What do strippers, prostitutes, and naggy girlfriends/wives all have in common?

They represent the vast majority of female characters in Grand Theft Auto V, the latest installment of Rockstar Games’ epic open-world crime series. 

Grand Theft Auto V released Tuesday to rave reviews, smashing the industry record in day-one sales with a whopping $800 million.

Critics praised the game’s dynamic open-world, innovative use of a three-protagonist structure, and improved visuals and shooting mechanics.

However one review got tongues wagging in the gaming community.

Carolyn Petit, an editor for the popular gaming news website GameSpot, in a mainly positive review sharply criticized GTA for its treatment of women.

It’s deeply frustrating that, while its central and supporting male characters are flawed and complex characters… GTA V has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists we’re meant to laugh at… Yes, these are exaggerations of misogynistic undercurrents in our own society, but not satirical ones. With nothing in the narrative to underscore how insane and wrong this is, all the game does is reinforce and celebrate sexism.

 Sadly, as happens so often these days, the comments section of her review took an ugly turn.

There were messages of hate and personal attacks on Carolyn for her status as a transgender person. Others claimed her review was “biased” for considering the treatment of women as a factor in the game’s overall score. You can read Carolyn’s full review of Grand Theft Auto V here.

Still it does raise the question, Does Grand Theft Auto V satirize sexism or celebrate it? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

But please everybody. Don’t let it get ugly.

The RDF Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of TriG. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in the Web. This document defines a textual syntax for RDF called TriG that allows an RDF dataset to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes. TriG is an extension of the Turtle [turtle] format. Comments are welcome through 11 October. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The CSS Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published a First Public Working Draft of DOMMatrix interface. This specification describes a transformation matrix interface with the dimension of 3×2 and 4×4. The transformation matrix interface replaces the SVGMatrix interface from SVG. It is a common interface used to describe 2D and 3D transformations on a graphical context for SVG, Canvas 2D Context and CSS Transforms. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published two Working Drafts today:

• CSS Ruby Module Level 1. “Ruby” are short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This module describes the rendering model and formatting controls related to displaying ruby annotations in CSS. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.
• CSS Syntax Module Level 3. This module describes, in general terms, the basic structure and syntax of CSS stylesheets. It defines, in detail, the syntax and parsing of CSS – how to turn a stream of bytes into a meaningful stylesheet.

Learn more about the Style Activity.

Google’s one-gigabit service made a big statement, but what’s still far from clear is who actually uses it, and for what.

Google Fiber’s affordable one-gigabit-per-second Internet service in Kansas City has been held out as an instrument of national shaming (see “When Will the Rest of us Get Google Fiber?”). But a few niggling questions remain. Who is really needs or uses the one-gig service? What can you actually get from it?

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.