Self-destructing messaging apps Snapchat and Poke aren't as "safe" as you thought. A loophole that allows users to save videos to their computer has been discovered.

Snapchat messages aren’t as fleeting as we thought. While we all know photos can be saved via screen shots, videos hadn’t yet aroused much concern. But Buzzfeed discovered a loophole that will allow you to retrieve, save, and rewatch both Snapchat and Poke videos.

Just when you thought there was the perfect app for self-destructing messages, it’s too good to be true. When the recipient of the message takes a screen shot to save an image sent through Poke and Snapchat, the sender is alerted. This isn’t the case if the recipient decides to access the temporary file. So how does it work?

Even on your computer, files are stored locally as a temporary file and the same goes for files sent to and from your smartphone. These files though aren’t visible unless you download an iPhone, iPad, iPod file browser to your desktop, like iFunBox — which for the record doesn’t require you to jailbreak your phone either.

When you’ve received a video through Poke or Snapchat, don’t open the file. If the video is opened when using Poke and played, the temporary file disappears and there’s no way of retrieving it. Instead connect your iOS device to your computer and open up the iPhone file browser where you can view all of the files inside of your phone.

To access Snapchat videos, access the Snapchat folder. Within this is a folder is a subfolder labeled “tmp,” which stands for “temporary.” You’ll find the temporary files of the videos here.

To view and save the temporary files from Poke, you’ll have to navigate to Poke/library/caches/fbstore/mediacard.

Buzzfeed notes that while Poke videos disappear after viewing it, Snapchat’s videos instead linger around. And the loophole doesn’t work for photos since they’re not cached.

Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel doesn’t appear to be fazed enough by this loophole to patch it and chalks it up to the nature of the app. He tells Buzzfeed, “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!”

Facebook, on the other hand, is working on a fix.

Loophole or no loophole, there really is no panacea for protecting users from duplicating content sent to and from any of these “self-destructing” apps. If someone really wanted to record a video or photo without alerting the sender, most would opt to use another device and record the clips or take a photo of the image. If you’re under the impression that these apps have your privacy in mind, consider this a wake up call. 

The PlayStation 2 ends its historic run in Japan just shy of its thirteenth birthday as Sony finally stops shipping the console in its home country. It is the best selling home gaming console ever made.

After nearly thirteen years, the PlayStation 2 is finally starting its slow ride into the sunset. The best selling home console ever made is still a sales force around the world getting new releases like FIFA 13 in countries across Europe and Asia. In its homeland, though, the PlayStation 2 is at the end of the road.

Famitsu magazine announced on Friday that Sony will officially stop shipping new PlayStation2 consoles to the Japanese market. The PlayStation 2 made its first public debut at a pre-E3 Sony event in April 1999. Early games like Namco’s Tekken Tag Tournament and Squaresoft’s (the previous incarnation of Square-Enix) The Bouncer wowed audiences with their high-end graphics. When the console released in Japan on March 4, 2000 it was an immediate sales success though its launch line up of games received a critical drubbing. The same was true following the console’s release in the United States in October 2000. Though game makers accused Sony’s hardware of being cumbersome to design for and struggled to port Sega Dreamcast games to the system, within a year the PlayStation 2 played host to some of the most creative and exciting games of the decade, from sequels like Metal Gear Solid 2 and new titles like Devil May Cry.

The potency of the system endures today. Though Sony is stopping shipments of the PlayStation 2 in Japan, new games for the system will continue to be released by major publishers. Square-Enix will release the latest expansion for its popular MMO, Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Andoulin, in March 2013.

The system will also continue to ship around the world. The PlayStation 2 was only released in Brazil in 2009, a country where the console still enjoys brisk sales. The PlayStation 2 remains a dominant force in India as well. Over the July to September quarter of this year, the 12-year-old console contributed to more than 3.5 million home console sales for the company.

Up until this December, the PlayStation 2 was the best selling devoted video game hardware ever released but it was finally surpassed by the Nintendo DS. Nintendo’s handheld hit 153.69 million units sold, just beating out the PlayStation 2’s 153.68 million. 

Blizzard announced player-versus-player modes for Diablo 3 years before the game actually released, but delayed the release of those modes for months into 2012. With days to go until 2013, Blizzard has killed the game's Team Deathmatch mode.

Diablo 3 is unfinished. Blizzard promised the game would release with player-versus-player modes, then said those modes would be released shortly after the game in 2012. With days left in the year, those modes still haven’t been released and now Blizzard is saying one of those modes won’t ship at all.

There will be no Team Deathmatch in Diablo 3. In a Thursday update on the official Diablo 3 website, director Jay Wilson explained why PvP modes for the game haven’t been released yet, how far along in development they are, and why there will no longer be Team Deathmatch in the game.

“Our original intent with PvP for Diablo 3 was to profide more formal support for the dueling community that existed in Diablo 2,” said Wilson, “This is how Team Deathmatch mode emerged, and it’s been instrumental in making a lot of improvements to Diablo 3. But in continuing to develop this mode, playtest it, and put it infront of other developers within the company, we’ve found that it falls short of our expectations for a high-quality Blizzard experience.”

“For us it comes to a few issues, one of which is depth. Simply fighting each other with no other objective or choices to make gets old relatively quickly,” Wilson went on, “Another is class balance. Like Diablo 2, Diablo 3 was designed to be a PvE-first kind of game, where we never compromised on player abilities in the name of future PvP balance.”

While dueling will make it into the game with patch 1.0.7 at an unspecified date in 2013, Team Deathmatch will not. Wilson explained that the studio plans to replace it with something and may eventually release the current version at some point, but for now there will be no Team Deathmatch.

Few games better represented the modern video game industry in 2012 than Blizzard’s Diablo 3. Every aspect of the business is in this sequel. The unchanging reliance on franchises for big sales; the volatile nature of monetizing games; piracy protection; the difficulty of embracing creativity while also satisfying an audience in constant dialogue with the creators; and the shifting expectations for single player games. Love it or hate it, Diablo 3 is the essential modern game, a lavish product with a severe identity crisis. It’s also been a changing game, updated consistently since its release despite more than four years of development and balancing.