Given the simplistic hack-and-slash play of the Diablo games, you might think that the lore surrounding the adventures are just as straightforward. You would be entirely wrong. The story is one of corruption and deception, and has as many turns as the labyrinth beneath the town of Tristram, where you begin in the first game. But like a labyrinth, those many turns have no dead ends, and it seems that everything has a purpose in the dark, twisted world of Sanctuary. Here’s the jist of it. Stay a while and listen!

Who ever would have thought that one of the most relevant issues to copyright infringement and piracy in the 21st century would be something as seemingly insignificant as a semantic distinction? Yet, here we are. Granted, “copyright infringement” is an unweildy term, and “piracy” is one that can feel overly broad, but “theft” — in almost any digital context — is flat-out inaccurate and, frankly, misleading. Many people, myself included, will get dragged into arguments all the time for saying “piracy is not theft” and having it misconstrued as some kind of value statement. It isn’t; it’s a statement of fact. But beyond all that, there’s another reality of digital media sharing, consumption, and control that is woefully ignored: Piracy is literally not theft, but the unwarranted takedown of non-infringing material is.

When you’re dealing with a contentious bill, there’s always the hope that it might get better, and the fear that it might get worse. Or, what seems to be the case with the new draft of CISPA, where it just gets different. This new draft, which incorporates two previous amendments along with some other modifications, changes a significant amount of language in the bill, and adds a lot more as well. Whether or not that really changes anything in a particularly meaningful way, however, is a bit of a different question. CISPA had its problems before, and the new draft definitely shuffles things around a little, but it looks like we’re still dealing with a similar amount of similar issues.

It wasn’t long ago that the potentially Internet-destroying twins SOPA and PIPA were effectively defeated, but ever since they snuck up on the Internet-at-large, there’s been the worry that something similar might happen again. Well, it’s happening. The new bill HR 3523, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), while different from SOPA in many ways, is pushing its way through Congress as we speak, and could pose a serious threat to the Internet that is both very similar and very different from SOPA.

The consumers have spoken. Electronic Arts, better known by its nickname EA, is the Consumerist’s Worst Company in America for 2012, as voted by users. For those of you who are familiar with EA, this probably isn’t a huge surprise, EA’s Origin platform is widely considered to be garbage, their DLC policies seem pretty greedy, and there are more customer support horror stories than you could ever care to hear. All that aside, EA makes video games, yet still beat out companies like Facebook, Apple, and in the final showdown, Bank of America, companies that stand accused of stealing your personal information, utilizing large amounts of sweatshop labor, and stealing your money or even your home, respectively. How could EA compete with that?

SpaceX’s Elon Musk is extremely passionate about space travel, and especially so about Mars. It’s no secret that he aspires to make SpaceX’s Dragon capsule the first commercial vessel to land on the red planet.However, in an interview with the BBC he claimed that not only could he do it, but that it would only cost a passenger $500,000. While Musk acknowledges that the price tag is immaterial — and conjectural — he did hint at big news coming soon.

Yesterday afternoon, the robotic warehouse control company Kiva announced that it had been purchased by Amazon for a whopping $775 million. Kiva, for those unaware, sells a unique product that is surely near and dear to Amazon: Fully robotic warehouses. Though humans still have a place in a Kiva warehouse, the system’s ingenious top-to-bottom controls are surely of interest to Amazon, who has built its business on running a fast, cheap operation. But what exactly is Amazon getting with its latest acquisition?

According to Global Equities Research, Apple’s outing into the textbook market with iBooks 2 seems to be off to a good start with some 350,000 textbook downloads in a mere three days. Add to that about 90,000 downloads of Apple’s free textbook creation tool Author, the amazingly low cost for producers and consumers of digital textbooks, and it would seem that education is finally ready to jump the digital divide. Or is it?

Now don’t get me wrong, there are awful, awful aspects to both SOPA and PIPA. The prospect of DNS blocking is egregious censorship. The prospect of cutting off funds and ad revenue to “infringers” without due process is egregious. Even without those provisions, though, we still don’t need or want SOPA or PIPA. Why? Because we already have dangerously broken copyright law: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

As you may be aware if you aren’t living under a rock, Facebook’s f8 conference was held today in San Francisco. During the conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made something very clear; there are some big changes coming down the pipe. The first and most striking, from a design perspective, is the Timeline.

The current (and previous) Facebook profile pages do a good job of representing your life in the recent past. While they present some static information like music you like, where you go to school, where you are employed, and so on, most of the information on your profile is very recent activity like status updates and posted links. The Timeline aims to change that by presenting information that aims to represent you as a whole instead of as the last few minutes or hours.