whoops yeah that sounds indictable
> sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames
this does not sound indictable, but it depends on what those illegal devices contained
That's a reach...technically they charged a license fee to use SXOS which allowed homebrew. It can also be used for playing stolen games, but it is not marketed as such.
In college I dated a girl in her first year of law school. This technique was something they are taught as a 1L (first year). I remember she would have assignments to write the arguments for both sides using the same set of facts. Made me realize that a good lawyer can convince a jury of anything.
When I was an 1L, some classmates were very good at arguing one side (usually the good-guy side) and then they would fall to pieces if professors asked them to advocate for the other side. Even to the point of saying there was no feasible argument for the other side.
Trial lawyers work with evidence and law. Deciding what the facts are is the business of judges or juries.
I pity people that can be so easily swayed towards binary perceptions. It is safe, I can tell you that much.
This is probably more of a smoking gun.
That seems to suggest they facilitated online marketplaces where these are sold -- and I don't believe they've ever sold pre-loaded games in these.
At most they advertise possibility of using homebrew. If you can run unsigned code, you can write unsigned code to dump retail games. But Team Xecutor doesn't explicitly encourage those specific actions nor distribute them online (only to cover their asses, of course that's what people buying them buy them for)
If you want legitimate console hacking software and tools not aimed at piracy, you'll find them in the open source space (part of it, as there is of course a subset of that community also just focused on piracy), not in larger commercial ventures, with extremely few exceptions.
(This is one reason why I stopped hacking consoles; most of the userbase ends up being pirates and the most lauded and successful developers are those who cater to them and us who wanted to stay away from that instead got verbal abuse; meanwhile others were making money off the whole thing.)
However, America's focus in free trade negotiations over the past decade and perhaps longer have been protecting their intellectual property. For example, due to America's pressure and as a part of the New NAFTA negotiations, Canada agreed to increase its copyright term from life + 50 to life + 70 years. I wouldn't be surprised if what was once legal in France has become illegal since.
Decades ago, US decided it wanted banks everywhere to follow American regulations. It was a resounding success. That's why US can now block Iran from trading with the rest of the world through national legislation rather than international sanctions, or make Canada hand over a Chinese national to be prosecuted in the US for alleged crimes done in Hong Kong. Now that banking is done, the new frontier is intellectual property. I expect national laws everywhere to one by one become like US laws.
While backing up your games is a legitimate use case, it's not terribly useful with cartridge-based consoles like the Switch (cartridges don't get scratched), and it's much harder to argue for that usage. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of people claiming they're "backing up games" are just pirating games. I've seen this first hand as a major public face in the Wii homebrew community, trying to steer the community away from piracy.
Game modding is often brought up as another use case, but straight piracy often requires additional effort over just modding games for technical reasons (you need to bypass game authentication and/or redirect all file access, not just the modded bits), so I don't buy that argument. Typical piracy tools are very obviously targeted at such, not at modding, and legitimate modding teams who do not support piracy have in the past developed approaches that are a lot less intrusive to doing so (see: Project M).
So it's going to be a lot harder to argue before a court for mechanisms that allow you to copy games, because legitimate uses are much fewer and far in between, and the tools are all, realistically, aimed at piracy, whether they drape a thin veil over it or not. The courts are not stupid, they can see through thin veils.
Yet once you disable signature checks in your OS, it could be used by the user for any purpose, no? Isn't that the main point of rooting your device, having ability to do whatever.
Then it comes to where you draw a line. If you allow me to run any program w/o checks, I can install RetroArch for emulation, or a save manager to save me from NSO tax, so I can backup my saves without paying a monthly fee. If you allow me to run kernel extensions, I can do stuff like overclocking or use my xbox gamepad with nintendo console, and if you unlock the bootloader, I can boot into Android.
Once you unlock all those capabilities to a point where I can boot any OS, you'd essentially turn a purpose-built device to a general-purpose computer, and building general purpose computers is not a crime (yet? :). I don't see PC makers or Microsoft being accused of enabling piracy, yet their platforms have the same freedoms.
Eventually we opened up the security CPU for other reasons (mostly a recovery/low level bootloader tool we built), but even then, piracy requires specific software, namely hacks that translate game disc access APIs to either DVD-Video access APIs or a USB storage stack. So sure, you have a general purpose computer, but you still need specific software.
Xecuter aren't just selling hardware and software that turn your Switch into a general purpose computer. They are selling hardware and software that has specific features for pirating games that are not useful in any other context. And therein lies the difference.
They were probably first to market, but then the community found the RCM bug and now Xecutor is pretty irrelevant.
Side note: “So long Gary Bowser“
Well, irrelevant for people who own a Switch that's vulnerable to the RCM bug. Nintendo fixed that in a hardware revision around two years ago so there's a lot of Switches out there which cannot be hacked by the open source methods, but can with Team Xecuters hardware mod. RCM was patched before the launch of the "Switch 2.0" and Switch Lite, so the only way to get homebrew along with the improved battery life of the 2.0 or greater portability of the Lite is via that hardware mod.
Edit: XenoGC!
IIRC the XenoGC was originally proprietary too, but open sourced by the designer after a few years.
I think they changed it for Super Mario 3D All Stars.
That version added rumble support and fixed some bugs, but being intended for Japan where Bowser is called King Koopa they used a different voice line.
https://nostarch.com/blog/thoughts-indictment-ryan-harris-ha...
How long until that turns into "sold illegal devices that hacked popular smartphones so they could be used to run unauthorized, or pirated, copies of apps"?
How long for PCs?