The UpStream (Page 127)

It is with great sadness that we have to even type these words. Nintendo has just issued a press release stating that President and CEO Satoru Iwata has passed away at the early age of 55. From the statement, Nintendo says it is due to a bile duct growth.

Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth.

Appointed as President in 2002 and CEO in June of 2013, Iwata took the reigns with great force over the past few years, in an attempt to bring Nintendo back to the glory days. He capped that statement emphatically at E3 when the games Nintendo showcased had a release date within the next year and were extremely popular with fans worldwide.

GiantBomb.com writer Alex Navarro put it on Twitter best when he said,

Industry isn't old enough to have lost many giants. This is a major one. Brutal...Say whatever you want about Nintendo under Iwata's direction, people LOVED him. No matter how cynical the audience got, he always connected.

For Nintendo, this does open up a succession discussion as to who will follow in his iconic footsteps. It is possible Miyamoto may take over a larger role in the company, or even Nintendo USA President Reggie Fils-Aime could head the gaming giant in the right way.

Iwata took a 50 percent paycut, with many other directors at Nintendo taking cuts as well over the past handful of years to show their dedication to the vision of restoring Nintendo as a leader in innovation and gaming. Nintendo will always need someone at the helm who is deeply passionate about the company, but also one who is not afraid to be a bit goofy at times, because that is at the heart of Nintendo.

Rest in Peace, Iwata-san. The entire staff at PLuGHiTz Live extend our deepest condolences and respects to Mr. Iwata's family, his colleagues and the whole Nintendo team.

Have you used Mitro, Twitter's password manager that the company acquired last year? If you didn't, that's okay, as not many people did. However it was very popular within Silicon Valley startups as a way for companies to manage internal passwords and credentials. It was also free, which was a nice selling point. However, Mitro announced it will be closing on August 31st.

A page dedicated to the shutdown explained why.

Unfortunately, we can no longer maintain Mitro. On August 31st, 2015 it will be shut down. Please follow the directions below to export your data and remove the extension. We will delete all data on September 13th, 2015. Thank you for your support, and sorry for the inconvenience. If you wish to transfer to an alternative password manager, we recommend 1Password, Dashlane, or LastPass.

TIMELINE

July 18th: Creating new accounts will be disabled.

August 4th: Final email warning will be sent.

August 16th: Mitro will be come read-only.

August 31st: Mitro will be turned off.

September 13th: All Mitro user data will be permanently destroyed.

The site also says that if you want to pay $200 per month because of the "extreme hardship" this may cause, you can email one of the product managers, which seems insane for a password manager. This was one installed via a Chrome Extension, which opens it up for even more trouble than it would be worth to save your passwords.

So there you have it. Twitter is shutting down Mitro and is, for now, getting away from the password management space. With all of the other options out there, I doubt this will create too much of a rift, especially since the company has made it extremely easy to export your data to an Excel spreadsheet or .csv file.

There comes a time in every person's life when they no longer get to enjoy one of their favorite past times. Sometimes it's because of life changing up circumstances, other times it's because of innovation. This one surely falls into the latter as the joy and amazing feeling of popping Bubble Wrap is going away, thanks to hands of those at the Sealed Air Corp.

Bubble Wrap, which is a name of a product and not a type of product mind you, has been sold by the Sealed Air Corp since 1960 as a way of cheaply and effectively protecting items during shipping. Since then, billions have basked in the glory of popping every air bubble on the strip of plastic sent in their boxes along with their product. For some, the product was just a bonus to getting to be able to pop another sheet of Bubble Wrap.

Now, the company is launching a new iteration of their famous packing supply. Sucking the fun out of our lives, the new product, called iBubble Wrap, will not pop when pressed on. Sealed Air Corp. is looking to benefit and target online businesses who not only use the stuff but also want to save money and space. iBubble Wrap takes up one fiftieth of the space of traditional Bubble Wrap and no longer comes pre-inflated in single bubbles.

Instead, the protective packing material will be inflated when it reaches the retailer, who will then place it into shipping boxes. iBubble Wrap has columns that are connected and distribute air where needed and as you inflate it. One truckload of the new product has the same amount of packing material as 47 trucks that would have shipped the original Bubble Wrap. I guess it makes sense when you look at it that way.

Still, it feels like my bubble of fun that lives within my heart is being ripped out only to not be popped, but stepped on. It now makes sense why babies cry when they enter this world.

Last year, the last and final co-founder of The Pirate Bay was arrested in Thailand and transported back to Sweden to face criminal charges. The four were also being tried for criminal charges in Belgium, which is where our story takes us today. Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström have all been acquitted of criminal copyright infringement and electronic communications.

Now, it's important to note the context of the trial. The charged were brought up based around the allegations that the four were still involved with the site from September 2011 to November 2013. The problem is that the four have denied such allegations, saying that they've cut ties with TPB ever since they sold it to Reservella in 2006.

During the trial, the prosecution attempted to connect the four founders to the website at any point during the two years in question. Unfortunately, it didn't really pan out and the court found that the group were not at all tied to the since the sale.

This is a small victory for them, as there are a handful of other countries that are waiting for the founders to stand trial in their borders. The quartet will have to face different charges in each country and can still face serious jail time if found guilty in those countries.

Lizard Squad was at it again this week. The group responsible for Xbox server takedowns during Christmas and the PlayStation Network outage in November decided to take aim at Daybreak studios, developers behind the hit games Planetside and H1Z1.

Last year, Lizard Squad had targeted a plane that had CEO of Daybreak John Smedley on board. The person behind the bomb threat, Julius Kivimaki, was simply sentenced to two years of a Finnish version of probation. Kivimaki also led a group that had the CEO "swatted" and had 50 fake credit applications submitted in his name. The group even went as far as to file false tax returns under his name.

Lizard Squad has kept Daybreak in their sights, and has now attacked the H1Z1 servers. This had led to Smedley going public to say he is going to "go after" the group and the persons involved and make sure they are punished as harshly as possible. The H1Z1 servers were pretty much unplayable all week and it continued through the weekend, to the point where Daybreak has to post about the DDoS attacks in order to make gamers aware of what's been going on.

We are experiencing issues again which may result in lag, disconnects, or inability to access games, forums, or websites. The team is aware.

Planetside 2 has practically been unreachable since Thursday as well. Lizard Squad's Twitter account has pinned a tweet to its timeline that simply read, "H1Z1 #offline #lizardsquad." The studio's website and most recent zombie survival title are slowly coming back online, but the experience is very sluggish for a good portion of its community.

We've talked about this before and the general consensus by most people is that this type of bored hacker is the worst thing for any community, especially when there's no point behind the attack or no "justice" being served of any type. Hopefully more of the infamous squad gets taken down before this holiday season.

We have discussed many times that appointment television is likely coming to an end. With services like Netflix and Hulu, the idea of waiting for a specific time to watch a television show or movie is becoming more and more ridiculous to many. If you're like me, though, there is a problem with streaming services: it takes way too long to get going. Once you launch the website or application it seems like quite a chore to find content you're interested in.

That has certainly been one of the benefits of traditional television for as long as it has existed. As soon as you turn it on, there is content going, whether it is something you want to watch or not. At least it comes back to where you left it, meaning it is likely there is something interesting to watch. Why can't streaming media be more like traditional television in that way?

The creators of a new streaming service, Pluto TV, seem to have the same problem as I have, as their service is designed to solve exactly this problem. Like a cable box, when you launch the app or website, content from your last channel begins playing immediately. Below the content is a channel listing, whose interface is based on one of the best cable box experiences ever. You can scroll through channels with timed listings for programming.

The content is broken into categories such as sports, entertainment, comedy, kids, news, tech, etc. Currently all of the content comes from publicly available streams like Funny or Die, FailArmy, Bloomberg, TBS and more. The service is currently free and ad-supported, though ads are infrequent at best. In the time I have spent watching content on the site, the only ads I really encountered were for the platform itself. Some content, however, does have traditional provider ads.

For example, the Seinfeld channel, which appears to be TBS-powered, runs ads for TBS itself. Personally I am a big fan of standup comedy, so I have been watching the standup channel, and have seen almost no advertisements. It is certainly an interesting platform with a lot of potential. I would like to see them partner with someone like Hulu or NBC and offer their content in a different, more curated scenario.