An automated Twitter account that posted Wordle spoilers to people who shared their results has been suspended.
The spoilsport bot replied to folks sharing their results, posting the solution to the next day’s puzzle and, for good measure, adding an insulting message along the lines of, “People don’t care about your linguistic escapades,” and, “This doesn’t make you look smart.”
Wordle, an addictive daily word puzzle that recently took the world by storm, challenges players to discover a five-letter word within six tries. One of the features that helped it to go viral is that it lets you share your result with others without giving away the solution.
The daily dose of delight that the game brought to people’s lives, and the fun of sharing the result, prompted some miserable soul to create The Wordlinator, a bot account “sent from the future to terminate Wordle bragging,” according to its bio.
As noted by GameSpot, the bot appeared shortly after media reports about Robert Reichel, a software engineer who found a way to uncover Wordle’s daily solution by deciphering the game’s source code, suggesting the person behind The Wordlinator used Reichel’s shared discovery to create the automated account.
While Twitter has zapped that particular bot, other similar attempts to ruin Wordle’s daily challenge could be incoming, so keep your eyes peeled if you’re sharing your results on the microblogging service.
When Wordle began to take off earlier this month, a number of unscrupulous developers tried to cash in by creating mobile apps that copied the web-only game.
The move was particularly disappointing as Wordle‘s creator, Josh Wardle, was keen not to monetize his game, whether through ads or other means.
Many of the copies have now been taken down, though at least one, called Wordle!, remains. That’s because it was created several years ago by developer Steven Cravotta.
With Wordle’s success, Cravotta’s own app started to generate revenue after years of inactivity, prompting the developer to reach out to Wardle with the idea of donating the proceeds from his app to a charity agreed by both.
Wardle was delighted by the gesture, describing Cravotta as “a class act.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.