SEGA Accused of “Anti-Consumer” Behavior With “Rushed” Sonic Mania Plus Protection
Since their aim is to prevent people from copying titles and playing them for free, no anti-piracy technologies are popular with pirates. Underlying this emotion is a kind of unofficial ‘hate-scale,’ in which the level of a dislike for a particular system increases proportionately to its success on the ground. Denuvo, one of the most prominent and difficult to crack anti-piracy technologies, is hated most of all. Denuvo...
NetEase Refutes PUBG’s Copyright Infringement Claims in Court
When PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) was first released last year, it became an instant hit. This success earned the company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but according to PUBG, this could have been much more if others hadn’t copied their work. The general theme of PUBG is now used by many games, which is a thorn in the side of the developer. To protect its financial interests, the company, therefore,...
Convert video using Handbrake
Recently, when my son asked me to digitally convert some old DVDs of his high school basketball games, I immediately knew I would use Handbrake. It is an open source package that has all the tools necessary to easily convert video into formats that can be played on MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and other platforms. read...
How to build a URL shortener with Apache
Long ago, folks started sharing links on Twitter. The 140-character limit meant that URLs might consume most (or all) of a tweet, so people turned to URL shorteners. Eventually, Twitter added a built-in URL shortener (t.co). read...
A brief history of text-based games and open source
The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and improvement of technologies enabling the digital art form we call interactive fiction. When a Community Moderator for Opensource.com suggested an article about IFTF, the technologies and services it supports, and how it all intersects with open source, I found it a novel angle to the decades-long story I’ve so...
