Month: January 2021

Nintendo is using copyright strikes to take down YouTube videos that detail how to hack the recently released Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. color handheld.

A hacker going by the handle stacksmashing managed to hack the portable unit a day before its official November 13 release, thanks to an early retail delivery. But a YouTube video detailing that hacking method, originally posted on November 14, was taken down by a targeted copyright claim from Nintendo earlier this week. Another stacksmashing video, entitled "Bringing homebrew to the Nintendo Game & Watch," has also been taken down by an apparent copyright claim.

Two other stacksmashing videos on Game & Watch hacking remain up as of press time: one detailing how to load a Doom port onto the unit, and one discussing how to dump the firmware. Neither of these extant videos features footage of Nintendo's own games shown running on the Game & Watch; such footage is specifically blurred out in one of the videos, in fact.

Enlarge / The three months between July and September 2020 saw a massive rise in road deaths in the United States. (credit: Getty Images)

American roads became significantly deadlier in 2020, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Although figures for the entire year won't be available for some time, the NHTSA has calculated the death toll on our roads for the first nine months of 2020, and the news is grim. Between the beginning of January and the end of September last year, 28,190 people were killed in crashes, which is an increase of 4.6 percent—or 1,249 more deaths—over the same nine months in 2019. (The full statistics for 2020 won't be available until later this year.)

What makes this increase even worse news is the fact that 2019 actually saw a decrease in road deaths, which declined by two percent compared to 2018. In fact, when the NHTSA released the 2019 statistics in late December of last year, it included a preliminary analysis of the first half of 2020 and found that during those six months, the traffic volume decreased by 16 percent, and road deaths declined by 3.3 percent over the same time period.

(As the decrease in vehicle miles traveled was greater than the decrease in deaths, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled actually increased from 1.06 to 1.25 when comparing 1H 2019 and 1H 2020.)

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Parler may never recover from being banned by Amazon and a number of other technology companies, CEO John Matze told Reuters in a Wednesday interview.

“I am an optimist," he said at one point in the conversation. "It may take days, it may take weeks but Parler will return and when we do we will be stronger.”

But at another point in the conversation, he acknowledged, "It could be never. We don’t know yet."