Month: February 2016

Update: On at least some Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 cabinets, the EJB menu trick can also be used to set the cabinet to free play mode, letting you (and anyone else) grab a game without putting in any quarters, as shown in this video. Given that, it's probably a good thing for arcade owners everywhere that this trick remained secret for so long.

Original Story

Gamers of a certain age probably remember paging through dog-eared copies of GamePro and other monthly magazines to discover the numerous hidden characters and secrets embedded in the highly popular Mortal Kombat games. There's at least one Mortal Kombat secret that never made the pages of those magazines, however. It's a secret that was just recently revealed after over 20 years of secrecy.

(credit: David Stanley)

About 1.3 million IP addresses—including those used by Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, and Yelp—are turning users of the Tor anonymity network into second-class Web citizens by blocking them outright or degrading the services offered to them, according to a recently published research paper.

Titled "Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users," the paper said 3.67 percent of websites in the Alexa 1,000 discriminated against computers visiting with known Tor exit-node IP addresses. In some cases, the visitors are completely locked out, while in others users are required to complete burdensome CAPTCHAs or are limited in what they can do. The authors said the singling out was an attempt by the sites to limit fraud and other online crime, which is carried out by a disproportionately high percentage of Tor users. In the process, law-abiding Tor users are being treated as second-class Web citizens.

"While many websites block Tor to reduce abuse, doing so inadvertently impacts users from censored countries who do not have other ways to access censored Internet content," the authors wrote.

(credit: Apple)

Apple's Siri personal assistant will finally be coming to OS X 10.12 when the OS is released later this year, according to a report from 9to5Mac. According to the report, a Siri icon will live in the menu bar in the upper-right corner of the screen along with icons for Spotlight, the Notification Center, and other features. Users will also be able to use a keyboard shortcut to bring up Siri, which will be an optional feature that can be enabled during first-time setup or in System Preferences (much as it works in iOS today).

Microsoft's Cortana feature made a similar jump from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 last year, and Google supports its "OK Google" voice commands in Chrome OS as well.

Since launching on the iPhone 4S in 2011, Siri has become a mainstay in most of Apple's products; it spread to the iPad relatively quickly, it came to the Apple TV when it was refreshed last year, and it's a primary input method for the Apple Watch. OS X already supports an optional Dictation feature for turning speech into text—in other words, the feature is a natural and long-awaited addition to the Mac platform.