Enlarge / A myriad of ways one might react to Gfycat's closure, trending on Gfycat itself at the moment. (credit: Gfycat)

The Internet continues to get a bit more fragmented and less accessible every week. Within the past seven days, Reddit finished its purge of third-party clients, Twitter required accounts to view tweets (temporarily or not), and Google News started pulling news articles from its Canadian results.

Now there's one more to add: Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of September 1, according to a message on its homepage.

Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to "Please save or delete your Gfycat content." "After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com."

Enlarge / Just because you're still alive in a retro-futuristic-post-apocalyptic Commonwealth doesn't mean you're necessarily witty. (credit: Bethesda / ProfMajowski)

Modders can change many things inside their favorite games, but dialogue from professionally voiced characters hasn't been one of those things—at least until recently. AI voice generation could open up new modding avenues for some games, as it has already done with one Fallout 4 mod package.

Roleplayer's Expanded Dialogue (RED) is listed in the NexusMods catalog as a "Massive expansion of vanilla dialogue," adding more than 300 entirely new lines of dialogue to the game. Those lines aim to solve an issue near to the hearts of fans of Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas: role-playing. If you're playing as a ruthless jerk, a brilliant nuclear scientist, or a strong but dimwitted dolt, you'll see more dialogue options that reflect this. Mechanically, the roll-the-dice speech "checks," which are based solely on your charisma level in the default game, can now be unlocked using related traits or skills.

If you're going to let a player be a cannibal, let them talk about it, too. (credit: Bethesda / ProjMajowski)

They're not just new labels on existing dialogue, either. RED, created by NexusMods user ProfMajowski (and first seen by us at PCGamesN), says it used ElevenLabs voice AI to generate its more in-character lines. The results can sometimes "sound a little 'emotionless,'" the creator writes, but "otherwise they basically sound like the real thing." Nothing your character can newly say now will change the game's mechanics or reactions, but it should sound a bit more in character.

Enlarge / Curling, like the cURL project, requires precision and is underappreciated.

When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month.

The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project, it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL.

Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.

Enlarge / It took a lot of work for Ellie and Riley to play Mortal Kombat II in The Last of Us—and somehow just as much work, if not more, to be able to film it. (credit: HBO)

The Last of Us' HBO series went to great lengths to re-create a 2003 mall arcade for a recent episode. Two of the arcade enthusiasts hired on for that scene have detailed the triumphs and technical limitations they encountered, at length, in an arcade history forum thread.

In the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us, a cordyceps outbreak overtakes the world in 2003, leaving things much as they were in the 2023 world through which Joel and Ellie struggle. In episode 7, a flashback shows Ellie and a friend powering up and exploring an early-aughts mall, complete with a beautifully neon-lit arcade, left just as it was during the first George W. Bush administration.

Production designer John Paino told Variety that "Raja's Arcade" took its name and frontal appearance from the game's Left Behind DLC, but otherwise the production team built it from scratch. All the games had to actually work because creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann demanded it, according to Paino. But the original games would have had cathode-ray tube (CRT) screens, which—as anybody using a camera back then would remember—can be difficult to capture. "We rebuilt them on LED screens," Paino told Variety.

Enlarge / Can Call of Duty run on the existing Switch? Does Microsoft have inside details on Nintendo's next hardware? Or are we in for some contractually obligated potato skirmishes? (credit: Aurich Lawson)

[Update 3:35pm 02/21: This post has been updated with information about Microsoft's deal with Nvidia's GeForce Now, along with comments from Brad Smith in Brussels regarding both Nintendo and Nvidia deals.]

Microsoft appears to have made good on a promise to offer Call of Duty on Nintendo devices, a move seemingly aimed at calming antitrust concerns about its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft President and Vice-Chair Brad Smith tweeted the news early Tuesday morning, stating that Microsoft had "signed a binding 10-year contract to bring Xbox games to Nintendo's gamers." The contract is "just part of our commitment to bring Xbox games and Activision titles" to "more players on more platforms," Smith wrote.

Enlarge / Dark corridors, cyberpunk lighting, low ammo, mutated humanoids: same as it ever was.

Nobody was expecting to see a PC demo for the System Shock remake this week, least of all me. I've been waiting to revisit Citadel Station and its malevolent AI since the project's announcement nearly seven years ago. Having spent a couple hours in the first level, I'm certainly impressed but curious about some of the decisions and focus areas.

If you played and loved the original, this demo, and likely the full game, is almost certainly worth your while. You can punch 0451 into the medical storage locker like it's 1994 again, but this time at modern resolutions and frame rates, using far more comfortable controls, even a gamepad. You can blast and pipe-bash enemies, but they aren't Wolfenstein-era 2D sprites anymore. And, of course, you can play the game on Steam, GOG, or Epic, rather than having to find an ancient CD-ROM.

There are some new conveniences, like an entirely overhauled interface with better shortcuts for secondary items, like grenades and stim patches. But the beats of the story, the puzzles and enemies and traps, the very core of the innovative, quirky game is still there. You can still spend far too much time meticulously organizing your inventory and collecting scrap for junk credits, while supposedly in the midst of a humanity-endangering crisis.

Enlarge / Framework's blog post shares this Steam Deck image to illustrate its commitment to housing gigantic Steam backlogs. (credit: Framework)

Steam Deck and Microsoft Surface owners looking to get more SSD storage than is typically offered (and for less money) have a new, unexpected source: Framework, the repairable laptop company.

Seeing the need for reputable vendors of smaller-size M.2 drives, the company decided to "add one more line item" to its typical Western Digital drive order. As such, the company has started offering a 2TB M.2 2230 drive for $300 in its US and Canada stores. As of this writing, the drives are sold out, but you can sign up to be notified when they're back in stock.

Enlarge / "Link gets an ancient-tech ATV/combine/dragster" was not in most people's list of likely content in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. (credit: Nintendo)

Today's Nintendo Direct livestream gave those with sky-high but long-deferred Zelda hopes just enough to stay excited: ominous tones, real gameplay footage, a tease at a playable Zelda, and a definitive May 12 release date and preorder offer. And, not for nothing, a $70 price tag.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was announced in mid-2019, given a May 2023 release date, and had most of its details held back until today. At the end of Nintendo's regular showcase, Nintendo loosened the leash a bit on the Breath of the Wild sequel. Speaking over footage of dark, misty, eternally beset Hyrule, arch-villain Ganon speaks in his best after-school-cartoon-villain mode: "Rise, rise, my servants. Sweep over Hyrule. Eliminate this kingdom and her allies. Leave no survivors!"

In the quick-cut moments that follow, you can see familiar elements, like Sheikah technology, the blood moon, hang-gliding, and horse-riding. But there's also rail-riding, blimp-floating, a four-wheeler, a quad copter-like glider, the Hyrule equivalent of a rocket launcher, a high-tech glove, and, again, a real release date. Toward the end, Zelda's voice says, "Link, lend me your power," offering a loose but still real hint that the princess could be playable in this title.

Enlarge / The Vanpowers City Vanture. Spotting the "e" on this e-bike at a glance is trickier than most. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

A "city" bike could mean many different things. It could be cheap, so there's less angst when it is almost inevitably stolen. It might be simple, with fewer gears and add-ons because the commutes are short and relatively flat. Or perhaps it's a lighter bike, one more easily hauled onto a curb or up a flight of apartment or office stairs.

Vanpowers' City Vanture is cheap and light only compared to other e-bikes (fully assembled, it costs $1,750), but its belt drive, internal hub, and five-level assist make it somewhat simple. It's also limited by a lack of accessory mounts and a gearing and motor setup that makes it more difficult to start and stop often in traffic or climb steep hills. For the right kind of rider, it could be a good pick. But you'll want to look closely at the City Vanture before choosing it for your urban or trail commute.

Oh, and you can build it yourself if you want to save a few bucks. This bike is a collection of interlocking tubes held together by mortise-and-tenon construction and bolt collars. You put the tubes together, run the cables through them, bolt everything else on, and put the wheels in place. More on that in a bit.

Enlarge / We don't have to rely on megacorp obelisks to operate the things we buy. We don't have to learn their language. We can break free. (credit: PonyWang/Getty Images)

For many people, an automated smart home is about little things that add up to big conveniences over time. Lights turning on when you pull into the driveway, a downstairs thermostat adjustable from your upstairs bedroom, a robot vacuum working while you're at the grocery store—you put in a bit of setup work and your life gets easier.

What most smart homes also include, however, is a voice assistant, the opposite of a quiet, unseen convenience. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: They demand that you learn specific device names and structures for commands, while they frequently get even the most simple command astoundingly wrong. And they are, of course, an always-listening corporate microphone you're allowing inside your home.

There are ways to keep that smart home convenience while cutting out the conversation. Some involve your phone, some dedicated devices, but none of them involve saying a device's name. Here's an overview of the best options available.

Enlarge / The theft of Riot Games' source code for League of Legends, TeamFight Tactics, and an anti-cheat platform could have implications for future cheats and exploits. (credit: Riot Games)

Riot Games has confirmed that an attack on its development environment last week included the theft of source code for its League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics games, along with a "legacy anticheat platform." The company has received a ransom demand but states that it will not pay.

The release of source code by the attackers, whether publicly or by sale, could have implications for cheat software, providing direct knowledge of the game's mechanisms rather than relying on reverse engineering. Riot acknowledged that the attack, attributed to "social engineering," "could cause issues in the future," but added that it was confident "no player data or player personal information was compromised."

"Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging," Riot posted in a reply tweet. "Since the attack, we've been working to assess its impact on anticheat and to be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed." Riot added that the code "includes a number of experimental features," though it's mostly "in prototype and there's no guarantee it will ever be released."

Enlarge / Holding up corporations, utilities, and hospitals for malware-encrypted data used to be quite profitable. But it's a tough gig lately, you know? (credit: ifanfoto/Getty Images)

Two new studies suggest that ransomware isn't the lucrative, enterprise-scale gotcha it used to be. Profits to attackers' wallets, and the percentage of victims paying, fell dramatically in 2022, according to two separate reports.

Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm that has worked with a number of law enforcement and government agencies, suggests in a blog post that based on payments to cryptocurrency addresses it has identified as connected to ransomware attacks, payments to attackers fell from $766 million in 2021 to $457 million last year. The firm notes that its wallet data does not provide a comprehensive study of ransomware; it had to revise its 2021 total upward from $602 for this report. But Chainalysis' data does suggest payments—if not attacks—are down since their pandemic peak.

Chainalysis' data from ransomware wallets suggests a marked decrease in payments to attackers last year—though the number of attacks may not have declined so markedly. (credit: Chainalysis)

Chainalysis' post also shows attackers switching between malware strains more quickly, and more known attackers are keeping their funds in mainstream cryptocurrency exchanges instead of the illicit and funds-mixing destinations that were more popular in ransomware boom times. This might look like a sign of a mature market with a higher cost of entry. But there's more to it than typical economics, Chainalysis suggests.

Enlarge / Here's the line that Twitter added to its API Developer Agreement on Jan. 19, two days after it cited "long-standing API rules" for why third-party apps may not be working. (credit: diffchecker)

"Long-standing" can apparently mean "later this week" at Elon Musk's Twitter, as the company has changed its developer agreement to seemingly justify its banning of third-party clients. The change happened two days after a vague tweet about "enforcing long-standing API rules" without pointing to any.

As noted by Internet sage Andy Baio, a text comparison (diff check) of Twitter's developer agreement between the effective dates of October 10, 2022, and January 19, 2023, shows only one change besides the effective date: a new line added to the section "Restrictions on Use of Licensed Materials." The addition restricts the ability of developers to:

c) use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications;

With that, Twitter put an end to an era, one in which third-party clients not only coexisted with Twitter's official app—originally based on Tweetie, an early third-party app itself—but often introduced and drove new features. Twitter's official apps and its website are now the only reliable ways to access the service.

Enlarge / It's not actual GeForce RTX 4080 cards slotted into GeForce Now's "Superpods," but Nvidia says the hardware is pretty close. (credit: Nvidia)

Cloud-based gaming service GeForce Now's new Ultimate tier is rolling out today, promising a series of adjectives about game streaming that might have seemed impossible just a few years ago: high-resolution, ray-traced, AI-upscaled, low-latency, high-refresh-rate, and even competition-ready.

I tested out the Ultimate tier, powered by Nvidia's RTX 4080 "SuperPODs," for a week on a server set up for reviewer early access. If I hadn't been hyper-conscious of frame numbers and hiccups, I could have been tricked into thinking the remote 4080 rig was local. Ultimate streaming can also be "better than local," such as when it lets you stream a AAA, ray-traced game on a low-powered laptop, tablet, or TV with no console attached.

Ars had previously described our GeForce Now 3080 experience as "dreamy" and called the performance "a white-hot stunner that rivals the computing power you can muster" with the same RTX 3080 card in your PC. It's easy to lay at least the same kind of praise on the new Ultimate tier. It replaces the previous RTX 3080 option with the next generation's chipset for the same price ($20 per month, $99 for six months). That might be a steep price tag for a service that mostly makes you buy your games, but given the 4080's $1,200 price, the rent-versus-buy question is worth considering at this level.

Enlarge / Mui Labs' Mui Board 2nd Gen embodies the loftiest promise of Matter: a wooden board, from a company you've likely never heard of, controlling devices made by many different companies, even if they're already connected to other apps. (credit: Mui)

First came the specification, then the release, and then CES 2023—it has been a busy few months for Matter, the smart home connectivity standard. You can't quite fill your home just yet with Matter-ready devices, but there are some intriguing options in development. Here's a look at some of the most practical, quirky, and viable gear coming soon (or soon-ish).

Some parts of Matter are already here

If you wanted to start your smart home off fresh this year with a focus on Matter-powered universal compatibility, you already have a couple pieces of the puzzle ready for you. Let's go bit by bit, starting with your phone.

Your phone, whether iOS or Android, can scan the QR code or read the Bluetooth signal of a Matter-certified device. Most platforms support adding devices to a controller through an Android app, but only Apple's HomeKit and Samsung's SmartThings have support for iOS device enrollment. Amazon has said it plans to add iOS enrollment for Thread-based devices this spring but already supports devices over Wi-Fi.

Enlarge / Twitter is blocking many third-party clients' access to its API while continuing to provide no explanation. (credit: Ryan J Lane/Getty Images)

Twitter has not yet explained why third-party clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot stopped working late last week. But a new report and testing by one app developer suggest the outages and lack of communication are intentional.

Internal Twitter Slack chat messages viewed by The Information (subscription required) show a senior software engineer writing in a "command center" channel that "third-party app suspensions are intentional." Another employee, asking about talking points to use when addressing the outages with product partners, was told by a product marketing manager that Twitter had "started to work on comms," but there was no delivery date, according to The Information's report.

Some Tweetbot users seemed to briefly regain account access early Sunday, without the ability to post, only to lose access again later. That resulted from Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad swapping out the app's API keys, but all of his keys were later revoked. That result "proves that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted," Haddad wrote on Mastodon Sunday evening, as noticed by The Verge.