Here go the conspiracies...

Must be a mind control experiment. Have you seen all the raging players on youtube?

Every so often a thing of genuine evil is born, and you are able to terrorize your friends and anonymous strangers by having them experience it. Maybe we can all be so lucky to design one with minimal effort?

Sounds much like Angry Birds, which was recently revealed (or alleged) to be an espionage tool of US agencies. This one is probably an espionage tool for the Chinese agencies.

Not exactly. The NSA picked up unencrypted personal data flowing over the internet from many apps that happened to include Angry Birds as one amongst many - unknown to the developers. [linky] [link]

But, "NSA spies on you through Angry Birds" makes a much better headline for news companies to manipulate you to click on. It's not an "espionage tool" anymore than your phone is an "espionage tool". But it is an espionage target, just like your phone is, because it's on so many devices (it's not worth the effort to deconstruct and study the packet formats and network architecture of a game if it's only used by a few thousand people).

This includes the mobile versions of Twitter, Google maps, Facebook, LinkedIn and every other popular app that might leave even just one or two pieces of personal data unencrypted by mistake (such as location data, gender, age ("You must be 18 or older to read this game review. Please enter your age"), etc...). Mostly this is leaked through the embedded advertisements that are collating personal information already for marketing purposes.

Reminds me off that social network that was fairly horrible, had crap customer service, only allowed 140 chars in a post, terrible searching which almost always forced US related stuff despite searching specifically for 'British' related stuff only (like politics for example) and you were almost always guaranteed to get banned for 'no reason' for days if you didn't mass criticise or if you mention good things or even G+ in your profile. I forgot the name of it but I always wondered why that became popular.

...So back on topic... :D

I managed to download Flappy Bird before it disappeared completely into the void of deletion. It is rather addictive, if for no other reason than to try to beat your best score (mine was 6 before I get sick of it).

Sad he took it down, I can actually see it being a really cool game!

I do tend to think that the undue negative attention probably outweighs any undue positive attention this game received.

That said, this is pretty cool too.

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/02/09/iphone-with-flappy-bird-100k/

I don't want to live on this planet any more.

Internet vitriol is a horrible thing. "The **** free game only **** entertained me for *** 300 *** hours?! You should *** pay ME for *** *** that ***! And I'm *** going to kill you!!!!"

At the end of the day, you need not listen to these people. 90% of everything is crap, which of course includes people and their opinions. It is well-known that the proletariate has a deep envy and hatred towards anyone who achieves anything, too. So, no surprise there.

The only tragic thing is that people do listen to these when their abuse is quite obviously unfounded. As in this guy taking a successful game off.

I somewhat consent with complaints about a free product if it is genuinely bad. Because after all, being free is not a waiver for being inferior (though most of the time that is the case). I really hate it when some lowlife banker or car dealer urges me to take a ball pencil which I actually don't want, and later it turns out that cheap crap ruined my shirt. The same situation arises (sadly) a lot of times with free open source software where it says "simply run configure and make" and then I waste 3 hours only to learn that contrary to the documentation it only works with exactly one version of <insert what you like>, and when I try that, it doesn't work either.