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Bully alertIs it really that difficult to just let people enjoy things?ShutterstockWordle is a simple, free online game with a devoted fanbase, so of course, someone’s come along with plans to stomp all over it. In this case, the ruination comes in the form of a Twitter account that purposefully spoils the next day’s answer for anyone tweeting about Wordle.The person behind the account, which goes by @wordlinator on Twitter, is currently unknown. The bot has been searching out people who tweet about Wordle just to respond with discouraging messages and spoilers for tomorrow’s word. “Guess what,” the account tweeted. “People don’t care about your mediocre linguistic escapades.”There’s some good news here, though, which is that the Wordlinator account has been suspended just days after it first began its witch hunt. But it’s also been revived more than once already. Tread carefully, Wordlers.The danger of reverse engineering — The Extremely Online often find themselves completely unable to enjoy something fun without poking and prodding at it — which is how we now understand exactly how Wordle ticks. Software engineer Robert Reichel posted earlier this month on his website that he’d discovered a method by which to reverse engineer Wordle’s algorithm…

Twitter has banned @wordlinator, a bot that replied to people’s Wordle posts with rude messages that include spoilers for the next day’s game. The account’s spoilers appeared to be accurate (the key is easily accessible in the game’s code, so it’s not necessarily a surprise), which could end up ruining the game for anyone who sees them. For anyone who’s managed to avoid it, Wordle is a game where you get six chances to guess a five-letter word — if you’re interested, you can learn how to play it here. The answer is the same for everyone playing, and it only changes once a day. The game also has an interesting sharing mechanic, where you can copy and paste a series of emoji to let people know how easy or hard it was for you to guess the word of the day. If you’ve seen a ton of yellow, gray, and green squares on Twitter, they’re probably either Wordle results or a joke about Wordle. The bot wasn’t well-received by Wordle fans. Given that the game is about guessing a word, knowing what the next one will be can ruin the entire point. It’s also one of those things that’s…

The team at Twitter Safety wants to make the social network a more peaceful place. So, who better to help than Peacemaker himself?The vainglorious superhero — and sometimes villain — played by John Cena, believes in peace at any cost, no matter how many people have to be killed. So Twitter Safety allowed him to pitch some ideas and caught them on video.All of the ideas he pitched, however, already exist on Twitter. But he did suggest some…uh…interesting new names for the functions.Pitch No. 1 from Peacemaker was for a way to “soft-block” people.“If haters follow me, they can just tweet some unpeaceful bullshit,” he said. “We should come up with a way to remove them.”Twitter already allows users to Remove Followers as relationships change over time.Allowing @DCPeacemaker to join our team meetings to pitch his ideas has been. . . well. . .Anyway, good news is we’ve already made a way to remove followers (or, you know, soft-block ‘em). pic.twitter.com/mFPhb5EouO— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 20, 2022Peacemaker also pitched an idea for Twitter to enable a “simp mode” to “prevent unwanted simps” from replying to users. This is similar to Twitter’s Safety Mode setting, of course, but Twitter is trying to…

Indian bowler Deepak Chahar’s rearguard act went in vain as South Africa managed to win a thrilling final ODI to whitewash India 3-0 in the ODI series. Chasing 288, the visitors were once again propelled by a second-wicket partnership between Shikhar Dhawan and Virat Kohli. Both of them reached their fifties before being dismissed. Shreyas Iyer and Suryakumar Yadav got starts but couldn’t convert them into anything substantial. However, a stunning partnership for the eighth wicket between Chahar and Jasprit Bumrah tilted the scales in the Men in Blue’s favor. Image Source: Twitter Chahar smashed his way to a 31-ball 50 and looked set to take the visitors home. Unfortunately, a lapse in concentration saw him throw his wicket away with just 10 runs remaining. The tail couldn’t wag further and the last two wickets fell within five runs to hand the Proteas a 4-run victory. Earlier, the Proteas got off to a poor start. They lost their first three wickets with just 70 runs on the board. However, as has been the case throughout the series, India failed to break the fourth wicket stand. Quinton de Kock and Rassie van der Dussen put on 144 runs for the fourth…

Waking up Sunday morning in Chicago to five inches of snow and Dick Butkus trolling Aaron Rodgers was a beautiful thing. And in case that tweet was too cryptic, Butkus followed it up with: “maybe its me but it almost seemed like @AaronRodgers12 was distracted last night like someone was in his head.” The Chicago Bears great, naturally, was referring to himself. Two days earlier Butkus, celebrated being verified on Twitter — a long-running saga in which Butkus poked fun at the social media company for not recognizing him as being blue checkmark-worthy. When Butkus finally was accepted, he sent out another punctually-challenged tweet: “now that i have the blue mark i can kick people off the platfrom right you hear me @AaronRodgers” Seeing the Hall of Fame linebacker trolling the future Hall of Fame quarterback for the Packers may have been the highlight of the season for Bears fans, who’ve watched Rodgers beat their team year after year and then proclaim after a 2021 win in Soldier Field he “owns” them. While Chairman George McCaskey and his wolf pack continue their exhaustive search process for a new general manager and coach — one that undoubtedly will leave no stone…

Presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. THE camp of presidential candidate Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. (BBM) on Saturday hit back at an online news network over its apparent attempts to discredit its campaign by using a "disinformation network to take down what it alleged as a disinformation network."Lawyer Victor Rodriguez, Marcos chief of staff and spokesman, issued the statement after it was reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Twitter suspended hundreds of accounts reportedly linked to supporters of Marcos based on the accounts and hashtags identified in a recent article by local news site Rappler.The son and namesake of the country's former president is drawing support from a massive social media campaign seeking to get him elected in May, which critics claim is attempting to rewrite the family's history. In a statement to AFP on Saturday, Twitter said the more than 300 accounts had been removed "for violating our platform manipulation and spam policy" and that an investigation was ongoing.Twitter said sharing political content on an account or rallying people do so via hashtags was allowed, "unless the accounts are inauthentic, compensated or automated, which we see no clear evidence of in this case." Twitter said that "with the Philippine…

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. Learn more. Out with the circle, in with the hexagon. Twitter has started to experiment with non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures.The company announced on Jan. 20 that it was introducing NFT profile pics as a Labs feature to some Twitter Blue subscribers. That means collectors of these blockchain-backed JPEGs can replace their circular avatars with a hexagonal representations of their favorite NFTs. Tweet "Right now subscribers can only set an NFT as their profile picture from the Twitter for iOS app," Twitter says, "but the hexa-shaped profile picture is seen across all platforms."NFTs are predicated upon a particular understanding of what it means to "own" digital art. Anyone can duplicate a given NFT with a single right-click, but for collectors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, having proof of ownership recorded on their blockchain of choice is important.That's why Twitter's new profile pictures require users to connect a cryptocurrency wallet to their profiles. That connection allows Twitter Blue users to confirm that they own the NFT they want to use as their profile picture—and that they want the hexagonal frame that…

(Reuters) – Twitter Inc said on Friday its head of security is no longer at the company and its chief information security officer will depart in the coming weeks.The shakeup comes after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as chief executive in November, handing the reins to top deputy Parag Agrawal, who has since reorganized the leadership structure of the social media company.Twitter did not specify whether the departures were voluntary.Peiter Zatko, a famed hacker more widely known as “Mudge,” was appointed head of security in 2020 after Twitter suffered a security breach that allowed hackers to tweet from verified accounts for public figures including billionaire Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.The New York Times first reported Zatko’s departure and Rinki Sethi’s upcoming departure as CISO earlier on Friday. Zatko and Sethi could not be immediately reached for comment.(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

“Despite the positivity around NFT use cases, there’s a lot of distrust in the community—perhaps due to the anonymity of key artists and influencers, and almost certainly due to the scammers that circle like vultures and frequent rug pulls,” says PJ Cooper, founder of Pandimensional Trading Co., which is launching its own NFT collection later this year. Despite those reservations, Cooper is largely supportive of Twitter’s entry into the NFT space, and says he will display an NFT as his profile picture when functionality rolls out to the UK.Cooper does, however, have worries about the fact that people can still right-click and save NFT profile pictures and mint their own version of them as NFTs.A company spokesperson for NFT marketplace OpenSea, Allie Mack, confirmed that NFT profile pictures that appear on Twitter are verified through the company’s site. In fact, Twitter uses API, metadata, and collection information from OpenSea to authenticate an NFT displayed on a user’s profile and turns it into a “soft hexagon” on the site. Around the same time as Twitter launched NFTs, OpenSea crashed. At the time, security researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted that OpenSea’s platform had taken out Twitter’s NFT feature. OpenSea says that the…