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Nintendo Just Kind of Banned Gaming Tournaments

Elizabeth Technology November 16, 2023

With little exception, having age-appropriate gaming tournaments is a good thing for a game (and the company behind it). Big communities getting together to play their one-on-one games means people bringing guests who might be interested enough to buy a set of cards or minifigs after and play in the next get-together.

Some companies even make guides for tournament hosters, partially as an investment in the community, partially so any tournaments hosted using that pack won’t reflect poorly on the parent company. Others go even further and sponsor tournaments themselves, like Capcom with its Street Fighter tournaments. Copyright permissions are handled differently by different companies in different mediums, but generally the tournament event can use their game’s imagery and names to advertise for-profit events as long as the event follows rules established by the company.  

If done right, the players have a fun and exciting time, the game company gets a bunch of free (or subsidized) advertising, and everybody wins.

Nintendo’s decision to ban large tournaments in this environment is nothing short of bizarre!

The Announcement

Nintendo’s announcement regarding tournaments using their games boils down to: no huge events (200 spectators or less IRL, 300 or less online), no use of Nintendo copyright properties to advertise (including game names), no merchandise, food or drink sold in-person at the events, and no profit (ticket prices and winning pools are capped to ensure this). Organizers also can’t raise the prize money from ticket sales or use modified versions of the game, either, and must obtain a special license from Nintendo before the event takes place. While Nintendo is legally well within their rights to do this, why would they? Capcom enjoys a huge amount of positive publicity thanks to it’s 2D fighter tournaments. Magic: The Gathering is known for drawing large crowds to events, and Wizards of the Coast, its owner company, is pleased to see it. Nintendo was not.

As you may guess, this severely handicaps future tournaments! Smash tournaments, one of the cornerstones of the early online competitive gaming communities, have just been slashed pretty hard. For context, Smash Summit has had final winning pools in the five-digit range since 2016. Smash Ultimate Summit has hit the six figure range. Smash tournaments have been running since the last decade. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of players have passed through these tournaments hoping to win, and the spectator count is magnitudes higher. Nintendo may not have set out to make tournament-ready games, but by golly they did, and now they want to take it back.

What Now?

Playing a game competitively is very, very different from playing it for fun. People dedicate huge chunks of their life to trimming off inefficiencies and practicing. For many, it is literally a second job, during which they may stream their practice to make some money off of all of the hours they’re investing into learning. The people viewing those streams then go on to watch them in the tournament, bringing money in for the tournament host, too.

Nintendo effectively just crushed an entire industry. Rather than work with the fans and try to spin their tournaments into advertising the way many other companies do, they instead decided that the current tournament fanbase was unreconcilable with their goals and simply cut them off. Already, Smash tournament organizers (often retired tournament winners themselves) are promising they’re going to keep going until they personally receive a cease and desist from Nintendo. They don’t really have another choice – players aren’t typically interested in switching games and losing all their practiced skill to switch over to Street Fighter or any other 2-D fighting game.

Who knows what happens next. Nintendo owns the intellectual property that this industry is built off of, but rug-pulling it like that has generated a lot of backlash from adult fans, even ones who weren’t watching tournaments before. It echoes the move that Unity just made, and before that, Adobe. The average consumer is getting sick of companies squeezing them out of stuff they already spent their money on. Nintendo may have underestimated the negative press from this announcement, but whether or not they’ll walk it back remains to be seen.

Sources: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fun-sponge-nintendo-places-strict-094104104.html

https://kotaku.com/smash-bros-ultimate-switch-nintendo-tournaments-1850955614  (warning – link contains foul language sourced from tournament competitors’ tweets in direct citation)

Using Biometrics: Is It Really Better?

Elizabeth Technology November 9, 2023

Some phones allow users to use their biometric data as 2FA, or as a password by itself – how does it measure up to PINs?

Cons

1) Your Face Looks Like Your Family’s

Every single service using face unlock handles this a different way – they all use different programs, and those different programs handle similarities differently. Apple, which uses state-of-the-art hardware and code to see faces, still sometimes mixes it up. For Apple, the program that reads your features and unscrambles this information is constantly updating itself and adding to its library of what you look like. If it didn’t, a sunburn or a new eyeliner shape would trip it up and lock you out for looking different.

The problem is that it’s allegedly doing that by looking at the person holding the device when it’s unlocked (using a passcode or otherwise), which is usually you but sometimes isn’t. People who look similar enough and who may be holding your phone enough (like family) can sometimes trick FaceID into opening for them by accident. While this is getting better, there’s no way to rule out a twin unlocking your phone without also sometimes locking you out too.

2) Law Enforcement

Most police forces have the right to collect some of your biometric data if you are ever arrested – your face and fingerprints go into their records. The legality of using that to unlock your mobile device pre-subpoena varies from state to state; some states will allow you total freedom to decline an un-subpoena’d unlock request no matter how your device is secured, while others won’t let you decline at all, but some states depend on the type of lock. Certain biometric data is not legally protected in the same way passcodes or PINs are. Look it up for your state!

3) Nefarious Children

A much more common unwanted-unlock scenario is a child getting hold of your phone during a nap and holding it up to your face to buy Robux. While face-unlock adapted, and many smartphones don’t let you attempt an unlock with closed eyes anymore, fingerprints stay the same even if you’re asleep. Still pictures of the target tend to trick older Face ID as well, although that is improving with each new generation of phones.

Pros

1) When Done Right, It’s Really Tough to Beat

Barring the similarity issues above, when biometric data is used correctly, it’s pretty darn good at keeping unwanted people out. Collecting fingerprints to unlock a device or account is often more difficult than it’s worth, and deters bad actors from trying. Strangers will generally not have photos of the phone’s owner good enough to unlock it on-hand – more recent phones use infrared too, so pictures don’t even work on new phones anymore. Cracking biometric locks takes a lot of coincidences or a lot of effort, not just a computer stuffing passwords.  

You also can’t write down your face and lose it somewhere like you might for a password, and (at least for phones) you can’t have it breached in the same way as a written password.

2) When Done Right, It’s Faster

You’d need to wait for a sent 2FA code, but you don’t need to wait for a fingerprint or a face unlock.

3) As Long As Policies Stay the Same, The Data Doesn’t Leave The Phone

As of the writing of this article, Pixel and Apple devices state that the mathematical representation of your face which the phone uses to unlock will not leave the device it’s being used on. Apple even goes a step further and separates the computer that handles facial recognition from the computer that does everything else inside the phone!

The caveat of course is if those policies stay the same – companies make promises and then go back on them all the time. American privacy laws are fairly lax compared to other countries, so any privacy policy not written into law needs an eye kept on it for changes.

How Does A Hacker Use Public WiFi?

Elizabeth Technology October 26, 2023

Ads for VPNs give their two biggest benefits as often as they can: that you can watch shows blocked in your home country using one, and that hackers using the same public WiFi network can’t steal your data as long as you’re encrypting it with a VPN.

The first one is relatively easy to understand, but how does the second trick work? 

1) Simply Saying They Are Something Else

One of the easier methods of tricking a connection is to simply create a hotspot near a public wifi source, and name it the same thing as the legitimate source. If there are two ‘Starbucks Café 9812’ Wifi channels available, the duplicate may catch out users. After that, the hotspot’s creator can intercept any data sent over the connection.

2) Using Specialty Tools

Unsecured Wifi is dangerous in multiple ways – loose, unencrypted packets of data travelling over the Wifi connection can be caught by a hacker and decoded into readable information using something called a WiFi sniffer. Information that your computer will not pick up by default can be found this way, and with it, data sent over that unsecured connection.

Using a WiFi channel with a password is generally good enough to prevent that from happening, however.

3) Hoping For Poor Security Practices

If a public spot’s router is not set up correctly, it might be possible for a bad actor to get into it as an administrator, with all of the permissions that entails. If the router is still using a default dictionary password, a dictionary attack might crack it, and give the bad actor those admin privileges that way. And, if a bad actor got onto the network legitimately, they may be able to execute a man-in-the-middle attack where they trick the target computer and the router into sending potentially sensitive data through them first.

 VPNs

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, add an extra layer of security via encryption to information as it passes from the user’s computer, to the router, to the VPN’s server where it is unencrypted, to the website where the request was directed, back to the VPN’s server so it can be re-encrypted, and then back to the router and ultimately the device, where the information is unencrypted.

That’s good for protecting the user from many of the security issues associated with Public Wifi, but it’s not the be-all end-all of security – you must pick a VPN carefully if you intend to use one, because using a VPN means putting all of that data in their hands instead.

Google Monopoly: What Does It Mean?

Elizabeth Technology October 24, 2023

Proving something or someone has a monopoly in today’s era of technology is difficult – but not impossible. The Department of Justice alleges that Google is hogging advertising space and overcharging for it as a result, as well as illegally (allegedly) incentivizing popular phone brands to use Google products as their default.

On Devices

Most mobile smart devices come with a built-in browser. Even when that browser isn’t Google Chrome, the browser itself uses Google for searches until a different default search engine is set. Opening Firefox or Safari and just typing a query directly into the URL bar will almost always (unless a different default is set by the user beforehand) search that query using Google. Many android devices come pre-installed with Google products like Google Maps. Users can ultimately change their defaults, but it would be difficult with the sheer number of apps that are pre-installed. Sometimes, uninstalling an app isn’t actually an option, either, as many frustrated Android users discovered when trying to uninstall apps like Google TV or YT Music. You can download other apps that do these things, but you can never be rid of the Google version without jailbreaking the phone, which takes a bit of technical know-how and often voids warranties or violates carrier contracts. This could just be because Google is huge and its big web of services are convenient… or, as the suit alleges, it could be that Google is illegally paying phone manufacturers to never try the competition, like Bing or DuckDuckGo.

On Ads

The Department of Justice alleges that since Google has shut out rivals in the search engine game, it’s also shut out any rivals that could compete with it in advertising spaces. Since most people use Google, Google ads cost consumers more to buy them. It’s (alleged) excessive control of search prevents users from using or seeing ad serving competitors, creating a self-sustaining cycle where they are always the more valuable search engine.

Google denies this – they say that Google’s chokehold on internet searching is because Google is the superior product, not because it has shut other products out.

Stifling Competition

Google has a lot of money. It uses this money to further its own existence, a result of a shareholder system that insists the shareholders must see some new growth, or else the CEO gets kicked. It’s the natural gravitational pull of such a system in a world where money can buy or smooth over nearly anything. When a business loses control of its motives, it loses control of itself. Did Google behave unethically? Probably – it doesn’t take a trial to suggest such a system encourages unethical behavior, whether legal or not. Did Google behave illegally? That is to be determined in the DoJ’s trial.  

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-monopoly-trial-sundar-pichai-larry-page/

Why Won’t My Bluetooth Devices Link Up?

Elizabeth Technology October 19, 2023

1) How far away is your other item?

Headphones, speakers, and keyboards generally aren’t going to have a range over 30 feet – some can’t even hit that. Generally speaking, devices don’t go over 30 feet because they don’t need to, and making them powerful enough to do so makes the battery drain faster. If your device is far away, it may not connect, or keep disconnecting and re-connecting.

2) Are you trying to connect to the right thing?

Many devices have bizarre serial number names that you can only find in your user’s manual, especially if the device is not a name brand like Microsoft or Apple.  When you start trying to connect your phone to your new Bluetooth headphones or speaker, make sure you know what its real name is!

3) Are you following the pairing instructions?

Many devices have light indicators on them somewhere to signal whether or not they are connected. Blinking lights usually mean a device is looking for another Bluetooth device to pair with, but not always. Sometimes things blink just to indicate that they aren’t connected. Follow your user’s manual!

Along with that, are both devices seeking a connection? Bluetooth can be on and open, but if the device isn’t in search mode, it might not connect where it’s supposed to until one or both devices are told via their Bluetooth menu that they’re supposed to work with each other.

4) Is the battery charged?

Bluetooth takes a fair amount of power to broadcast, and the signal may get weaker before the device is fully dead. If you notice your speaker suddenly wants you to be closer to make it work, it might be time to charge it, or change the batteries.

5) Has it been on for a long time, with no breaks?

You can also try turning both devices off and back on again. Any device with RAM can have things clog it up, and turning a device off usually fixes it and gives it a fresh start.

6) How old is your other item?

Bluetooth is backwards compatible, so it’s rare to find two Bluetooth compatible devices that won’t work together. It’s rare, but not impossible! Some older and simpler devices have a hard time overcoming the barriers between each successive Bluetooth upgrade. Which device has the newer version of Bluetooth seems to matter as well – my phone will connect to an older Bluetooth car radio transmitter, but my MP3 player will not. A new car radio transmitter will connect to the MP3 player and the phone just fine.

Footnote – Security

It’s not a good idea to leave Bluetooth on when it’s not in use! When you’re done using it, turn it off. Bluetooth can be tricked into connecting to strange devices a number of ways, and be used to take data off of your device. The good news is that most devices only ever expect to connect to one other thing at a time, so as long as your phone is tied to your speaker, another device won’t be able to connect via Bluetooth.

Unity Just Gut-Punched It’s Users For Profit

Elizabeth Technology October 17, 2023

Unity is a game engine, and it’s famous for its versatility and low resource requirements. Game engines are essentially a pre-made skeleton that studios can use to make their game without having to pre-program things like collision or an understanding of physics into it first. Game studios, big and small, use Unity for a wide array of projects.

Unfortunately Unity has decided to start charging for installs, thereby gut-punching all of those studios and destroying most of their hard-won credibility in one go.

The Announcement

Unity put out an announcement that on January 1st, 2024, they would introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee based on game installs. In that same announcement, they said they would add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity plans in November of 2023.

“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed.  Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.” (Unity Blog: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates)

There are some more tidbits about the install further down, including their new thresholds for the fee (200,000$ of revenue in the last 12 months, with 200,000 lifetime game installs for the Unity Personal and Unity Plus plans, 1,000,000$ revenue and 1,000,000 lifetime installs for Pro or Enterprise) and the fees themselves, ranging from 0.20$ to 0.01$ depending on plan (Personal had the highest fee out of all the options).

The Consequences

Does that seem concerningly vague? Do you have questions? Unity isn’t interested in answering. Nobody knows exactly what counts towards the fee. Sure, in the magical world where everyone has an up-to-date computer that runs the game first-try, doesn’t have antivirus that stops install part-way, and nobody ever accidentally or intentionally downloads a pirated copy of the game, this fee structure is easy! But we don’t live in that world.

The phrasing implies that Unity is only concerned with installs, not purchases, so every install counts even if it doesn’t come with an additional purchase. If somebody wanted to destroy a development team they don’t like, all they would have to do is 1) buy the game once, 2) write a bit of code to install, delete, and reinstall the game, and then 3) wait. Once a certain threshold of installations and reinstallations is passed, the installs start to cost the studio 0.15$ each time as long as the payment thresholds were already met too. The double-threshold seems like a good guard rail, but if it’s counting revenue and not profit, a studio that broke even on a 750,000$ game could be driven into the red like that. And that’s assuming all purchases are legit purchases. Right now, nobody knows whether or not Unity can tell if the install used a pirated copy of the game or a legit one! If Unity is counting pirated copies towards the lifetime download threshold to start charging, then bad actors don’t even have to buy it first to wreck a company. The choice to work off of installs instead of purchases is truly baffling– it’s like Unity is siding with the pirates and charging them rent.

Unity’s vague announcement doesn’t even scratch one of the bigger issues with the announcement: to measure installs of a downloaded game (as in, the game is downloaded, the installation wizard is activated, and then the game itself is installed and able to run) would take an internet connection and some sort of communication back to Unity, which raises privacy concerns. So either Unity is not going to be able to keep track of installs (not downloads, which require internet, but installs, which don’t) accurately, or it’s going to quietly slip some spyware somewhere to keep track for their new fee.

The Consequences – For Unity

Things are not going so great for software consumers. Adobe, Photoshop, and a host of other companies have moved from ‘buy it once and have it forever’ to ‘buy a subscription and pay 8$ a month forever’. These programs make a lot of money this way. People who learned how to edit in Photoshop or how to securely track signatures in Adobe would have to re-learn these things should they ever go to another program, and for businesses, paying the 8$ is easier and cheaper than re-training their professionals. It’s annoying, but not so annoying that people stop going to classes built around these tools, or change their business standards to get new tools, or otherwise do things on a wide enough scale that Adobe backs down and reverts to the old model.  Sure, individual consumers will eventually get fed up and switch to other programs (and there are many good, free programs made purely out of spite for the original choosing to cost money) but large businesses generally don’t.

With that in mind, one can see how Unity might have thought they’d be able to pull their scheme off successfully. For the little guy – the individual consumer – there’s nothing to worry about. If your project doesn’t hit 200,000$ worth of sales and 200,000 downloads, then they don’t charge. For the big guy, well – they can afford it. Big businesses would rather fork up the cash than retrain their artists. And here is where Unity miscalculated.

Video games are not Adobe. Studios are capable of making their own engines. There are teams who are dedicated to moving games out of obsolete, un-updateable systems into fresh, new ones. And unlike Adobe, a video game could simply cease to exist with no warning, and the developer wouldn’t be sued for taking down an important business tool. If a dev can’t re-tool their game (or make it entirely from scratch in a new engine), they may need to pull their game from sales to avoid meeting thresholds; with the end of the Flash plugin fresh on their minds, consumers know what it means when a game developer says that. They know that the developer didn’t kill their creation because they wanted to. Big indie studios can make a fun, popular game that isn’t actually profitable once their bills are paid. So much art is going to go missing. All those buyers know that it’s because of Unity.

Unity has done a smidge of backtracking, but not nearly enough – developers are already preparing to switch should Unity hold fast on this announcement. This whole situation is a game developer’s worst nightmare. Even if they totally reversed all of the decisions they made regarding this fee announcement, developers in every stage of the career life cycle will remember what they tried to do. Newcomers may pick a different engine; established studios may choose to make their own engine instead of relying on something unreliable. Unity has shot itself in the foot.

Why are Game Downloads So Ridiculous?

Elizabeth Technology September 28, 2023

The first Doom game is famous for how little space it takes up. Because of it’s absolutely tiny size, almost any device can play it. The latest Doom was approximately 50 GB, a far cry from the games of the past.

The Beginnings

Doom is famously small. When games came on floppy disks, fewer disks meant less overhead expense and a more seamless player experience. It also reduced the risk that something could go wrong. Programming was simple, elegant – textures and sounds were limited, and yet Doom used it’s few pixels to great effect.

Sonic, another small game (meant for a console this time), famously took up a levels’ worth of space for the SEGA opening soundbite. The scale of the levels themselves was so incredibly small that a second-long clip of someone saying ‘Sega!’ consumed as much space as a level. That is insane. Audio, even the crispest, clearest mp3s around, can no longer say that.

While some ambitious games like Doom were technically 3-D, many more were much simpler – Sonic, Metroid, and other 90s games were all 2-D, and yet they all came out difficult and engaging. A number of other trash games came out alongside them, but the shining stars of 90s nostalgia still hold up to this day. The concepts themselves were fairly new to the world: Personal computers and consoles alike were still a fairly new consumer product, still heavily associated with businesses in the case of PCs and children for consoles. Customers, therefore, were making room for something new, not accommodating it unconditionally.

The Graphics, and The Next Step: 3D

The next generation of consoles and computers were significantly more powerful, and as such the games could afford to take up a little more space. A little. Still, that little meant that things looked very different. The distinct polygonal art seen in Final Fantasy, Banjo Kazooie, and other favorites was the best, least-intensive art they could make at the time. You’ll notice shadows are limited and that textures often repeat.

The Nintendo 64 had about 4 MB of RAM – games to fit it could be a maximum of 64 MB, although many were much smaller. Articles say that all of the games for the 64 could fit on the Switch, which is still underpowered compared to other consoles! And yet, so many iconic games come from this era. Ocarina of Time, Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie – the world was an oyster. Other games on other consoles came out, but Nintendo – having watched Atari shoot itself in the foot – didn’t make a habit of producing bad games, or letting third parties make bad games for them.

Game length, too, was incredible for the limited storage space: polls say that Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie both take 11 to 12 hours to beat, and longer to 100%. If they didn’t provide hours of entertainment, that money might go elsewhere to keep the kid distracted. A small game had a big hill to climb, and it still didn’t have a lot of space to do it in, both on the shelf and on the actual console. Games would much rather be longer than look great.

Middling

I recently watched a video covering Silent Hill 2, a game for the PS2, which came only four years after the Nintendo 64. I was very impressed by how good it looked; while the main character was definitely blocky, and the fog and fire effects looked like they were sponged on, the frame rate never dropped, and the pre-rendered cutscenes could have blended in with games much younger. Game storage had moved from cartridges and the occasional floppy disc to the new and much better CD-ROM. Silent Hill 2 was 1.8 GB. The device to load it, the PS2, had a RAM of 32 MB, and that was plenty to run it. Games like those pushed the boundaries of what could be packed into a disc!

The great thing about these games is that even though they took up more space to look nicer, you could still generally tell how long the game was by the file size, although people were no longer ‘making room’ for a ‘toy’ – they were creating a space for legitimate art and leisure. Computers were more widespread, now, although not every family had one. Games were turning into art, into something most people wanted or already had experience with. Consoles, while almost always hot Christmas items ever since their conception, started turning games into ‘must-buys’. As such, sloppier games and games that took up a lot of space now had permission to exist. Games didn’t have to be so brutally efficient in their coding..

The 2010s

The Xbox 360 had entered the market, and LAN was becoming outdated. The console and the increasing internet speeds of the time meant that players didn’t have to get together to play together for everything anymore. Gaming consoles as well as computers are now capable of downloading large games directly from the internet, where before a disc or a cartridge or something would have been more efficient. This is around the time games start bloating. Characters look really good – Grand Theft Auto 4 looked downright realistic compared to San Andreas, and adults who had played both could tell. Games, even for the PC, could be really effective sandboxes. The player had room for a whole world now, after all.

 Big games were usually still pretty long, but they were also becoming unpredictable. The Darkness (a game I really liked) took up 6.8 GB and several entire afternoons to beat – Sonic ’06, meanwhile, takes up 5.6 GB, and if the game weren’t slidey and difficult to navigate, could easily be done in a day or two assuming you found the will to finish it. Games could get boring much faster – unlimited potential and limited handholding meant that games like Minecraft could be really fun for hours, or get boring in thirty minutes. Storage space for PC games is no longer a promise of quality or length.

Even Better Graphics – How Big Is Too Big?

Doom: Eternal takes up 50 GBs to download. While it is decently long – PCGamer says it took them 20 hours to complete the main quest, and HowLongToBeat says 12 hours – it’s also significantly bigger than the first Doom, which provided somewhere between 5 and 6 hours for just the main quests, at a mere 2.39 MB. You don’t have to be a math expert to tell that the ratios are way different. The textures that go into making Doom Guy’s gun now take up more room than the original game ever did. And is it worth it? How many copies of Doom could you actually download on your computer? Borderlands 2, another game on both PC and console, takes up 20 GB but provides around 30 hours of entertainment with just the main quest. The twist is that Borderlands 2 is 4 years younger. In the time between GTA 4 and GTA 5, between Borderlands 2 and Doom, between Gears of War 3 and Gears of War 4, game studios have ballooned all the trappings that come alongside the game. However, the concepts of games themselves, at their core, don’t take up any more space than they used to.

Games stopped getting bigger for levels. They started getting bigger for detail. New Halo games are not longer than the old ones, on average, but they are still bigger. The detail of the levels is consuming valuable space that gamers with mid-tier rigs might like to save for other things. Like other games. Games that don’t hold themselves to hyper-realism in every new generation are finding their job much easier, but the Triple A studios are struggling to justify the expense and space consumption of a game that gets a ‘B’ on Steam. Triple A studios have come full circle, and are beginning to shut themselves out of parts of their market that they’d otherwise be guaranteed.

An unintended side effect is that indie studios are providing much more accessible games. A triple A studio is forced to let go of otherwise guaranteed customers because their game sizes and specs are keeping up with the top-of-the-line computers, not the mid- and low-tier ones the indie studios are aiming for. They take less resources, they provide a different experience – but they’re much closer to that original era of gaming where their spot on a computer was very far from guaranteed. Small games can be just as fun and charming as big ones – especially when their size comes down to texture and engine lighting over more substantial things like story and gameplay, or AI.

Sources: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/05/random_every_nintendo_64_game_ever_released_would_fit_onto_a_single_switch_cartridge

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=834

https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=9364

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=1274

https://gamerant.com/halo-infinite-franchise-how-long-to-beat/

https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/12210/

Borderlands 2 nearly perfects the blend of shooter and role-playing game (review)

The Old Twitter Is Dead – Long Live Twitter

Elizabeth Technology September 12, 2023

What Made You Think You Could Just Do That?

When a company is big enough to become an official channel of communication for the White House, it’s not shocking that jerking it around in an effort to break things off of it is going to break a lot more than leadership bargained for. Twitter, now X, is experiencing quite a bit of seismic activity in response to their rebrand.

Purely From A ‘Visibility of Leadership’ Viewpoint

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the current CEO’s reputation as a funny rich guy is going down the pipes. He launched a car into space! Haha, what a Bond villain! He sold a flamethrower! Haha, what a Bond villain! He smoked a joint on Joe Rogan’s show! Haha, what an Everyman. He illegally started taking Twitter’s old sign down and replaced it with an incredibly bright one that strobes every twenty seconds! Haha…. what… but that’s not….that’s like… Lex Luthor, not Tony Stark. A man who made a program that Twitter bought had to tweet at Twitter leadership to ask whether or not he was still going to receive the money he was owed for his work, and the CEO, barely researching the issue at all, tried to embarrass him into dropping it with private medical info that Twitter The Company did not have the right to share. That’s not even Lex Luthor – that’s abominable.

 It’s important to know these things for context. Musk, the current CEO, is not and has never been playing 4-D chess with this purchase. Turning Twitter into X instead of simply making X is a result of impulsive tweets and communications that (falsely) boosted the hopes for Tesla’s stock price. Remember how hard he was trying to get out of it? Especially the stuff about the bot count? He didn’t want it. But not following through would have landed him in hot water with the US government for stock manipulation, perhaps even insider trading.

He could have made his own social media platform instead of buying the most expensive one on the market, and he probably would have been better off for it if he hadn’t been memeing, but he had something to prove. He had to prove he was funny and cool and so rich he could just buy Twitter on impulse.

Being Important

Musk’s incredible wealth has insulated him from consequences. Worse, Twitter’s status as an important communications tool is delaying further consequences for the company itself. The companies hosting the servers are reluctant to shut it down or throttle. Advertisers pulled away from Twitter, but losing their money didn’t turn off the lights like so many predicted it would. Meeting the definition of ‘doing business with’ terrorist organizations may have already triggered investigations by the US government, but they’re moving so slow it’s impossible to tell what’s happening. The company itself is running on a skeleton crew, but the people remaining are effectively held hostage by visa requirements or somehow believe they can fix what’s been broken. View rate limits keep people from scrolling perpetually like they always have. Despite everything, despite waves and waves of bad choices, bad updates, firings, missed rent payments, bad sources of income, all the things that used to take down giants like Sears, MySpace, Kmart, et cetera, Twitter lumbers on, a giant among giants. The landlord can’t even get them out of the building despite Twitter tampering with the signs outside of it without a permit. Part of the reason people are so eager for the ship to go down is because by all rights, Twitter should have died already. And yet users keep going back! Twitter keeps limping forward! Few websites have ever been able to keep crawling forward like this after getting kneecapped, but by golly Twitter is hanging in there.  

One More Sign, One More Change, One More Anything

The sign’s hanging in there too! The sign(s), actually. The whole reason I’m writing this article is because of the signs and what they represent within Twitter, now X. We know rebranding to X is wiping out a ton of brand recognition. How does Musk intend to make up for all the lost years of bird? By changing the sign on the San Francisco Twitter building into a giant, blinding white Unicode character X. This is after Twitter tried to take down the old sign without getting the building’s permission first, and the cops came and stopped them taking letters off before they were even half done. Both signs, both bad, were on the building at the same time, and neither had the necessary permits from the city to be in the state they were in, either partially torn down or powered up.

Musk’s blinding X sign was an unusual sight on the San Francisco streets because those signs are a genuine danger to drivers at night, so nobody else puts them up. It’s likely that they’re not allowed to. Twitter happened to be right across from a residential building (which is occupied even on the weekends) but even if it wasn’t, several thousand lumens of strobing, flashing light is irritating unless you’re actively seeking it out at shows and such.  It didn’t stay. Like the process for removing the sign, Musk did not get permits to put this new one up – it wouldn’t have strobed like that if he had. It wouldn’t have been as bright, or as annoying, if he’d just gone through the process and let someone tell him no.

WebP Images

Elizabeth Technology July 27, 2023

Google Images

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).

Sources: https://99designs.com/blog/tips/webp-image-format/

New Top-Level Domains

Elizabeth Technology July 25, 2023

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.  

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