Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

There are three interesting scandals going on around the net, and I don’t feel like covering any of them, so I’ll just summarize and give you a few links for more information. They’re interesting and popular, but for some reason, I don’t particularily want to touch any of them.

Tamara Hoover

An art teacher for Austin High School is in danger of being dismissed and having her license to teach revoked because her roommate published naked photographs of her on Flickr, the popular photo sharing site. The Austin Independent School District issued the statement, “Please know that AISD has no intention of infringing upon a person’s legitimate rights to free speech and expression. However, public school educators are legally held to a higher moral standard, in order to protect the young lives they influence.” On her blog, Ms. Hoover wrote, “I have just filed to have a hearing (standard protocol). I should be given a date for that hearing sometime next week. (end of next week) This hearing is where “they” hear my arguments and decide my fate. We have begun due process.”

Britney Spears

After an interview with Dateline to get out all her frustrations with life, Kevin, children, and the press, Britney Spears breaks down in tears and complains that the media hounds are ruining her life. The Gossip Rag has the scoop–and links to the interview on YouTube!

Singaporean Girls

A teengager in Singapore was beaten and stripped in a stairwell, but a video recorded on cell phone has been circulating through MMS and the internet. With her humiliation and assault on tape, the girl should have filed a police report, but probably hasn’t. Meanwhile, confused Americans keep linkwhoring to the term “Singapore” which appeared in the top 10 of Technorati again for the first time since the “Tammy from NYP” cell phone video scandal.

You’ve seen T-shirt Hell, but have you seen what the vendors on Isla Mujeres, Mexico, an island just off the coast of Cancun, offer? Their shirts are distasteful, perverted, disgusting, outrageus, and amusing in every possible way. If you want a funny t-shirt you could never wear in any place where English is spoken, check out Mexico.

The first is I’m a lover of all men with subtitles listing all the kinds of men the wearer of the t-shirt would not want to love. Please note that almost all of these shirts are trying to make some sexual point or another.

(more…)

Please note that this post contains pictures of trivial female upper body nudity

You remember the GTA sex scandal where a mini-game could be unlocked that simulated sex between the main character and nude females in the game. For that, Hillary Clinton got involved, and the game was yanked to put an M rating back on the box. Now, according to Joystiq, it seems like Oblivion is next in line for the M stamp because Bethesda included a naked upper-body texture on all its female characters:

In the process of trying to create a nude skin for Oblivion, I found Bethesda had already done all the work for me. They just covered it up with underwear afterwards. Please note, this is a realistic nudity mod, not a pornographic one. The file included removes the bra welded to the skin of females of all races, showing things as most people know they are in the real world after removing upper body clothing. It will not show every female in the game as topless. I do this because I hate government/society/whatever forcing companies to “protect our innocent population from seeing those evil dirty things 50% of them posess personally anyways” not because I’m trying to turn it into a porn game.

Fileplanet already has a list of other naked mods for Oblivion in what the media would call the latest “video game sex scandal.” In actuality, the ESRB is overreacting to the artistic development of character models, where people are realistically built up naked, then layered with clothes. Here’s a sample screenshot of the base texture which has so many people upset, because it’s a realistic depiction of the female body:

Bethesda Softworks \ Oblivion \ Data \ textures \ characters \ orc \ female

Of course, in the game, this texture *could* with a patch be used to unlock naked upper-body characters. However, they look completely non-sexual and rather silly, as the following photo shows:

Here’s what the ESRB says about the Oblivion nude mod:

The pertinent content causing the change in the ESRB rating involves more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating of the game (the game already carried a Blood and Gore content descriptor), as well as the presence in the PC version of the game of a locked-out art file that, if accessed by using an apparently unauthorized third party tool, allows the user to play the game with topless versions of female characters. The locked-out topless skin was found by ESRB to exist in a fully rendered form on the game disc, but is not accessible in the Xbox 360™ version of the game.

Why should the game carry a nudity descriptor when this content is not part of any part of the playable game? There’s a difference between pornography and nudity, and unlike Grand Theft Auto’s intense sexuality, Oblivion’s nude models are used in the artistic process of creating the game.