Sunday 5 July 2009

Evening roundup

  • Andy Warhol painted Debbie Harry on an Amiga. My current computer desktop is painted up to look like an old Amiga 500's Workbench release 1.3, the computer I had in high school. Sigh.

  • More from BoingBoing: Massive bank fraud on Eve Online. I wonder if Castranova's watching this one. Billions of dollars of play money traded for $5,000 in real money. From the BBC story:
    "Basically this character was one of the people who had been running EBank for a while. He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank, and traded it away for real money," Ned Coker, of Icelandic company CCP which runs Eve, told the Reuters news agency.
    ...
    It has now emerged that Ricdic used the cash to put down a deposit on a house and to pay medical bills.
    "I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it," Ricdic told Reuters. "But you know, if I had to do it again, I probably would've chosen the same path based on the same situation."
    Ricdic has now been thrown out of the game as trading in-game cash for real money is against Eve Online's terms and conditions.
    The rules governing play within Eve would not have sanctioned Ricdic if he had simply stolen the cash and used it in the game, nor if he had bought kredits with real dollars.
    It seems that EVE only gets upset about violating actual terms of service and requires players to otherwise come up with their own in-game sanctions: nice.

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