Greetings and salutations! Welcome to Replay, where every week we catch you up on all the biggest videogame news—and, in this case, the conventions you maybe can manage to skip. Let’s get to it.Activision Blizzard Just Pulled Its Games From Nvidia’s GeForce Now Streaming ServiceLast week, Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service opened up to people…
At a cozy party in 2014, Case Marsteller caught a rare, shiny Honedge Pokémon in Pokémon X on her Nintendo 3DS. It was a precious moment, made significantly more so after a close friend, who was playing Pokémon X alongside her at the party, passed away shortly after. It was the last time she would…
On Tuesday of this week Samsung held its annual Galaxy Unpacked event in San Francisco. It did what most tech companies set out to do when they host a big event: Announce shiny new products (Galaxy S20! Another folding phone! Some earbuds!) and get customers stoked for features like “sub-6 5G compatibility” and “Space Zoom.”…
United States policymakers have long sought ways to boost federal agencies’ capacity to implement cybersecurity and plan for significant cyber incidents. As early as 2002, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon advocated for the creation of the National Emergency Technology Guard (NETGuard), a corps of volunteers with technology experience who could help following a cyber incident.Fast…
Hi everyone, and welcome to the third edition of Plaintext. I hope that this newsletter has become one more good reason to look forward to Friday. (I now look forward to Friday because it means the newsletter is done and I don’t have to worry about the next one until … Sunday?) If you are…
Any device or service that gets people out of a fossil-fuel-guzzling, congestion-creating death machine (er, car) is great. But when it comes to e-scooters, I’m a big fan of owning your own, rather than renting one.If you own your own scooter, you’re more likely to be familiar with its operation. You won’t be thrilled by…
Last June, at a swanky, strobe-lit event in Washington, DC, Brendan Blumer, the 33-year-old CEO of a blockchain company called Block.one, unveiled a new product with Steve Jobs-like theatrics: a social network called Voice. A year earlier, Blumer’s company had raised $4 billion selling a crypto token called EOS. It was, by far, the largest-ever…
A few years back, Mark Zuckerberg began a listening tour across America that looked to all the world like the prelude to a run for office. Many guessed 2020 as the year that a billionaire startup founder would make his case for disruptive leadership on behalf of the American people. In fact, the social media…
Nothing exists in pop culture without a mutation. Artists have borrowed (or happily stolen) from their contemporaries for centuries, but with the way meme culture raucously spreads online, every bit of today’s pop art—rap songs, Marvel characters, memorable scenes from Bravo reality shows—ends up repurposed by fans through add-on. A 25-second clip from The Real…
Last month, the cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike was getting settled on an airplane when his seatmate, a Midwestern-looking man in his sixties, asked for help. He couldn’t figure out how to enable airplane mode on his aging Android phone. But when Marlinspike saw the screen, he wondered for a moment if he…
