Written by Joseph Albahari In 1987, an urban legend was born. It was reported that 14 trucks of Atari products were taken from a factory in El Paso, Texas to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The legend revolved around the failure of one particular game: “ET: The Extraterrestrial.” Zak Penn, writer of “The Avengers,” was intrigued by this tale ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari Are your passwords safe? That depends on when you last changed them. On April 7, it was made public that the security of the Internet was compromised by the Heartbleed bug. Heartbleed, or CVE-2014-0160 as it is technically named, is an OpenSSL security bug that has affected about 17 percent of the internet’s websites. The bug ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari With the help of generous Kickstarter donations, tech company Oculus VR was set to revolutionize the world of gaming. But in March, much to the dismay of the Internet, Facebook decided to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, commented on the deal after it was made public. “After games, we’re ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari While most people are focusing on the Final Four of college basketball, there’s another kind of “March Madness” going on in the world of finance. Electronic Arts, the company behind the Battlefield games, the Madden games and The Sims, has been dethroned as The Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America.” The Consumerist, a consumer’s finance blog, holds ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari The Infinite Monkey Theorem states, “With one thousand monkeys typing on a typewriter, eventually one will write Shakespeare.” That deduction was considered when an anonymous programmer decided to create a program that allowed multiple people to play the same game simultaneously.  The social experiment named “Twitch Plays Pokémon” began on Feb. 12 and was hosted by ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari Daft Punk is not the only musical robot group storming the media in 2014. Z-Machine, an all-robot band created by Yoichiro Kawaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and designed by Naofumi Yonetsuka, a fellow robotics engineer of the university, has come into the spotlight. Kawaguchi and the other creators worked with Squarepusher, a recording ...

Written by: Joseph Albahari Sometimes, what is created must also be destroyed. Flappy Bird, one of the most downloaded games of 2014 across IOS, Windows and Android marketplaces has been removed this week at the request of its creator. Created by Dong Nguyen and developed by DotGears Studios, Flappy Bird was first released in May of 2013, but the game ...