Firstly: Actually something game-related. Holy crap, that's a first for me...

Second: After a recent kerfuffle in a game I play, Elite:Dangerous, a flurry of articles have cropped up. A group of experienced pilots have been discovered to be tricking new pilots into a distant system, compelling these pilots to mine for the benefit of the veteran pilots. These new pilots don't know how to escape (there are options, they just don't know them) and so are by this point forced labour.

The Elite community has responded by conducting sweeps of any systems where this group of veterans is operating and establishing a presence inside any system where this forced labour is taking place with a view to providing new pilots the tools they need to escape.

However, I'm sure it will be a surprise to everyone here to learn that media coverage of this has been somewhat ... lopsided. The group of veterans running the forced labour operation has a 7 in their name. Some sites - like the one linked - have taken this to mean that this is a reference to the WWII 7th Panzer Division, the Ghost Division, presumably because all gamers are actually Nazi stalwarts eagerly awaiting the Götterdämmerung. Given that this all appear to be on the basis of the use of digit "7", this presumably includes those US servicemen in the 7ID and 7th Cav. Perhaps someone should tell them.

I fly with one of the groups opposing the forced labour operation, and we're trying to correct this misinformation. We object to what they're up to, but what they're doing is bad enough to run with rather than some sensational lie for clicks...