit odd to anyone who buys physical media on a regular basis. “We started GOG because we were collectors and fans of old games and we had tons of old stuff. But it wasn’t cool to access it: the boxes were old and rough around the edges, sometimes the CD didn’t work. It just wasn’t a good experience,” he says. “We have a lot of DVDs, but having, owning and buying them is not cool anymore — it’s inconvenient. They’re gathering dust on the shelves. We want a digital version and there’s nothing like that.”

One of Blu-ray’s biggest advantages over streaming or a digitally distributed movie, however, is quality: each disc can hold between 25GB and 50GB of uncompressed audio and video data. By comparison, the Pirate Bay documentary GOG is offering weighs in around 8GB and only plays in stereo — not 5.1 surround sound. But that doesn’t bother Iwinski; he seems focused on hitting people that are more likely to watch Gravity on their laptop or mobile device than in a home theater. “You can stream from GOG, but the magic happens when you download the MKV file and you can move it to your iPod and move it to iTunes and it syncs automatically.

“It’s the power of simplicity,” he says.

[Image credit: Indie Game: The Movie]

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Gaming, Home Entertainment, Tablets, HD, Mobile

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Source: GOG

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