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Watching Terms and Conditions May Apply (TACMA) is sort of like watching Ars’ tech policy coverage—but in an 80-minute feature film.
Filmmaker Cullen Hoback adeptly uses a combination of cutesy animation, archival footage, and even guerilla journalism to make a movie that’s informative, frightening, and compelling to watch. Hyrax Films provided Ars with an advanced copy—it opened in New York earlier this month, and is currently being screened this weekend in Denver. In late July and early August, TACMA will screen in tech hubs San Francisco and San Jose, as well as Phoenix, Portland, Dallas, Richmond (Virginia), Toronto, and San Diego.
Within the first 10 minutes of the film, Hoback reminds us of the halcyon days of the late 1990s commercial Web, when startups rose and fell and a real digital privacy policy in America was bubbling beneath the surface. In early 2001, over a dozen privacy bills were introduced in Congress. But after Sept 11, 2011, the narrator (Hoback himself) intones: “all privacy legislation was either killed or abandoned and the PATRIOT Act was, of course, initiated.” The film deftly reminds us that this was the initial seed that gave rise to National Security Agency’s blanket telephony metadata collection program. (A Congressional vote to shut down that program was defeated by a slim margin just this past week.)
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Here's a little treat on a Monday morning. A number of premium iOS apps and games have been discounted to nothing over at the App Store, including the charming and mildly addictive Tiny Wings (and Tiny Wings HD for iPad), Traktor DJ (normally $20), Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery Sorcery EP, as well as Infinity Blade II (usually $7). There's no official promotion to explain or list all the discounts, so we're left to guess that this could be a prelude to July 10th, when Apple will mark the fifth anniversary of the App Store. Cupertino has already started sending out promotional material to mark the occasion, listing the usual Store and probably reel out some more big statistics to show how far the App Store has come since 2008, so these freebies could well be a part of that. go with it. We've linked up a few of them freebies after the break, but the list isn't exhaustive so you please add more in the Comments section if you spot any others that merit the storage space. Happy hunting!
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Tablets, Mobile
Via: The Verge, TouchArcade