Remember vuvuzelas, those annoying, high-decibel plastic noisemakers that everyone got obsessed with during World Cup season and then promptly stopped talking about? Game maker Ubisoft does, and it’s incorporated them into a Michael Jackson-themed Nintendo DS game as an anti-piracy measure. This just may beat the whole StarForce thing.

If you pirate the game (which Tiny Cartridge says isn’t particularly good, for the record) and attempt to play the ROM, touchscreen cues won’t display, and, more troublingly, the shrill sounds of the vuvuzela will buzz over the music in the game, drowning it out.

Check it out below:

Another day, another installment of Will It Blend, where the answer always seems to be a resounding “Yes!” This time, we’re blending what could be the most loathed non-oil inanimate entity of current events: the vuvuzela. After demonstrating it’s full ear-blasting potential, Tom shreds it to tiny, silent pieces with his blending abilities. Don’t try this at home. Not because of the danger or the fumes, just because we don’t want to fuel the vuvuzela market.

Five months ago, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be releasing a “magical” device called the iPad. While it received decidedly mixed first impressions from the tech press at the time, Apple has had the last laugh, with 3 million iPads sold in its first 80 days. Love it or hate it, the iPad is here to stay — as are gimmicky, viral video- and photo-ready uses for it.

During these first five months, there have been creative, bizarre, and bizarrely creative uses for the iPad aplenty, propelled by an Internet that can’t seem to get enough of them. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to catalog them all in one place for posterity’s sake:

If you groggily signed onto YouTube this morning, you may have noticed a football soccer ball-shaped button on many of your videos’ bottom panel. You may then have pressed that button, and discovered a buzzing vuvuzela that drowns out the audio of whatever you’re watching. If you are like many people, you then proceeded to either Google “youtube vuvuzela” or Tweet about it (or post a Facebook status update about it, maybe?) because YouTube’s vuvuzela hax is currently a top trend on both Twitter and Google search. Truly, the World Cup brings nations together.

A vuvuzela is a long, plastic horn that soccer fans blow into to produce a loud, irritating buzzing noise; they have inexplicably become the Internet’s central obsession in the opening week of the 2010 World Cup. Auto-Tune is a pioneering pitch correction program by Antares Audio Technology, which you most likely associate with the robotic vocal stylings of T-Pain and other pop music icons. But you knew all that. What happens when you Auto-Tune a vuvuzela? And while we’re at it, what happens when you coordinate several Auto-Tuned vuvuzela samples to play a few measures from Europe’s anthemic 1986 hit, “The Final Countdown”? In the name of science, Geekosystem investigates:

Four things to mention about this ‘game’, as mocked up by olybop:

1. Vuvuzela Hero: Legend of Africa has been shamefully under-covered at this year’s E3.

2. The vuvuzela meme is still nowhere near getting old.

3. The idea of people doing ‘devil fingers’ to a vuvuzela performance is patently hilarious.

4. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

(olybop via TDW)

If at the end of a day’s World Cup viewing, you think to yourself, “gee, that was fun, but my life could use a little more of that irritating bee-like buzzing instrument that all of the fans were playing,” has app developer mobilio.nl got good news for you! Their vuvuzela app promises to give you just that, during and after the game.

Available for free for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad, “Vuvuzela 2010,” a.k.a. “iVuvuzela,” simulates the buzzy horns that deafen soccer fans, interfere with on-field communication between players, and were considered for a full-scale ban during the tournament by FIFA, who ultimately decided to let them stay.

Lately, the app is a sensation: