The owner of Salt Lake City-based Sensory Sweep Studio is going to spend some quality time in jail. David M. Rushton began serving a yearlong jail sentence on October 10 at the Salt Lake County Jail for failing to pay more than 100 employees. He was also fined $1.2 million. Rushton took a plea deal in the rare criminal case for nonpayment of wages brought by the Utah Attorney General's office - but he plans to appeal the verdict to a higher court...

Oopsie. A recent promotion for EA's Origin digital distribution platform saw thousands of games downloaded for free by Origin users using a free code. The original purpose of the code was to give Origin users $20 off the purchase of a game in the digital store, but the coupon didn't work as expected...

Apparently users found that it allowed them to download multiples titles free of charge. Games they managed to score for free include the likes of Dead Space 2, Crysis, Command & Conquer 3 and 4, Battlefield 2 and Mirror’s Edge.

Following up on yesterday's story about the Maine GOP attacking Maine state Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz over leading a "double life" in World of Warcraft, Politico has another story featuring Lachowicz's response. Colleen Lachowicz told the publican Thursday night that that the attack shows that the Maine GOP is out-of-touch if they think being a gamer is shameful.

As is usually the case with UK paper The Daily Mail, they have taken a new study from the University of Pittsburgh about the relationship between sleep and insulin production and turned it into a commentary on how games are bad. In their headline they proclaim "Staying up all night playing video games 'puts teenagers at greater risk of diabetes.'" The horror.

In Episode 22 hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight laugh at the ridiculousness of fan requests to give the ladies of Dead or Alive 5 bigger breasts, discuss region locking consoles, and talk about cable providers who are considering more game-related services. This episode will chafe you more than an iron thong on a female fighter who can't stand up straight because some Japanese guy gave her an unneeded mega boob job... Someone call a chiropractor!

League of Legends maker Riot Games has managed to wrestle a web domain from a porn company. The URL, LeagueofLegends.co, relied heavily on user error to lure unsuspecting surfers to its dark and saucy doors where they were served up all kinds of nakedness... Riot Games won its legal dispute against the owner of LeagueofLegends.co, a domain that redirected users looking for the official site of multiplayer online battle arena League of Legends to a porn site.

Games industry veteran Don Daglow thinks American gamers have trouble dealing with failure in games. He claims that this stems from the American education system where children are no longer taught to learn from the mistakes.

"The idea of failure has been dramatically reduced," he said, adding that American students don't "fail" anymore. Instead they are "challenged." Daglow thinks European developers should keep this in mind when trying to design games that they want to succeed in the American market.

If you want to know what it might be like to work for the dark side, then this job doing charity work for Intellectual Ventures as its "VP of Global Good" might be right up your alley. The company that is best known as a super powered patent troll is seeking someone to be in charge of doing charity work for the company from its dark citadel in Seattle.

Last Friday the White House confirmed that they were weighing their options regarding an Executive Order since the Senate was unable to pass Senator Joseph Lieberman's (D-Connecticut) Cybersecurity Act of 2012, despite significant lobbying resources spent by the MPAA, RIAA and ESA. The announcement was met with lukewarm enthusiasm by legislators on both sides of the isle, who are not used to the Oval Office creating such broad-sweeping new laws.

Two French gamers decided that it would be a grand idea to reprogram a Sega Genesis so that every time a player made a mistake or took damage in a game they would get some punishment from shock collars. You can't make this kind of stuff up, folks. Also it goes without saying that you shouldn't try this at home.

The two gamers try everything from Sonic to Golden Axe 3, with amusing results. You'll notice in one of the shots that alcohol might be involved in the production of this little experiment...

A Health Canal report details the concern of a critic of the UK's new video game ratings system saying that it will fail because it doesn't deal with "irresponsible parenting." Yesterday the new PEGI ratings system went into effect in the UK. The new system includes penalties for retailers that sell age inappropriate games to children that do not meet the ratings guidelines.

A job listing from Irrational Games has a peculiar requirement: the applicant has to have worked on a game receiving an average Metacric.com score of 85 or higher. The job posting, which can be found on Gamasutra's Jobs section, seeks applicants to fill a Design Manager position at the company for its Boston offices.

In Episode 12 of Super Podcast Action Committee, Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss Fez developer Phil Fish's decision not to fix the patch for the game before re-releasing it to Xbox Live (because it costs too much money), Uniloc's patent infringement claims against Minecraft maker Mojang, last week's results from the GamePolitics poll, and the media trying to blame Batman comics, movies and games for the horrific Aurora, Colorado theater shooting.

In his latest video Andrew Eisen plays the part of a The Dark Knight Rises fan responding to critics.

While the video is about the movie and the response to low review scores for the latest Christopher Nolan Batman film on Rotten Tomatoes (which apparently caused some fans to issue some death threats and share some other forms of vile speech), this video could easily apply to Halo, Uncharted, Madden, or any other beloved franchise with a protective fan base...

Some items were harmed during the making of this video. We were not involved.

Way back in June we detailed the trouble Anita Sarkeesian ran into after launching a Kickstarter for a video series called "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games." Despite the negative and frankly inappropriate feedback to the Kickstarter, the project generated $158,922 in funding. The original goal was $6,000.

An article on Ars Technica details how an automatic update to Cisco routers added cloud support that required users to agree not to download pornography and copyrighted material. Luckily the article also describes how to roll that update back to an older version of the firmware so you can go back to using web-based router management.

Update: Blizzard strongly denies that it banned players using Linux in conjunction with WINE to play Diablo III. Here's what they told Ars Technica:

Apparently Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has turned his Brooklyn Heights, New York apartment into a set for an upcoming documentary on Dungeons & Dragons.

While Ohanian hasn't played D&D since high school, the Reddit co-creator tweeted that he will be interviewed for the documentary and will have his Brooklyn Heights apartment temporarily transformed into a D&D themed set.

Apparently Sony owns a skyscraper in Manhattan, and according to this NY Post story they are looking to unload it for a pretty penny or two... According to the NY Post Sony is in talks with commercial real estate broker Newmark Grubb Knight Frank for the potential sale of the building at 55th and Madison Avenue. 

The first thing that crossed my mind when Nintendo showed the Miiverse at its E3 press conference was "how long after the Wii U launch will the first user type out an expletive?" Well apparently Nintendo's solution for dealing with potty mouths is a system that uses actual humans to screen bad or inappropriate language.

Nintendo's chief executive Satoru Iwata says that the company plans to implement and use three separate systems. The first system is a traditional filtering system that checks for unpleasant words and replaces them with asterisks.

If you were aching to get that $99 Xbox 360 deal (we detailed the pitfalls of it way back in Episode 2 of the Super PAC) then you might be happy to hear that Microsoft will extend the pilot program beyond the Microsoft store to other retailers including Best Buy and GameStop later this month.

A New York State Assemblymen wants to fight cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks" with a new bill that would ban anonymous web posts. The bill would make it so that all New York-based websites have to "remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post," according to Wired's Threat Level.

Microsoft has a new Xbox 360 bundle that costs $99, but consumers that buy it will have to commit to a two-year contract for an Xbox Live Gold membership. And that two year membership will cost you about $15 a month. While the idea might be to subsidize or finance the console as a trade-off for the low price point, the move also smacks of false advertising because the console will ultimately cost consumers $99, then 24 months of paying $15, for a grand total (not including sales tax) of $459 (24 months x $15 = $360, plus the price of the console at $99).

Xbox Live is a great place to meet new friends and - apparently - the perfect venue for scoring a pot deal. But today we offer you a cautionary tale on making such deals: don't use the postal service to deliver that package. Nineteen-year-old Garrett Bryant is learning that lesson first-hand. Lawrenceburg, Kentucky police and the postal inspector allege that Bryant had a pound of marijuana mailed to him under a fake name.

Two Reddit users have compared the tanks from Games Workshop's tabletop game Warhammer 40,000 with tanks in EA's free-to-play online strategy title Tiberium Alliances. The side-by-side comparison shows that the tanks in EA's games look suspiciously similar to the tanks from Games Workshop’s popular game universe. 

According to Market Watch social game developer and publisher Zynga spent around $1.37 million dollars to protects its CEO and his family from a Russian stalker named Vera Svechina and other threats. In 2011 CEO Mark Pincus filed a restraining order against the former stripper and amateur filmmaker after she allegedly visited his home on two occasions and threatened his wife and family.

Earlier this week it was revealed that Silicon Knights had not received grant money from the Canadian government that was announced on July 14, 2011. In a "he said, she said" moment, SK front man Dennis Dyack tells GamesIndustry International that he just doesn't understand why the Canadian government is holding out on the grant money. The Canadian government attempts to explain the hold-up, which Dyack then denies.

A new message posted on Pastebin and attributed to the hacking group Anonymous promises to shut down the entire internet on March 31. The group says that it will target the 13 root DNS servers that make up the bulk of the servers that give URL names to most of the Internet.

As to why they would want to do this, they say the following:

Here we go again. Another "reliable source" - this time with inside knowledge on Sony's next console, offers some rumors that should upset a majority of the gaming public.

There's no denying that sending your child online to play a game alone is like sending a puppy into a lion's cage at the zoo. If you want someone to experience the crassness of society, you can get a quick lesson playing Call of Duty, Battlefield, or even UNO as teenagers call you every name in the book (and some you didn't even know existed). Anyone that plays games online knows this, but it's always interesting to see how local news channels handle such topics. Usually they handle it badly, but one station does a good job of delivering a balanced report..