You might have heard it in advice: “You should always look at airline tickets in Private Mode, or the price will go up”, or “I look at eBay in Incognito Mode when I’m on the family computer, so my mom doesn’t know what her Christmas present will be”. Every browser is equipped with it! So what does Incognito Mode actually do?
No History
You probably already know this, but Incognito Mode (or Private Browsing, or Private Mode, or…) doesn’t store history for your browsing session. Great! The downside: If you find something really interesting while Incognito, and don’t bookmark it, it’s not in your history. The upside: if you were shopping on eBay but don’t want the person leaning over your shoulder to know, as long as you only ever visited in Incognito Mode, it won’t auto-fill in the search bar when you type the letter ‘E’.
No Cookies
This is a little bit bigger than it seems.
A cookie is essentially a way for a website to see what you’re interested in (see our article on Cookies for more info). It does other things too, but for most websites, interest is enough. It improves ad revenue, and it does usually make the user’s experience a little better. For example, if I search for dog treats, and I’m not logged into my Amazon account, Amazon may still show me listings for dog treats, even though it shouldn’t technically know it’s me without my login.
This is tracking, even if it’s non-malicious and just to maybe show you something you might buy. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable! Not only that, but if you’re searching for a gift that you yourself would never use – say, Carrot Flavored dog treats – the website has no way to know that the Carol’s Carrot Treats are not for you. So you get recommendations for it. Forever. Unless you’re in Incognito Mode!
Cookies can range from harmless to annoyingly persistent, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere fast. If you’re looking for a gift, and don’t want to be recommended purses for the rest of your life – use Incognito Mode.
Yes, Downloads Are Still There
The browser probably warned you on the default ‘New Tab’ window for Incognito Mode, but anything you download is downloaded to your computer. Downloading things to your browser is actually downloading them to your computer through the browser. If you’re pirating music (don’t do that) and hoping that Incognito Mode will help you avoid malicious downloads, it won’t. Don’t download anything you wouldn’t download in your non-incognito browser.
This applies to bookmarks too: things you bookmark in Incognito Mode are still visible in the regular browser’s bookmark bar.
No Browser-Saved Logins
You know how some websites ask if you’d like them to ‘Remember Me!’ with a little check box the first time you visit a site, and then it autofills the next time you log in, and then it keeps doing that for so long that you forget your password? And then you try to log in so you can get your sister that tchotchke she had her eye on for her birthday? Yep, ‘Forgot Password’ link time. Yaaaay. Passwords saved by your browser might still be there in Incognito Mode, but passwords saved by the website are stored with cookies. As seen above, Incognito Mode does not save cookies.
This will also annoy you next time you log in, because clicking ‘Remember Me!’ for the new password you made just now (in Incognito Mode) won’t actually save it. The website’s cookie only remembers the last password you used in regular browsing mode. The cookie responsible for remembering you is disabled in Incognito Mode.
Yes, Your Internet Provider Can Still See Your History
Don’t do illegal things online. They’re illegal. And also usually visible to the internet provider. Your internet provider can still see the websites you’re visiting in Incognito Mode, because that information passes through them first. However, if you don’t want the ISP to know that you’re ordering oil paintings of dogs through Etsy (LEGALLY!), your best bet is a VPN (Virtual Private Network). A VPN adds a layer of encryption to your data, making it difficult for the Internet Provider to see what sites you’ve visited. This isn’t foolproof, because the VPN is the one seeing your data instead of the ISP – but it is another layer between you and other people discovering you bought that oil painting.
An emulator is a program that emulates a game console, usually for the purpose of playing a game that is – either by price, age, or device – inaccessible. Streamers commonly use emulators to play Pokemon games made for the Gameboy, so they can screen-record their gameplay directly from their computer instead of having to somehow hook the Gameboy up to it. Zelda fans might want to play Ocarina of Time, but they might also find that the console to play it on is awfully expensive for one game, but an emulator is pretty cheap! In certain cases, games are geolocked – countries restrict access to certain forms of art as a means of censorship. Emulators can make those games accessible to people who want to play them in that country.
In the 1990s, consoles were on top when it came to games. Computers were rapidly gaining in power, however, and some folks realized that the console could be recreated using a home computer. The first emulators were born via reverse-engineering console coding. They evaded legal action by only copying devices that were outdated, but that changed too with a major emulator made for the Nintendo 64 while it was still in production. Nintendo pursued legal action to stop the primary creators, but other folks who had already gotten their hands on the source code kept the project going.
Ever since then, emulators have lived in a delicate balance of making games available and making them so available that the parent company decides to step in and try to wipe it out, which is nearly impossible once it’s out on the open web. Gamers simply won’t allow a good emulator to die!
Copyright
Copyrights are crucial to the gaming ecosystem, and it’s a delicate balance of allowing fan art, but disallowing unauthorized gameplay. Allowing game mods, but disallowing tampering that could lead to free copies being distributed against the company’s wishes. Copyright laws are always evolving – new tech comes with new ways to copy, create, and distribute intellectual property. Generally, though, copyright falls back to permission: did the original company intend for their IP to be used in this way?
Emulators and copyright don’t get along very well at all! Emulators are, by their very definition, creating access to the game in a way the original company didn’t intend. As such, it’s unofficial, and if money is exchanged, it’s not normally between the copyright holder company and the customer, it’s the customer and some third unauthorized party.
Games aren’t selling you just the physical disk. You’re buying a license to play the game. If you take it as far as Xbox intended to back when the Xbox One was coming out, friends are only allowed to come over and play with you on your license because the company can’t enforce it. It’s a limitation of the system that they can’t keep you from sharing disks.
Not every company thinks like this (see the Playstation 5), but that’s the most extreme possible interpretation. You bought a disk so you could play a copy of their game that they have licensed out to you. You own the right to play that copy of the game, you don’t own the game itself.
Consider: Death of a Console
When a console dies, it’s taking all of its content with it. There is no more money to be made off of it, and the games are going to slowly disappear into collections and trash bins.
Does art need to exist forever, or is it okay if some art is temporary? Not every Rembrandt sketch is still in trade – some of it was just sketches, and he obviously discarded some of his own, immature art. Immature art is interesting to see, but it’s not what the artist wanted their audience to see. Otherwise it would have been better kept. Think about the ill-fated E.T. game that Atari made. They weren’t proud of it, they didn’t want it seen, and they saw fit to bury it. So they buried it. It was directly against their wishes for people to find this game and then play it. Emulating it is obviously not what the programmers who made it wanted for it.
But then consider all the little games included on a cartridge that’s just forgotten to the sands of time, made by a programmer who didn’t want it to fade away? Acrobat, also for the Atari, isn’t very well-remembered, but it still made it onto Atari’s anniversary console sold in-stores. 97 games on that bad boy, and Acrobat was included. It’s not a deep game, it’s nearly a single player Pong. But the programmers who made it didn’t ask for it to be excluded from the collection, so some amount of pride must exist over it, right? Does the game have to be good to be emulated? Is only good art allowed to continue existing officially?
Is all art meant to be accessible to everyone?
If some art is made with the intent to last forever, is it disregarding the creator’s wishes to not emulate it, against their production company’s wishes?
If art’s made to last forever but the artist (and society) accepts that that’s simply unrealistic, is it weird to emulate it, in the same way it’s weird to make chat-bots out of dead people? Every tomb we find, we open – even against the wishes of the grave owner, in the case of the Egyptians, or against the wishes of the living relatives, in the case of Native Americans. Video games are kind of like tombs for games that have lived their life and then died. But they’re also kind of like art.
When you get past the copyright, it’s a strange, strange world to be in.
Ethical Dilemma
Stealing goes against the ethics of most societies, modern or not. The case against emulators is that it’s stealing. It often is! An emulator/ROM (ROMs act as the ‘disc’ or ‘cartridge’ for the emulator) for Breath of the Wild was ready just a few weeks after the game launched, which could have seriously dampened sales if Nintendo didn’t step in to try and stop that. That first emulator, the one for the Nintendo 64, also drew a lot of negative attention for the same reasons, potentially siphoning away vital sales.
However, there’s a case to be made for games and consoles that aren’t in production anymore.
Is this a victimless crime, if the original game company really can’t make any more money off of it? It’s one thing to condemn piracy when the company is still relying on that income to make more games and pay their workers, it’s another entirely when the game studio isn’t interested in continuing support, and the console had a fatal fault in it that caused many of them to die after 10 years. That game is as good as gone forever without emulators. With no money to be made, why not emulate it?
In less extreme circumstances, the console’s still functioning, but the cartridges that went to it are incredibly rare. The company could potentially make money off of the game if they someday decided to remaster it, but that’s unknowable. Licenses could be available for purchases… but they aren’t right now.
Or, even better, the cartridges are still available for purchase in the secondary market. You just don’t happen to have the console, which has now spiked to a cost of 400 dollars due to reduced supply over time. You buy the cartridge – you’re still buying the license, you just don’t have the car, right?
According to copyright, you need a specific car for a specific license, but ethically, you’ve done the best you can as a consumer.
Assuming you have tried to buy a license for the car. The biggest issue with emulators is that they allow unlicensed drivers access to cars, making piracy much easier than it should be.
Brand Name
Much like Disney did with Club Penguin’s many spinoffs, emulators are kind-of sort-of overlooked up until they start eating into sales. Most companies just don’t want to spend money to enforce an issue like emulators – their game is still being played, their brand is still out there, and the users are going to be very upset if this big company decides to step in and ruin fun when they don’t need to. It may do more harm than good to try and wipe the emulator out when most people want to do the right thing.
Obviously, they’ll need to put a stop to emulating new games – the goal is to spend just enough money to do that effectively without also overstepping and destroying emulators for consoles no longer in production. It takes money to make games, games should earn money as a result. Removing emulators for games and consoles no longer in production isn’t helping them earn money – as such, many are allowed to stay. For now.
If you’ve been on almost any social media in the past couple of months, you may have noticed that Twitter’s reputation has taken quite a dive under Elon Musk’s reign. The blue checkmark fiasco has led to easier-to-hack accounts, plus a wave of account impersonators looking either to scam people or simply spread misinformation (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s impersonator stands out as a particularly well-made one, complete with a believable handle). The API decision, which led to organizations like the New York transit system leaving, was another kneecap to Twitter’s popularity and credibility. Most recently, a view count limit speculated to be the result of Twitter’s missed server payments (allegedly) has many people looking for an alternative; a couple have popped up, but is the juice worth the squeeze?
Lemon Juice in a Papercut: Threads
Threads, the newest social media app launched by Facebook, aims to recreate Twitter’s secret formula but without an option to focus on only the accounts the user is following. One page – a “For You” page equivalent, where followed content is mixed with algorithmic content and ads – is available. There is no option to view only the people the user follows.
While that’s not a bad idea in today’s social media landscape, Threads’ problems start behind the scenes. If you create a Threads account, you need to have an Instagram account. If you don’t already have one, you have to make one. Once you have a Threads account, you can’t deactivate it without also deactivating your Instagram account. For people who use Instagram regularly, that’s a serious problem – they can’t leave! Threads holds Instagram hostage, and it can only do that because they’re from the same company!
A second, even more serious issue is that Thread is blocked in the EU because of how wildly invasive the info it gathers on its users is. Threads users have everything from their niche demographics data down to their phone’s type and accelerometer data scraped into Facebook’s knowledge-hungry maw. Facebook wants to know exactly who you are, what your political leanings are, how edgy you like your jokes, what kind of phone you use, how often you drop it or speed with it in the car, how much of your phone’s storage is dedicated to pictures, how many friends you have, what their names and phone numbers are, and it’s using Twitter’s demise to gather that info. Some users allege that Facebook, the app that Meta gathers the most info with (for now), will occasionally scrape names from somewhere else and slap it on the user’s profile without asking or giving notice, leaving people who’ve set their profile names as their pen name, their business name, or an alias scrambling to fix it before too many people see. The concern around stalkers and abusers especially make Facebook an unsafe platform to use, if this is the case. Who knows who Facebook is gathering all that data for, or who it’s selling it to!
BlueSky – Cool Kids Only!
BlueSky, the other major social media platform rising from Twitter’s ashes, is also gathering data, but in a different way – signing up grants BlueSky permission to scrape your tweet equivalents and feed it to AI language models. Not great, but Twitter was doing that too. The real prickly part is that BlueSky is an attempt at a decentralized social media platform with all of the pros and cons that could entail.
The pros: if you like blockchain tech, BlueSky could make it easier for different blockchains to communicate with each other about resources stored within them. The site itself is trying to avoid what just happened to Twitter by enabling many different companies to contribute features to it. While BlueSky is invite only for the moment (so I can’t actually see inside of it), it appears that it’s working off the Discord mentality, so feeds are divided by servers and not Following/Recommended tabs. Having individual servers itself has pros and cons, but it allows people who don’t want to talk to each other to simply opt out of seeing each other on their respective feeds. If a user doesn’t like discourse but wants to be part of a character fan server, they can participate without inviting argumentative essays in the comments! Allowing people to granulate is sometimes better than shoving them all into a room together, like Threads is doing by default.
As for cons? BlueSky doesn’t seem to be integrated with blockchains yet, but in the event that everyone is encouraged to sign up to a blockchain system within it, things could go very wrong pretty quickly, although it’s tough to tell from publicly available information what ‘integrating with a blockchain’ even means in this case. However, we do know for sure that any issue with social media privacy is exacerbated by a system that keeps meticulous records of everything ever added to it, like blockchains. The reason so many industry experts are wary of a Web 3.0 scenario where social media becomes completely unredactable or deletable is because it makes doxxing an even bigger problem than it already is! And with AI being used to generate scandalous voice lines and pictures of both celebrities and ordinary people, these sorts of websites have a unique potential to turn into hostile cesspits of activity for both unlikeable public figures and public figures that are liked a little too much. It’s an issue now, and website moderators aren’t tampering with a blockchain to remove sensitive data. It’s also unclear what the end goal of integrating a blockchain system into BlueSky even is, aside from getting to integrate blockchain into a social media system – who benefits from that labor? BlueSky intends to be a spot for cryptocurrency conversion in the future according to some articles, and while there’s money to be made in that, the risks they’d be taking on to do so in such a volatile space would have to have one heck of a reward in return. Some users are understandably wary, waiting to see what else BlueSky is getting out of that.
Right now, BlueSky is invite-only, and it’s not secretly tied to some other social media account that would force the user to wipe their existence from the net should they decide they don’t want to keep using it, so it has that over Threads, at least.
There are a lot of theories as to why Musk would go from the widely-recognizable “Twitter” to a single letter name like X.
Much like colors, brands can “own” letters, but only in certain markets. UPS owns their distinctive shade of brown in the shipping industry, but if Hershey chocolates decides they want brown and yellow wrapping on a special edition bar, UPS can’t tell them not to. Why? Nobody is going to confuse Hershey chocolate for a product of UPS. Tiffany owns their robin’s egg blue within the jewelry and fine glasswork market, but again, if Hershey wants to use robin’s egg blue on their Easter candy, Tiffany has no legal way to stop them even if they wanted to. And they don’t!
Letters are much the same: many social media sites own a stylized version of the first letter in their name to maintain recognition even in teeny designs like app icons, including big ones like Facebook and Google. So, on the surface, switching to a single letter follows a cogent line of logic. The problem? Tumblr owns the letter “T” for social media. Twitter’s app icon is a bird because the two are so similar they can’t both use the letter T (both blue, both blogging or microblogging sites, etc.). The equivalent would be UPS trying to switch to “F”. FedEx would have something to say about a choice that obvious even if they didn’t touch their colors. Twitter wouldn’t try.
So why X if not T? Easy – Musk owns X.com. That’s why they’re going to X.
Notably, Musk used to work at PayPal and tried the same thing there, but they parted ways before he could convince anybody. The times have changed, and the era where Musk worked at PayPal is very different from the era today. For example, Microsoft now owns copyrights around the letter X as it relates to communications and Threads/Meta have copyrights for X relating to software. Twitter is also now visible in many more places than PayPal is. PayPal only appears when money needs to change hands – Twitter is (or was) considered essential for businesses of any size, from the biggest shipping companies to the smallest boutique newsletters. Everyone knows of Twitter, and that would make rebranding incredibly difficult even if it wasn’t to a single letter.
Execution Gets Them Every Time
Firstly, the UI of the site is still coated in Twitter and Tweet terminology as of this article’s writing. That means it’s still Twitter. There just aren’t enough staff on hand to do one big update/rollout for their new X branding like they might have liked to, and as a result Twitter is still Twitter until users recognize X to be Twitter, which won’t be complete until everything says X. Making a big deal about the switch (so customers are less likely to become confused when something isn’t where it used to be) is only a part of the equation for success; another huge part of it is getting people to stop saying the old name. Hard to do when the microblog posts still go live as ‘tweets’.
Brands who feature ‘Find us on Twitter!’ notes on their packaging will have to switch over to the ‘X’. This alone may take weeks, both because the process of getting the new label on the packaging itself will take a while, and because the old packaging needs to cycle out at the grocery store. Websites using Twitter links will have to change their icons. Twitter has been a bird for so long that some of them might have forgotten how.
Elon owned X.com. That’s the easy part. But everywhere else, even if big names like Meta and Microsoft don’t pitch a fit over the copyright issues Twitter is creating for itself, and even on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, X/Twitter’s branding is incomplete and rushed. The entire launch seems to be the result of an impulsive decision in a morning meeting. Twitter didn’t own the @X handle on Twitter before it made the switch. Someone else snatched it up immediately. The Japanese rock group X Japan had the X handle they would have used to stay in format with Twitter Japan, and so they just can’t use that handle for Japan.
What is X? Outside of a domain Elon has been sitting on forever. What is ‘an X’? X by itself means nothing. It’s an exit. It’s the top right of the screen when you want to leave. It’s the mark over treasures and mines on maps, but nothing itself except a marker. It’s the thing you replace when you first start learning algebra. It’s a cool letter, but maybe going with “Twitter X” would have been more comprehensible vs. what the site has going on now. What, tweets are now called X’s? They’re… exes? I’m no longer tweeting, I’m exing? Did you see that X that The Rock posted? I can’t believe some guy is leaving X. You know, X? Like the letter? It used to be Twitter.
There’s no meat on it, no associations to make with it, not a fanciful mark or a made-up word. It’s a letter. Just a single letter is expected to carry all the weight of a brand like Twitter.
Google Images is one of the most powerful image-finding resources in the world. In the early days of the web, you could quite simply just copy and then paste an image from Google Images into your project and call it a day. This wouldn’t work for publications, and it opened up a gigantic legal nightmare for anyone caught using copyrighted images in their advertising “by accident” after an intern did that (copyright is one of those laws you can’t say ‘I didn’t know you couldn’t do that’ and get off), but for personal and internal use, Google Images could do what you needed it to.
However, the internet is a tricky place, and a website who used a picture (legitimately or not) could appear before the original source of the picture did. While this still didn’t affect the most basic use of an image, it had the potential to turn into a problem when content reposting got really popular on Instagram, Pinterest, etc. and online news sites wanted to use an image they found. They’d end up asking the wrong person!
Secondary to that is images that are free to use, but poor quality. The website supplying the image doesn’t want people to use the worse 300×300 px version of it if a better-quality version exists.
WebP images solve both of these problems, both intentionally and accidentally!
Websites Run on Google Properties
Image-loading speed has been an unbreakable barrier for websites with images on them for forever. Pictures are a lot of information, and pulling that information from the server makes the entire page slower. The bigger the image, the slower it goes.
The earliest days of the web only had JPGs and other weak, lossy formats to supply the web with the images, and even those took forever on dial-up internet. Now, we have dozens of formats to choose from, although JPGs and PNGs are the most common for both size and convenience of use. PNGs are also capable of being transparent, although they take up more space than JPGs do due to their lossless nature. Thus, in Google Images, a WebP image will likely be both the smallest and best copy of any particular image.
WebP
However, WebP has thrown a wrench in many a meme – the file type can’t be converted to a JPG or a PNG with the default software on your Windows computer (yet). When they come up in Google images, you can’t just save them straight off the site (which you shouldn’t have been doing anyway!) anymore and expect that same file to be uploadable to a meme website or your art program. Sketchbook and GIMP can’t handle WebP images!
Of course, nobody at all would be using these if it was all downsides. WebP images are faster to load, smaller, animatable, and can handle transparency, fusing all of the best traits of JPGs, PNGs, and even GIFs. When making a website, every single second the user has to wait is a second they’re less likely to continue to wait, unless they actually care about the content they’re looking for. Waiting even five seconds for a webpage to load wipes out a huge chunk of potential views! PNGs have been a pinnacle online image formats for a long time, but they can delay loading times, and can even be used to DDOS a website if that website doesn’t have size upload limits. WebPs can do that too… but only if the website allows WebP uploads, and only if the format of it is lossy. It’s weaknesses are it’s strengths – it’s difficult to use, difficult to steal, and difficult to alter (again, for now – as it becomes more common, many of these problems should subside given Google works with developers).
Google recently released some new top-level domains for purchase.
What is a Top-Level Domain?
A top level domain is one of the most important parts of a website’s internet address, after the ‘root’ zone. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is made up of several pieces. The first part, usually http:// or https:// is the ‘scheme’, which tells your device which application it should use to open the URL. ‘www’, the part right after that part, is a subdomain – it gives your device additional information about the website, and can even be swapped out depending on the website being used (although www is very common). After that is the domain – in a website name like www . example . com, ‘example’ is the domain. In www. Google . com, Google is the domain.
After that is top-level domains – the last part of the address that use .com, .org, .gov, and others, which are just below the domain name in importance. If you type in the wrong top-level domain, you will not land on the correct website, just like if you mistyped the main domain name. Some top-level domains are controlled (only U.S. government bodies can use the .gov ending, according to CISA, and only websites in the United Kingdom use the .uk top-level domain) but others are open and available to whoever wants to use them. They don’t have to be three letters or less, either – .pizza , .tube, and .online are just some of the top-level domains one can buy. Truly, the world is an oyster!
Trouble Afoot
With all that out of the way, what has Google done this time?
The thing about top-level domains is that they have to be for sale first! There are a limited number of domain vendors, and not every domain vendor can sell every type of top-level domain. However, any established organization in the world, public or private, can apply to create and then operate a new top-level domain. They have to prove their capability, because doing that takes a lot of money and server space, but it’s possible for large companies like Google.
The problem is that a few of Google’s cool new top-level domains are A) already in existence elsewhere, and B) exist in a place where they can overlap. Google released eight new top-level domains, and two among them are also file types: .zip and .mov.
For convenience, many websites will turn links into hyperlinks. Typing in www.google.com into Word, for example, will create a hyperlink. The same goes for Outlook and Teams. This is the core of the problem – trying to reference a file you’ve saved elsewhere in online communications channels is creating an opportunity for the recipient to click on a link they didn’t mean to.
If you mean to tell someone that they should check out the photos[dot]zip file attached to the email you’re sending, and they mistakenly click the auto-hyperlink instead of downloading the file attachment, they’re left visiting an unknown (potentially malicious) website. Or, if someone in a Teams chat group says the new photos are ready in the photos[dot]zip file in the company OneDrive, then they’ve opened their team up to accidentally clicking a link thinking it leads to the shared files. Simple statements that weren’t issues before are now security risks! A particularly clever scammer could set up auto-downloads for .zip files named the same as the website, so the victim doesn’t even realize they’re downloading malware. If their browser throws a warning, they’re likely to trust the source if they don’t know that this is a possibility. The same goes for .mov files, but those aren’t as common as .zips are.
Google has basically opened the door to a new kind of scamming, and their reasons for doing so are unclear.
A Trojan virus is essentially a virus that sneaks in pretending to be something else, hence the name! Links that lead to auto-download pages on shady websites that promised something else, .EXEs disguised as .PDFs, .XLSXs that betray the trust of the user, the list goes on.
Once in the computer, what they do is what determines what kind of Trojan they are.
The only real way to avoid these things is to be cautious with what you download and click – Trojans are very versatile by nature. The one that hit the news, FatalRAT, tricked users with a fake ad that led to a fake Google webpage. Illegal download sites are famous for having multiple fake download buttons surrounding the real one, all of which might just download malware instead of the pirated movie or show the end user was hoping for. The website doesn’t even have to be shady – bad actors using websites like Facebook or Twitter can post links leading to places that download these things without warning! Email attachments are another easy way to contract a Trojan virus as well.
RAT: Remote Access Trojans
Remote Access Trojans grant remote access to the Trojan’s creator once downloaded and established. Once there, the RAT can be used to control the computer. Once the virus is on there, the creator can send commands to it as if they were in front of the computer themselves, whether that’s for data extraction, or to attack other computers on the network.
Backdoor Trojans
Backdoor Trojans, once downloaded, start sending data back to their source from the infected computer. Where a RAT’s priority may be to take over the device and keep the computer’s owner from taking back control, a backdoor Trojan often tries to lie low, avoid detection, and gather as much data as possible to send back to its creator. Some install keyloggers and other malicious spyware, while others just copy and send files found on the device.
Rootkit Trojans and Exploitable Backdoor Bugs
Rootkit Trojans can get onto the device via any method, but are unique because they hide in the rootkit folder, which is responsible for handling the device’s startup and shutdown procedures. Since they start up at the same time as the device, built-in antivirus may miss it indefinitely.
Similarly, some Trojans don’t rely on the user making a mistake and clicking something iffy, but the company making some of the user’s software leaving in a backdoor they can use to tunnel into the end user’s computer, achieving the same effect.
After Install: Ransomware and Blackmail
Trojans are not exclusively for stealing data, although many of them do go after tax documents and other such financial files on a computer. Some Trojans sneak onto computers specifically so that computer can become part of a botnet without the owner noticing, taking its computing power and contributing it to malicious DDoSing projects. Some Trojans sneak in, demand an “update” once the computer is hooked up to the internet, and then use that “update” to sneak in ransomware or things like keyloggers, which are then used to blackmail the user out of money, or sometimes information.
The end result is always bad for the end user, so be very careful when downloading third-party programs from websites with no reputation online!
Twitter’s handling of blue verification checkmarks is turning into a total mess amongst the people Musk intended as a target audience. When did it become uncool to be verified?
Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Support Twitter?
Firstly, even people who have no clue who Elon Musk is, or his dozens of scandals, don’t like him on Twitter because his policy decisions have actively made the platform more difficult to use. He’s a political figure, yes, and that alone makes him easy to dislike, but he’s also handling Twitter’s transition very poorly. Two-Factor authentication is now hidden behind a paywall, and the coding choices Musk has demanded in the past several months means that authenticator apps can’t fill the gap he left in security. His layoffs mean service is delayed, too: customers report that Twitter support only responds in a timely manner if they spam them with tickets and messages. Nobody likes slow service! Especially if their account has been hacked!
Even when his decisions don’t break critical functions of the site, they harm its culture. Several beloved joke/meme accounts that used the API to function have shut down because Musk started charging for access to the API, an attempt to curb bots that also doubled as fundraising. Companies that have historically used Twitter as an alert system can either cough up a couple hundred dollars on a monthly basis to keep going or quit while they have a good reason. Many just quit even if they theoretically could afford it. For example, the New York City transit committee won’t be using Twitter to update riders about route changes or delays anymore because Twitter is now too inconsistent.
He’s Not Cool
It’s not only the tech, though. His political leanings are putting him in with a crowd that thinks wearing a suit to school every day is cool. That is to say, when he tweets about his political beliefs or makes jokes, the people who retweet him sincerely are behind on pop culture at best or actively telling everyone how much they hate it and wish it would change at worst. That’s an opinion he welcomes on the platform as part of his push for free speech. That’s one thing, but the kids who like wearing the suit and the kids who don’t are two totally different crowds. Trying desperately to win the favor of the non-suit kids looks desperate. Especially when he doesn’t seem to know how. His memes are outdated. He posted a meme about Harambe, the gorilla that was shot at a zoo when a child fell into the enclosure, months, perhaps years after those memes wore out their welcome. He also famously tweeted ‘let that sink in’ alongside a picture of him carrying a sink into the Twitter offices, and then proceeded to fire huge swathes of the staff.
This is what made Musk uncool after years of being seen as the IRL Tony Stark. This is what made Twitter Blue uncool – it’s supporting an out-of-touch billionaire who’s trying so desperately to be cool but fundamentally doesn’t understand how. He’s basically trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen. The kids in suits wanted to buy it, but how much of Twitter’s population do they really make up? Clearly not enough for Musk’s taste.
Cool Kids Don’t Want to Sit At His Table
As such, the checkmark became a punishment. Generally speaking, your target audience should be excited to get your product for free! And yet nobody getting the check ‘as a gift’ seems to be super happy about it. The gift ones are indistinguishable from the ones that were paid for, so it looks like a handful of people have purchased the check when they haven’t.
Lil Nas X publicly complains about the blue check. Dril, most famous for his funny absurdist tweets, spent at least a day changing his name to break the blue check connection, only for it to reappear next to his name a few minutes later. Stephen King, the man who tweeted the check cost too much and he’d leave if he was forced to pay for it, is being assigned a check for free against his will. Dead folks are getting checks. A parody account of Nintendo’s UK division got assigned a check, signalling another Eli Lilly style fakeout scandal is still totally possible.
These people are getting the checks for free, and nobody can really say why – Musk publicly said he was paying for some of them, but others are seemingly being assigned to users with over one million followers. His actual fans, and the people who would actually be happy to get the check, don’t seem to be getting it at the same rate (although it’s totally possible they are getting the checks and not complaining because they wanted the check in the first place).
This is a sign that even Musk knows that this is not the buyable badge of honor it was meant to be. Gray checks remain a stopgap solution. Power to the people? Free speech? Fraud is harder, but not impossible, under this system. Verification has gone back to meaning next to nothing.
Tetris, released in the 1980’s (the first version was released in 1985, but other countries received it from 1986-1988) is one of the most viral games ever. It’s simple enough that children can play it, but complex enough to keep players of all ages entertained for hours. It doesn’t require that the player speak any one language – the mechanics are simple enough to not need instructions. And, most importantly, it’s fun. Winning is satisfying. It gets harder the longer you play, so you’re never bored with the difficulty.
Versions of Tetris exist everywhere now. The game itself is as endlessly versatile as eggs. Physics-based. Efficiency based. Tetris games that want you to fill the board completely, like a puzzle. Tetris games that allow you to squeeze pieces in between gaps that are too small, and Tetris games that don’t. Tetris games that troll you. Competitive Tetris, where discarded lines are given to your enemies. Tetris games where the Tetriminos have 5 blocks, instead of four. The game is endlessly updateable, and the original remains the most ported game in all of video game history. Difficult, but fair, the standard games have chased since day one.
Tetris Effect
Some players develop what’s known as the Tetris Effect – they’ve played the game so long that it begins to seep into their dreams, and they unconsciously wait for blocks to start descending from somewhere whenever they aren’t occupied with another task. The Tetris Effect technically refers to any time a person is devoting so much time to an activity it starts to bleed into places it wouldn’t normally be – Rubix Cube speed-solvers sometimes unwillingly run through their algorithms in their head, and chess players may find themselves trying to identify what piece a traffic bollard would be and how it could move on the board.
When you look at it that way, sea legs are part of the Tetris effect. The Periodic Table in it’s solved state is as well! Tetris first put a name to the phenomenon because it is so genuinely interesting that people who weren’t accustomed to having it were experiencing the effect for the first time.
Repetitive Games and PTSD
Simple puzzle games have benefit beyond just immediate entertainment. Studies seem to suggest that repetitive games like Tetris or word games, something easy enough to be attention-absorbant, can help curb the effects of PTSD after a traumatic event, like a car crash. Specifically, games like Tetris help combat involuntary flashbacks. Treating PTSD after it develops with CBT shows promise, but intervening before it has a chance to really take root would be better. The study size in the initial research was small, but it shows promise: https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/tetris-used-to-prevent-post-traumatic-stress-symptoms .
DOOM is an incredible game that is famous for running on everything. The game’s code only takes up 2.39 MB (it takes a little bit more to run it), and it’s method of recording player inputs as demos instead of video (enabling anyone to play a demo of another player’s run in a time when recording games as videos and uploading them usually looked like pixelated garbage) made it extremely popular among people who love speedrunning games competitively.
All that said, the original version of the game, run on an emulator, functions really well. What about the ports to other platforms?
The Times
Firstly, to ‘port’ anything in software terms means getting it ready to operate on a different system than the one it was first designed for. It’s the process of making the software portable.
Getting DOOM to play on anything is a trivial matter now. But back when DOOM was new and super cool, it wasn’t so easy to move it to handheld game devices or consoles. Picture a game made for the computer – you play it with your keyboard and mouse. To get it ready for the XBox or the Playstation, the developers of the game have to change how it handles inputs. They may also have to change textures (XBox plays on a TV screen usually, which is larger than a computer screen) and how the game handles loading. That takes work. And games weren’t an object of respect at that point. They were time wasters, something to keep the kids indoors if it was too hot or too rainy outside for them to play. A significant number of people involved in the game making process felt that anything they helped produce just had to be playable, it didn’t have to be good. The gradual dropoff of Atari and the ocean of shovelware games lost to time gradually changed that attitude, but DOOM ports to other consoles were an unfortunate victim of it before that happened.
Rush Jobs
Porting to other consoles was like rebuilding the game, and if you don’t respect the game, you’re going to build a facsimile of it good enough that kids will buy it and stop there.
Take the port to the Super NES, made in 1996 – the game literally does not have the functionality of saving. You have to beat each episode (episodes consist of nine levels each) in it’s entirety in a single sitting. Bizarrely, some of those episodes won’t let the player alter the game’s difficulty, so playing through on Easy the whole way through is not going to happen. It might still have been better than the Sega adaptation two years later, which cut several textures as well as a full episode altogether to make room for the rest of the game! Yeah, you could save, but at what cost? Meanwhile, the Atari’s port to the Jaguar console managed to make a passable copy of the game at the expense of only five levels and a lot of texture. But it could run multiplayer if you had a second Jaguar, so that already made it leagues more attractive than other ports at the time. Not that it was good, it sounded bad and it looked sort of ugly, but it was better.
Better Versions
Of course, DOOM had good copies as well! DOOM is surprisingly functional as an app on the Apple store. You can’t jump in DOOM, so the controls remained simple enough that players could still see most of their screen back in 2009 when the app released. To go just a couple of years after most of these ports to 2001, Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance made a surprisingly playable copy of the original game. The Playstation version from 1995 did a fantastic job of catching the spirit of the game instead of cutting things for time, even adapting some of the music and lighting so the console could handle it better. Eventually, XBox released a version of the game where you could play multiplayer and everything was 1080p in 2006 as part of the XBox LIVE Arcade, and even the Nintendo Switch can play DOOM now.
This isn’t counting emulators that allow the player to play the game on their home computer as if it were the original – the hardware most computers have by default means the game runs as well as the emulator does.
You can see which companies understood the appeal of the game they were porting, in the sense that the companies who went out of their way to make a good version of a simple violent videogame are still mostly competitive today. With the exception of Nintendo and their first chopped up version of the game and Atari’s functional multiplayer version, gaming companies who pushed DOOM to the side ended up pushed aside themselves.
