Technology

You can now play one of the internet’s most famous memes right on your Nintendo Switch. Zero Wing, which features the classic line “all your base are belong to us” during its introductory cutscene, is now available to play on the Sega Genesis app that’s accessible with a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription. Nintendo seems to be well aware of the meme. In a video announcing the arrival of Zero Wing and three other games to the service, Nintendo leads with the space shooter and features many memorable quotes from its bad translation, including, of course, the “all your base” line. (Warning that the Zero Wing section in the video and the game itself has patches of intensely flickering lights, in case you’re sensitive to those like I am.) Is this meme still relevant? Now that ...

Windows 11 comes with more restrictive install requirements when compared to its predecessor, including restrictions on older processors as well as requiring an internet connection and Microsoft account. Luckily, there are workarounds that allow for upgrades to Windows 11 on unsupported CPUs, and the company isn’t blocking those circumventions. But, if you’re looking to do a clean Windows 11 install and configure the system with just a local account, you can now do that easily with a tool called Rufus. The app has been long used by IT departments to quickly create bootable Windows installers. The latest beta release, as reported by Ars Technica, now has the ability to remove the requirement of an online Microsoft account, alongside other circumventions. It can bypass computers that lack TP...

A case being brought in the Colorado district court of Denver County is challenging the constitutionality of a controversial keyword search warrant and potentially curbing a law enforcement practice that has implications for the criminalization of abortion. A reverse keyword search warrant is a surveillance technique that lets police start with a search term of interest and identify users who have searched it within a particular period. In concrete terms, that could mean identifying all the users who search for a specific name or address — or in a scenario that has caused anxiety recently, everyone who searches for “abortion drugs.” Proponents of the technique say they’re an important tool for identifying criminals, but civil liberties groups see the warrants as a new and chilling threat t...

After years of mounting pressure, TikTok provided US lawmakers with more details into how it limits Chinese access to American data in a new letter dated Thursday. In a letter addressed to nine of the app’s most prominent Republican critics, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew detailed how the company planned to separate American user data from ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company. Chew also explained TikTok’s plan to house American user data on Oracle servers, a plan first reported by BuzzFeed News last month. “We’re proud to be able to serve a global community of more than a billion people who use TikTok to creatively express themselves and be entertained,” Chew wrote in the letter first reported by The New York Times. “We know we are among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standp...

Dish is trying something no one’s succeeded at for a very long time: build a new nationwide cell network from the ground up. The 5G service, called Project Genesis, finally went live in “over 120 cities” two weeks ago, and my colleague and I immediately signed up to test it out. From the start, we had some big questions: how fast will this new network be? Would we even be able to find Dish service? And did the company launch Genesis before it was ready just to meet its contractual obligations with the government and avoid tens of millions of dollars in fines? Given how buggy the sign-up process was, I didn’t have high hopes when I unboxed my Project Genesis-specific Samsung Galaxy S22. But after a week of testing it in Spokane, Washington, I can’t say that the network is an abject failure ...

Electronic Arts, the unmitigated king of unforced errors, made a woefully ill-advised tweet yesterday, and the company’s Twitter mentions have not known peace since. They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games — Electronic Arts (@EA) June 30, 2022 The tweet follows the convention of a popular meme that’s been circulating the bird app in which a person is described as being highly attractive, then listing something about that person that’s supposed to make them instantly unattractive. In EA’s case, the quality that’s supposed to make the person unattractive is the fact they prefer single-player games. Now I get that there’s supposed to be a message here. I’m going to interpret this as a dig at the kinds of people who say they only play games that offer deep, introspective me...

RadioShack — a 100-year-old name mainly associated with its electronics retail business — is trending on Twitter for its wild and edgy tweets. What many did not know, however, is that since its acquisition by Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV) in 2020, the company has shifted into selling cryptocurrency. Somewhat forgotten by those in the later years of Gen Z, as they declared bankruptcy in 2015, not much news has been coming out from RadioShack up until now. Now under the Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez-founded REV, the name that still sells batteries and small electronics online is fully embracing its crypto audience and is more edgier than ever. In a play to get some more eyes on its Radio Shack Swap ($RADIO) token, its Twitter page has gone from 0 to 100 in wildness with tweets like, “I think the...

A group of driverless Cruise robotaxis blocked traffic in San Francisco for hours on Tuesday evening after the cars stopped working without explanation. Details of the incident were shared on Reddit (and spotted by TechCrunch) and illustrate how driverless vehicles are still experiencing teething problems in real-life settings. Cruise, which is backed by General Motors and Honda, has been testing its technology in San Francisco since February, but only launched a commercial robotaxi service last week. The cars have no human safety driver at all but operate under certain restrictions. They only offer lifts on “select streets” between the hours of 10PM and 6AM when the weather conditions are favorable, and can drive no faster than 30mph. Pictures of the driverless roadblock show at least fiv...