On January 3, Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka signed a new law (via Deutsche Welle) which effectively permits piracy in the country. With the lofty aim of—among other things—developing “the intellectual and spiritual-moral potential of society,” the law allows for the use “without the consent of the rights holder” of software, movies, and music “from foreign states committing unfriendly actions” against Belarus, so long as they’re deemed “essential for the domestic market”.

What constitutes essentiality in this context isn’t mentioned in the text of the law itself. But insofar as software is concerned, it’s a good bet that fundamental tech like Windows, and perhaps even Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite, would make the cut. But when it comes to films, mus…

In the event of an actual nuclear holocaust, there probably wouldn’t be a lot of sidequests left to complete or environmental storytelling to puzzle out, but that wouldn’t make for a fun videogame, so Bethesda understandably played it fast and loose with nuclear physics in designing Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland. Even in the face of that, Any Austin on YouTube⁠—who has a bit of a speciality in puzzling out videogame open world logistics⁠—had to ask: how many bombs actually landed in Fallout 3, and where?

According to the capital-L Lore, it was in the hundreds, but the actual evidence in the game is a fair bit short of that. Any Austin started with the most concrete sites in his survey⁠—ones strictly spelled out somewhere in game⁠—and…

Seagate has agreed to pay the US Department of Commerce $300 million in total over the next five years for selling Huawei some hard drives. 

The US government’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) alleged that Seagate broke rules on exporting to the China-headquartered company when it sold some hard drives to it over the course of 13 months from August 2020 to September 2021. 

Some hard drives being “more than 7.4 million”, valued at approximately $1,104,732,205, according to the BIS press release [PDF]. The Bureau claims Seagate became the sole source supplier of HDDs to Huawei during this time.

In terms of the timeline here, these sales occurred after the US government updated its rules for companies trading with Huawei to include fresh …

Update: As of 4:30 pm PDT, most of Reddit seems to be working again. (We still can’t access some features.) The reason for the downtime hasn’t been stated.

“We’ve implemented our fix and are slowly allowing things to ramp back up,” Reddit said a little after 3 pm PDT. 

Original story: No, it is not your imagination: Reddit, the “front page of the internet,” is down.

I noticed the problem while researching (ie., looking at memes) for a separate story about The Last of Us, which you’ll hopefully be reading fairly shortly. In the midst of that, the site very suddenly stopped loading: I wasn’t getting any errors, just a blank page.

After a few frustrated reloads, I popped over to redditstatus.com, which indicates that a “maj…

It should go without saying that we all live in hell. A tin of beans costs £2, the Gulf Stream is giving up, and (worst of all) Blizzard wants $65 for a Diablo horse. If only we could return to those halcyon days before memory: The ’90s. Things were simple then, with shared wares aplenty and an internet that was still young and warm and wild and free. Just imagine how many more microtransactions we could spring on those naive suckers before they cottoned on.

Such is the bold vision of Guy Dupont, a developer whose recent entry into the Boston Stupid Shit Nobody Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon was the most sacrilegious gag I’ve ever seen: He added microtransactions into Doom earlier this month. That’s the original, 1993 Doom. Can he ever be forgiven? No.

You…

For someone like me who is desperate to get stuck into any whimsical life sim, Tales of the Shire sounds like a perfect match. On paper, it promises a cosy life in Middle-earth, filled with farming, decorating, cooking, and fishing. But the demo exhibits a desperate attempt to make a cosy game while the subgenre is so popular rather than focusing on building a game that welcomes new Lord of the Rings fans while letting long-time ones live out the dream of living as a hobbit. As a result you’re currently met with something that lacks an identity and is frankly just disappointing.

To start, a lot of it is boring. There’s no better way to put it. And that’s coming from someone who has put thousands of hours into plenty of life and farming simulators which revolve around a very simp…

Persistence is an admirable trait, or at least it is when you know the result is not only achievable but a worthwhile accomplishment. But when two film companies tried once again to force Reddit to provide IP addresses for anyone discussing piracy on the site, despite having tried twice before to no avail, you’d be forgiven for thinking they must have something special to bolster their case this time around. Sadly for them, it turns out the First Amendment isn’t just something you can bypass through persistence.

The ongoing battle of heads versus a brick wall initially began with a group of film companies taking legal action against cable firm RCN, because users on that ISP had downloaded copies of a number of their movies. The group wanted Reddit to provide fulsome details, such …

Ubisoft wants investors to know that it’s still all-in on the AI-generated NPCs thing, according to a recent Q&A session (which you can access on the Ubisoft website). Fielding queries after a financial report, CEO Yves Guillemot insisted that there’s still a bright future for uncanny NPCs delivering awkward and stilted performances with precious little intention behind them.

Alright—that’s not entirely fair. There are some practical uses for AI in game development, either for boring, non-immersive grunt work that no-one else wants to do—as former WoW lead Ghostcrawler puts it, “crappy” tasks like “making the cliffs where the continent sloped into the ocean”. Alternatively, you can make the uncanny nature of said voicelines the point, while making sure the…

Giant statues broadcasting a mysterious code, monks telling me to open my throat chakra, an ominous symbol added to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and now: a laptop displaying ancient Slavic text dropped into a middle of a landfill and a Johnny Silverhand-themed Wolfenstein 3D clone that unlocks a secret server farm. This is a side of Cyberpunk 2077 I never knew existed, FF:06:B5.

The FF:06:B5 subreddit and Kotaku both have in-depth breakdowns of this saga, but the basic facts from before Cyberpunk’s big 2.0 update are as follows: there’s a handful of large, stylized statues scattered across Cyberpunk 2077’s world map, some of whom have a readout with the code FF:06:B5 on their base. Monks near one of the statues warn that players’ “throat chakra is blocked,” and that they should “acti…

As noted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, Valve has requested that all Dota 2 custom game makers cease real-money monetization in their creations by August 17. A number of popular modes for the juggernaut MOBA have already gone offline in response.

The custom game tools in Dota 2 gave rise to a vibrant modding scene, with the most notable example being autobattler genre progenitor Dota Auto Chess. Auto Chess was a straight-up phenomenon when it landed in 2019, and though a bit diminished these days, the genre it spawned is still chugging along.

Some custom games in the Dota 2 arcade possess real money monetization through third party platforms like Paypal or Patreon. Paying the developers outside the game earns you access to the usual microtransactions for cosmetics or, mor…

The hardware in Valve’s 2021 Steam Deck can run circles around Nintendo’s 2017 Nintendo Switch, but there’s been one point of comparison where Nintendo’s had the upper hand for the last year: the screen. The Switch OLED model debuted just six months before the Steam Deck, and once you go OLED on a TV, phone, or gaming handheld, it’s pretty hard to leave those rich colors and deep blacks behind. The Steam Deck has just passed its one year anniversary, and for the whole year I’ve seen one question about the Deck pop up more than any other: is Valve going to make an OLED model?

The short, polite answer, from Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, is that Valve “understands the limitations of the current tech that’s in the Deck, in terms of the screen.” 

“We also want it to be bette…

Friends, here is my story: Coming home to the UK from Summer Game Fest, hungry and heatstruck, I arrived at one of Los Angeles International Airport’s many food and coffee stands. Blearily, I ordered a latte and some kind of egg salad sandwich composed mostly of bread. The cashier told me that this humble repast would somehow be $21, in violation both of the social contract and mankind’s covenant with the Lord God.

Being an assertive and self-confident type, I said absolutely nothing and meekly paid up. But I shouldn’t have, because if I still had that $21 I could have bought the entire Dragon Age trilogy—base games and all the DLC—twice over in the currently ongoing Dragon Age Steam sale. In place of a thin film of egg smeared on a loaf of wholewheat and a latte that …

Let’s make sure you kick this Monday off with a Wordle win. Whether that looks like the fastest success ever thanks to a sneaky peek at today’s answer, or you spend a while with it after reading our hint for the August 19 (1157) puzzle, is entirely up to you. Don’t forget to check out our general tips too if you’d like to make the most of every guess.

I ended up winning today’s Wordle quickly… because I took it slow? Well, what actually happened was I looked at the scattered yellow and green letters I had found, despaired, went to have another guess and then thought “Hold on, if that is here and that is there then…?”. Instant row of greens. Brilliant. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, August 19

Right up there with the Turbo button on ’90s PCs, the Prt Sc button on your keyboard is almost as useless. Microsoft is about to change that, however, with the Turbo button making a stunning comeback! I’m joking, of course, it’s set to actually make the Prt Sc key worthwhile by making it launch the operating system’s screen capturing Snipping mode.

In the latest test version of Windows 11, available via the Beta channel of the Windows Insider program, the fix is in. That means, by default, the Prt Sc key will now open the snipping tool on a single keypress, giving you access to Snipping mode, whether that’s the standard rectangular select, freeform, window, or full-screen modes.

Previously, hitting the Prt Sc key would simply save the entire desktop to your clipboard, but if…

Spend some time reading through our helpful Wordle tips, guides, and archives, take a quick peek at today’s clue, or skip straight to the part where you win Wordle by scrolling or clicking to the April 1 (651) answer. Whatever you need, we’re here to help with the daily puzzle.

I’ll admit I didn’t really think about my opener today, choosing to plough straight on in there with the first word that popped into my head—and luckily for me, this turned out to be a great start. The answer came quickly, although I did worry when I turned over four greens, thinking I was about to be stuck playing hunt-the-consonant before I found today’s Wordle answer. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, April 1

Today’s answer is the word used to…