Sqword is a word game where you try to make as many words as you can in a five-by-five square grid, earning more points for longer words. It was made by Josh C. Simmons and his friends, and is freely available at sqword.com. However, it’s also been picked up by multiple browser game portals, who took it without permission and ran it behind their own ads for profit.

As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. “The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page”, he wrote. “I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.”

On the off-chance you have somehow missed out on encountering Goatse over the years, it’s a photograph of a bent-over man stretching out his…

Elden Ring got an update today, and things are getting downright illuminated in The Lands Between. The 1.09 patch brings a slate of bug fixes and makes all sorts of tweaks to Elden Ring’s weapons and combat, but the headline item here is that the game is finally getting ray tracing support. There’s just one problem: You probably won’t want to actually use it.

You can go switch ray tracing on in Elden Ring’s graphics menu, but what you won’t find there is a toggle for Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR support, the miraculous frame generation tech that lets you maintain a playable framerate even with taxing graphical gewgaws turned on. That means actually activating ray tracing has the potential to slow your game to a slideshow, especially at high resolutions.

That’s probably why FromSoft’s minimum and recommended specs for Elden Ring’s new ray tracing mode both suggest you play the game at 1080p: Any higher and you’d begin to sacrifice too many frames. 

To be fai…

Speaking at the recent Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, Warner Bros Discovery executive JB Perrette said the company wants to expand more into free-to-play and live service games in order to avoid the “volatile” ups and downs of big-budget game releases.

It has indeed been a volatile year for Warner. The company rode into 2023 on the success of Hogwarts Legacy, “the best selling game of the year in the entire industry worldwide,” but a year later Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed to live up to expectations, a stumble Warner said left its games business facing “a tough year-over-year comp” in its first financial quarter. Tough enough, apparently, to force a shift in long-term strategy.

“Our business historically has been very triple-A console-based,” Perrette said near the end of his session. “That’s a great business when you have a hit like Harry Potter, it makes the year look amazing. And then when you don’t have a release, or unfort…