It's shit. Deeply, deeply anti-consumer shit.

So thanks to the recent eShop release of Metroid Prime I've had a chance to experience FPS controls on a Wii remote, and I have to say it's probably the best you'll see on a console. With sensitivity turned up to "Advanced" you have a rough approximation of mouse aiming that more than does the job, even without the generous auto-aim that this particular game came with. I honestly think this was a much better step forward for gaming than the successor, the Wii U's unwieldy tablet controller thing.

NFC figurine games are a new type of game, involving a line of figurines with RFID tags embedded within and typically a proprietary hardware NFC peripheral. Scanning these figures into the game typically allows the player to play as the character depicted on the figure, saving the character's progress within the RFID tag in the toy, among other ancillary gameplay benefits.

Piracy has become to unsuccessful media what the Chupacabra is to lost sheep - an easy way to both absolve yourself of any responsibility for your failures while simultaneously bolstering an overarching narrative that is either overblown or completely untrue. I mean, there are many things that could cause some project to fail, and even multiple definitions of failure, but it's just so much easier to simply say "because piracy" and skip the whole introspective post-mortem process.

I am a little dismayed that whatever fervor Silicon Valley had for copyright and patent reform has long since been replaced with ire towards other industries and entrenched monopolies. Fifteen years ago, or very close to that, we were seeing startups getting threatened by the music industry and taken down for infringing actions. The technology industry had a clear existential threat in the music and movie industries, and every corner of the industry hated it. We wanted things to be fixed. But that's gone now.

So what happened?

About a year ago, a disgruntled NSA contractor ran off with a bunch of classified documentation and released it to a bunch of news organizations before fleeing to Hong Kong and later Moscow. The files therein explained an ongoing campaign to systematically violate the privacy of American and non-American citizens, compromise the security of encryption standards, install malicious software onto the routers of arbitrarily selected "high-value targets", and generally make the world less secure because we can.

As complained about previously on Fantranslation.org, the HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions are a "standard" way of getting a DRM-laden video to play on a DRM-laden browser. The technical details are unimportant (it's shit), the main issue is that it represents, on a political level, acquiesence and surrender to large multinational media conglomerates whose CEOs wet themselves at night and need a security blanket that makes us all radically more insecure.

About a week ago I downloaded a mobile application called Flappy Bird. Now, I normally don't touch cellphone games, but this one was different. Why? Because it had no in-app purchases. This alone struck me as odd; but the lack of microtransactions alone was enough to sucker me in. The result was a quite difficult tapping game with a name that sounds like a certain Rovio game and pipes that look like a certain Nintendo game. But it was very challenging and engaging, so I kept it on my phone.

Many years ago during the golden age of Wii hacking, Team Twiizers posted a rather cryptic message on their blog about trying to get in touch with Nintendo's anti-piracy division to discuss a possible exploit that would make it super-easy to disable all of the Wii's anti-DVDR security and launch Wii games from unauthorized recordable media. The goal was to establish some kind of relation with the console manufacturer stronger than angrily glaring at each other's update servers.

One of the biggest scams perpetuated upon the poorer classes is the payroll debit card. A service offered by hypothetically legitimate banks, a payroll debit card is a financial product for the "unbanked" - the millions of Americans who are on ChexSystems' shitlist and therefore barred from using ordinary financial products. This is an example of an "unbanked financial product" - any financial product designed specifically to target people banned from engaging in traditional finance.