Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (2020)
blog.jonlu.ca
blog.jonlu.ca
Microsoft bricked thousands of illicit China-developer xbox360 kits one spring morning, in the winter of 2010.
they also have bricked retail xbox360 consoles of nefarious (teenage) actors. cannot go into more detail on that one. maybe after a few more years.
We've all been there...
I believe these two podcast episodes cover that in depth.
For this reason, I cannot watch/listen to darknet diaries, or a host of other topics. The physical cringe of wanting to correct the record is unbearable, but from what I heard, they are very accurate and have done their research.
RIP anthony
It also doesn't distinguish between reporting ("Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain"), analysis ("Dr Bob says wet streets cause rain; is this accurate?") and opinion ("In the opinion of the columnist/author, Dr. Bob is an idiot who thinks wet streets cause rain! This is just yet another example of the violence inherent in the system, decaying the moral fabric of our system."
It also doesn't account for the Dunning-Kruger effect, or on Joe Q Public's near total ignorance on the subject of observational biases and dependency on anecdotes and personal experience.)
That "hypothesis" leverages Joe thinking some reporter covering global warming is "fake news" when it's been a cold, snowy week...to get Joe to think that reporting about current events or politics is equally "fake."
A reminder that a reporter who writes "Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain" is not publishing fake news. It's reporting the fact that there is someone who said/thinks that. That is different from presenting their statement as fact.
Cool well it sounds like they are reporting something interesting or truthful so it's fake news in my book.
There was a word for that, hang on what was it. Oh, right. "Lying."
We don't notice how little we know on topics we don't fully grasp, but when we notice them in topics we are more experienced about we don't do anything, we just change topic.
That's the pain I feel when facing this new instance of the affect, in a more palatable form:
I could comment on the internet - but knowing my comments will, despite immense reverence, or correctness, be ignored by the silent masses, turns the effect into an affliction.
The man reading the newspaper can mutter the facts under his breath. Had he yell louder, still, nothing will change - his breakfast partner bemoaned.
The miniscule chance of my comment correcting the record pains me. Had I yell louder, maybe someone will take note. But I can't - because they won't, and the possibility of my pertinent, small chance of making a difference gets irrevocably distant, as an algorithm pushes the topic of collective interest to someone else's disdain.
So I reload the page, and forget what I knew.
Like an internet-mullet. Business in my name, party behind an alias.
The interesting bit would be writing and maintaining two distinct sites/corpus.
It is generally recommended (OPSEC Bible rule 3) to never publish, however, I have more stories to tell now than future crimes to commit, so, one day, yes, I would like to.
lol? This is your reply to people literally begging you to share your story? That other people won't read it? We can't all get the audience we want.
im sure the french have a word for it
The internet undermines a lot of this though from a technical perspective. If you are interested in things technically (building PCs! Gaming! Development!) you read the sources from better tech sites and it is not as bad as back in the day when you had newspapers and empty pretty talking heads on CNN. Well, unless you're in the echo chamber as described here...
The other thing is just that mainstream media is just AWFUL at science and technology, because journalists inherit the general anti-scientist bias of the general population and humanities domains. On "people affairs" they usually have sociology and psychology and poli sci background and instincts... they are reporters of human structures and motivations.
So I suppose it is true that they have better reporting of the affairs of non-scientists to some degree.
> This is the story about the XBox hacking scene and how a group of guys pushed their luck a little too far.
Anthony (Clark) was one of said guys. Heavy spoilers ahead...
... He was convicted in 2016 for wire fraud related to EA FIFA coins. In 2017, he was found dead, awaiting sentencing.
per gentlemen's agreement (something the soulless, kakfa-esque fucks at M$ will never understand), I can't elaborate further...
but if you ever find a 0-day / bug, don't pursue a bug bounty.
They will put a bounty on you, and squash you like the bug.
Nintendo threatening modders legally is literal child's play compared to the literal mob tactics MS and Activision used against what they perceived as financial or PR threats.
I am sure you are aware of what Sony did around 10 years ago to certain people regarding the PS3 and its exploits.
> but if you ever find a 0-day / bug, don't pursue a bug bounty.
It is still elementary days but there has been some controversy among researchers that in reality John Deere's bug-bounty program is being a PR stunt in order to cover up bugs and stall disclosure. So I guess people are slowly waking up to the reality of things not going their way.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/kl4fhi/nintendo_c...
it means an altruistic agreement where both parties have something to lose from either speaking/competing
MS has an agnostic stance on bug bounties.
some folks did some super illegal shit and got justice.
these things are unrelated
So many legal methods to kill someone that is normalised & accepted by society.
the rest of the crew got 5+ years.
> The physical cringe of wanting to correct the record is unbearable
It's like me when I hear someone at karaoke singing out of key and out of tune. The pain is almost physical and it hurts the brain.
Thanks for sharing.
Because the damage is permanent, to "tangible property", and "without lawful excuse" (and please don't knee-jerk to arguing "they can do what they want because you agreed to it" - you didn't and they can't), I'd think there's a very good case for criminal damage as distinct action from any computer misuse recourse.
The argument needs to made, not on behalf of the users as a class action, but on behalf of another stakeholder - the environment. Every time a company makes and sells products that can be "bricked" they contribute to e-waste (see [1][2] if this issue isn't yet on your radar - it's something every hacker should be aware of).
I have faith that smart people in European politics genuinely get this merging problem, and we have the courage, time and willingness to bring new legislation or trade restrictions that would make it impossible to sell such products in Europe. Even better I would like to see Microsoft made to pay the cleanup costs.
[1] https://digitalvegan.net/digital-vegan-print-sample.pdf (ch 17 Wasteland)
[2] https://www.fathom.pro/blog/2020/09/world-wide-waste-an-inte...
Like if you want to sell illicit XBoxes, it's on you to ensure that the thing can't be rendered inoperable by a third-party software update, it's not the third-party's responsibility to account for your hardware when they do software updates.
Doing software updates that brick tampered hardware is harder to make a sarcastic argument about.
No. First, the primary culprit is who designs and deploys a mechanism to do harm. If I set a lethal trap on my property with a sign saying "Beware the 10,00 Volt mantrap", I am not excused when a burglar is injured - even though they are breaking the law by trespass. Secondly, it seems that the manufacturer gets to decide, arbitrarily and post-facto (post-sale/agreement) what constitutes a "scammer". Finally, with "e-fuses" you are setting a trap mechanism on my property which I have purchased in fair expectation of my rights.
> it's on you to ensure that the thing can't be rendered inoperable by a (third-party?) software update
I believe in many places like the US, it could be breaking the law to ensure that, since reverse engineering and circumvention of protections would be required.
Of course you're right that there's a sort of moral responsibility on people not to vandalise serviceable goods such that they become waste. But people throw away perfectly working technology every day.
If by "third party" (I think we would use "first party" here) you mean the vendor/manufacturer when you say:
> it's not the (vendors) responsibility to account for your hardware when they do software updates.
then I heartily disagree. It's certainly their moral responsibility, and, unless they offer owners a reasonable way to disable updates, it ought to be their legal responsibility too.
But that's not what's at issue. Otherwise your argument makes it seem like the update "accidentally" damaged the owners property. Quite the contrary, the vendor is sending out updates designed to cause harm, and in full knowledge and punitive intent. Am I mistaken?
> Doing software updates that brick tampered hardware is harder to make a sarcastic argument about.
I don't follow you. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit and discouraged per HN guidelines in favour of arguing in "good faith".
If that is the product, how can someone call afoul?
you are equating blowing an Efuse with setting a lethal trap.
there is a reasonable expectation for one, less so for another.
im not sure if that analogy of your's is made in the best faith.
I hate that the idea that you rent stuff from companies, instead of buying and owning, is now so ingrained that people defend actively destroying someone's equipment remotely.
but you bought a Cryptex.
break the Cryptex, it's broken.
We can stop buying electronic Cryptexes, or we can force companies to stop making them.
but from a realistic perspective, the only way to uphold the sanctity of online play, and enforce IP rights, is to have a secure stack, from boot loader, physically integrating the encryption keys with the hypervisor, and to render anything else an inoperable brick.
Lest we have cheaters in console games.
I do agree to a degree, I think "offline mode" should have a legal basis to stand on, but I also like to know that the others in the game are not cheating.
and that is impossible without an inaccessible black box, the Xbox, which is what we bought.
ive seen both sides of this coin.
Ignoring the fact that reverse engineering is just a matter or time and pressure, eventually people will start hooking up image recognition auto-aimers to the input/output of these devices... what then? do we enter some kind of minority report era of gaming where you have to get your eyeballs replaced with "unhackable" ones - hope they don't burn out your retinas in an update. Point is, a black box is actually not a complete solution - as long as you can play the game, there will always be a way to cheat.
There are various online FOSS games that are completely open and hackable, where it's very easy to download the source and literally set a condition in the make file to enable "wallhacks" (because that is in-fact a useful debugging feature - talking about ioq3 specifically)... those communities just deal with it the old fashioned way, new players get treated with more scrutiny, admins get good at recognising cheaters (most cheaters are not good at hiding it, and experienced players who would better conceal wall-hacking behaviour etc are less likely to want to play with hacks way anyway). It's far from bullet proof, but so are so called "black boxes" despite their cost to the user.
yes.
Retinal fingerprinting with VR. you can jtag your headset, and be locked out.
the answer is "yes", because of market forces.
I want to play against other players, with an assurance that the game is fair.
I will pay money for this. A Company will deliver on this, and those who seek to infringe upon this, will be legally coerced into submission.
I'm not usually one to judge what others spend their time/energy/motivation on, but you may want to re-evaluate your priorities.
Is having a game with that level of "unhackability" - because lets be honest, there's no such thing as unhackability - really worth everything that would have to be given up, from right to repair, right to own your hardware, the ability to not arbitrarily be locked out of something you put money into because <you were injured and lost an eye|your hardware broke and misread something|You develop a lazy eye| n number of anything else>?
If it's that important to you, play a game where cheaters are dealt with the old fashioned way. I'm ready for a break from corp hosted game servers, give me a server I can run myself.
Some people want to play games, and enjoy themselves in a competitive environment, and pay for the privilege.
If that doesn't appeal to you, that is your priority.
Don't like it?
dont buy a fuckin xbox.
telling others they shouldn't enjoy a game because "muh hardware" is literally a borderline bad-faith statement, and a shallow attempt at virtue signaling.
buy a computer to compute.
buy a console for an assurance of a fair playing enviroment.
you cannot. this is the crux of the matter.
consoles dont have cheaters, PC games do.
consoles are locked, pc's are not.
these are separate ideas, that meet when players do: online.
the only way to hide the code to prevent cheating is to physically embalm it into the CPU, in a way that, if physically accessed, will break the machine, rendering the effort fruitless.
PC's are going that way, the way GPU's are containing more "black box" mechanisms themselves.
consoles were this way from the start, on purpose.
A similar example outside of gaming is Linux as an OS platform: antivirus software isn't a big thing, despite Linux being continuously behind bigger desktop OSes with their security mitigations - (e.g. things like strong ASLR). It's less of a concern, not because Linux is more secure, but just because desktop applications there aren't a large target market for malware, and because of large cultural differences in usage.
On the other hand, AC bypasses on PC happen not because of a lack of console-esque hardware mitigations, but simply because software AC is not particularly advanced (yet). Popular AC solutions tend to employ non-engine-specific solutions that match known cheat signatures - bypasses inject cheat dlls and hope they don't get caught "too often", rather than using in-engine verification of non-cheat behaviours. I think this is primarily just an issue with software maturity and likely to solve itself over time. The general non-gaming software space has gone through similar evolution, whereby we used to rely heavily on signature matching on malware, and have evolved toward a more integrated "zero trust" approach to mitigating threats - signature-matching still exists for things like software-composition analysis, but in general is not a primary mitigation strategy for runtime security.
> the only way to hide the code to prevent cheating is to physically embalm it into the CPU, in a way that, if physically accessed, will break the machine, rendering the effort fruitless.
> PC's are going that way, the way GPU's are containing more "black box" mechanisms themselves.
Hiding code has historically never succeeded in preventing anything. The trend toward black-box is about a combination of corporate IP protection, vendor lock-in (see also the Apple T2 SoCs) and almost certainly APT actors (disclaimer: speculation). It's not about security, least of all anti-cheat.
What you're describing here is markedly different than what the gp is referring to: intent matters (determining intent may be difficult in some cases, granted, but it's crystal clear in these specific examples)
I was in the "xbox underground" group and later worked at Microsoft. they never bricked retails, lol.
After CON files were being resigned with 00000' keys, they tried and failed to maintain a "known bad" list of RSA private keypairs that were known to be resigning modified content.
after that patchwork hack failed, because of the spread of CON resigners, they gave up on that effort. You can still find blacklisted keypairs in the NAND, if you looked around.
but my retail was't exactly unmodified, so I was bending the definition of "retail", here...
but yes, they bricked retail consoles posing as xDev and pNET kits.
dont blame them. we were bad kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efuse describes the mechanism of action: "eFuses can be made out of silicon or metal traces. In both cases, they work (blow) by electromigration, the phenomenon that electric flow causes the conductor material to move."
Modern ones are typically flash memory that simply doesn't have the circuitry for erasure.
This is commonly used for microcontroller reverse-engineering and cracking - you can remove the "program read-protection" bit in some microcontrollers by exposing the fuse portion of the decapped die under UV light. That being said, in all instances of fuse manipulations I'm aware of, the chips are always decapped. I never heard of a non-destructive technique (asides from fault injection), so I'm not sure how practical is your proposal - though I won't be surprised if it exists. But make sure the chip doesn't depend on a critical bit to boot (e.g. external clock enable) before you try - indiscriminately erasing all the fuse bits can brick chips - you don't want that to happen.
Also, as a matter of fact, corrupted fuse bits are certainly responsible for some hardware failures in the field. If a fuse bit ever "gets loose", it can brick many chips since their boot configurations are no longer correct. Fuses are usually designed with a negligible failure rate in normal use, still, defective chips are occasionally made. Also, if you're going to use it in a high-temperature industry application or a radiative space environment, you definitely need to be careful.
Good point.
A common technique was using diodes. Zener diodes are normally used to suppress overvoltage, but they're only useful for transients, and easily destroyed by a sustained, constant overvoltage due to excessive power dissipation. This is a serious problem in surge protector designs. "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade". Since they fail as a short circuit, early chip designers exploited this property as a one-time programmable fuse for factory calibration.
Quote Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Robert A. Pease.
> As mentioned earlier, a diode tends to fail by becoming a short circuit when overpowered, and zeners cannot absorb as much power as you would expect from short pulses. How dreadful; but, can IC designers serendipitously take advantage of this situation? Yes!
> The Vos of an op amp usually depends on the ratio of its first-stage load resistors. IC designers can connect several zeners across various small fractions of the load resistor. When they measure the Vos, they can decide which zener to short out - or zap - with a 5-ms, 0.3- to 1.8-A pulse. The zener quickly turns into a low-impedance (= 1 Ω short), so that part of the resistive network shorts out, and the Vos is improved.
> In its LM108, National Semiconductor first used zener zapping, although Precision Monolithics (Santa Clara, CA) wrote about zener zapping first and used it extensively later on. Although zener zapping is a useful technique, you have to be sure that nobody discharges a large electrostatic charge into any of the pins that are connected to the zener zaps. If you like to zap zeners for fun and profit, you probably know that they really do make a cute lightning flash in the dark when you zap them. Otherwise, be careful not to hit zeners hard, if you don’t want them to zap and short out.
> These zener zaps are also becoming popular in digital ICs under the name of “vertical fuses” or, more correctly, “anti-fuses.” If an IC designer uses platinum silicide instead of aluminum metallization for internal connections, the diode resists zapping.
Nowadays they are implemented as a write-only EEPROM or Flash memory (and can even be overwritten in some designs using a special programmer), but the name "fuse" is still used for historical reasons, and to reflect their software-irreversible nature.
Also, fun fact: since fuses are EEPROMs, they're vulnerable to potential data corruption just like any other EEPROMs. If a fuse bit ever "gets loose", it can brick many chips since their boot configurations are no longer correct. It's especially problematic for space applications. This is also used for chip cracking - you can remove the "program read-protection" bit in some microcontrollers by exposing the fuse portion of the decapped silicon die under UV light. BTW, if you ever see a computer that reports an "Intel Core i6" processor model, it's likely a corrupted fuse bit (yes, this was a real incident).
Guess it must have been an i7 then, which is a 1 bit disctance, while i3 and i5 would have been a 2 bit distance (both as number and ascii symbol).
I'm ideologically opposed to using this feature 'productively', but it definitely makes it simpler (cheaper) for the company to maintain installed base versions...
What's the difference in burden on the company between a user who just declines updates for years and a user who installs upgrades but then downgrades again? Surely the customer support response in all cases is "install the latest version"?
Having an installed user base always on the latest firmware version cuts down on support costs. Its a hidden cost but a real one: when a user calls customer service with a problem, you're losing money - anything that reduces the amount of time spent debugging the issue, is a win. This means that if the support engineers can rely on the fact that users will always be pushed forward in software releases, they can focus on contemporary issues/uses cases rather than having to maintain - for years, often - an archaic list of prior versions/faults/issues.
Its not just the case that these eFuses' prevent "ownership" of the firmware by the user - though that is a consideration - its more that, by disallowing downgrades to prior firmware releases, a mechanism is in place that organizationally promotes improvement in the product quality. Well, that's the theory - that the latest OS is always an improvement - and believe me, we software engineers work hard to make sure that is the case. It occasionally doesn't go according to plan and users feel compelled - for whatever reasons they decide - to downgrade to a prior version - but as a software engineer, I much prefer to operate, knowing that my end users will always be encouraged to have the latest and greatest (hopefully) version of the firmware.
Support is a sunk cost. Supporting older versions is a self-imposed force multiplier of that cost.
32? Is that it? So if Nintendo want to push more than 32 updates, they either need to not blow any more fuses, or stop using the fuses when they've all gone? Wouldn't they be totally useless then?
Remember, Ninty doesn’t need to burn one for each update, just for the ones they consider important enough.
So they must have some guidelines for what kind of features are worth burning a fuse.
But yeah, 32 sounds low. Let's just hope number 32 has an easy exploit :)
Often you also first use stock before you learn about/want to start hacking it.
The alternative is to never connect to WiFi, ever, and some do that.
Generally, consumers would want to downgrade because older versions have vulnerabilities that are fixed in newer versions. these vulnerabilities allow console owners to do what they want with their hardware, and gaming communities have shown Nintendo time and time again that if it is possible to use game hardware for game piracy, it will be widely used for that purpose.
Those of us who want a neat standardized hardware platform to hack on without pirating anything are in the noise floor for companies like Nintendo, so we have no representation among neither pirates nor the console manufacturer.
Most TVs have efuses to stop software rollback.
In that case it isn’t about access to pirated content either—people want to be able to modify it for basic features the company has neglected to provide.
Nintendo is just greedy.
Many of their new games are still good.
And, of course, there's plenty of competition in both hardware capable of running games and in games themselves, so it's not like Nintendo has a monopoly. (And it's pretty well known up-front to customers that Nintendo likes to keep a tight grip. So it's not like people don't know what's coming.)
Is there a feature that the Game Boy had that the Game Boy Color lacked? Nope. GBA did drop the infrared port that was barely used by GBC games but my PS3 also can't use my PS1 memory cards nor can an Xbox One use a 360 memory card or the HD-DVD drive. And Series X lacks Kinect or HDMI in support. Poorly used or outdated features often go away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_SP#Headphone_...
The flash cart also added some really neat features that were missing, such as: the ability to take screenshots, ability to save and restore a game at any point, ability to load cheats like infinite ammo and such.
Nintendo was/is at war with cart users and any update to a DS with a flash cart stood a good chance of either killing the flash cart or rendering it inoperable until a new firmware was released for the flash cart (which may never happen). There's a long and great history here. And if you want to know more, the GBATemp wiki[3] is a great starting point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_cartridge [1] https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/3DS_Flashcart_Comparison [3] https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/Category:Nintendo_DS
New games and game updates often require Switch system updates. Two examples:
Animal Crossing DLC requires a system update.
Rocket League seasons usually require a game update.
If you already have a game and it runs today on the current firmware you can at least keep playing it offline by just skipping the system or game update.
Or to get back the features you had originally paid for but got removed, like Linux OS installs on PS3s.
Examples:
Sony removed Linux OtherOS from the Playstation 3 firmware because even though it didn't have a GPU driver, they were worried it could be leveraged to do whatever. There is no value in running Linux on a PS3 today, but there was once.
Apple notably between iOS 6 and 7 changed their design language from skeuomorphic to flat white "metro" style. If you don't like staring at a glaring white screen, too bad. But more importantly, when it comes to drivers, esp. graphics, they can introduce eyestrain if something isn't as good. Issues with sound, networking, etc. for all sorts of platforms. The Intel Management Engine which is inside your PC (AMD has a counterpart) is a another CPU and another OS that you're not allowed to shut off (or access). Sometimes firmware updates will come out preventing you from rolling back to a previous version that didn't have a bug with the hardware in this or that because of the precious Intel ME backdoor.
The most famous example from my point of view:
To prevent the use of older versions of the software, later versions of the software will burn fuses as they surpass versions, preventing them from ever being used again on that device.
No fuses there - just an incredibly complex mess of nonces, digitally signed tickets, and secret generator keys.
[0]: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Security_Fusings [1]: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/ECID
There have been articles saying that Apple lets some third party security people use these devices.
E.G. https://macdailynews.com/2019/08/06/apple-hands-hackers-secr...
I can see how giving that access that might make sense, but I don't know if that article is true.
Dev-fused devices would also be very useful to Apple adversaries like NSO in developing hacks so I would actually expect Apple to continue to keep tight control over them.
We at Samsung use a similar mechanism called Anti Rollback Prevention (ARP). It is a switch that can be enabled for normal devices if the employees using them are given an approval by their boss. Only a handful of employees have access to it, and the switch turns off by itself after a defined period.
The first players to use a xenon keyvault on a jasper mobo got away with it for years just because MS overlooked a decent assumption.
the discovery of the RGH, reset glitch hack, aided in the reversing the early stages of the bootloader, allowing a small, incredibly talented, incredibly missed individuals to reverse the firmware/NAND challenges and correctly respond to the challenge.
For now that's an issue for games and online services, but everything is getting digitized. Imagine getting banned from your EV's online services and losing authentication to start your car.
Let my guess. Related to the various 'stealth' servers that exist for XBL?
Got any more fun stories from that time?
yes, but the internet will never believe these stories.
The history of Xbox Live may be one that is better off never told.
Between the statute of limitations now being a farce, and the young gentleman who made it out unscathed legally are now battling employment, credit, and security check issues... maybe the stories of SIM swapping, SWATing, social engineering, doxing, DDoS, bribery, conspiracy, nation-state actors, treason, and other miscellany that plagued our late childhood with paranoid fever dreams....be better off untold, at least until more of us are confirmed retired or safe from petty retribution.
You mention wanting to "correct the record" in an earlier comment- why not DM this guy and tell him what you're telling us? https://twitter.com/JackRhysider
It was a fantastic console, and fairly open. It had two ARM CPUs (one per screen), and there was a terrific homebrew scene. Some of my first embedded C programs were for the NDS lite. It had ebook readers, paint programs, a toy Linux port, the whole 9 yards.
But, that openness also made it open to piracy. The way you loaded code onto the system was through "flashcarts". They were shaped like game cartridges, but they had a microSD slot on the top and an internal MCU which often ran a firmware that could load game ROMs from the filesystem, and even add features like cheats and save-states.
The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games. Developers were dropping off the platform well before the 3DS came out, and Nintendo started to pay much more attention to DRM.
It was sort of a sad situation. The ability to write your own software for a handheld game console was amazing in the 2000s, but that openness ended up suffocating the platform.
Works great for Apple and Play!
On a PC, you get the freedom to install what you want.
On consoles, you get a certification of quality, integration, and style for the console. Everything fits with well-defined hardware as well. And since it's just video games, it's not a huge deal if it's limited, you can always install indie games on your actual PC.
With an app store, you just get shovelware that is unduly promoted combined with a gatekeeping what software you can run on your device, which could have otherwise been open.
That was a sad day.
They haven't seen fit to change their homepage copy of "We are GOG.COM, the DRM-free home for a curated selection of games."
These days they have mostly won through DRM and tying in online multiplayer which can not be pirated.
This apparently was a small motivator in the development in the japan-only Famicom Disk System, a floppy-disc-like drive addon, which did use a protection system that amusingly was based around trademark law. There was a number of other interesting elements about the Disk System, but I'll suppress my desire to vg history ramble :)
Do you have a source for this? All the data I've seen shows piracy really doesn't impact content creators in a meaningful way.
... the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them. [1]
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
“We definitely found that piracy was a significant factor in our Nintendo DS development efforts. When we approached publishers to propose potential game projects with them, most of them brought up their concerns about piracy at some point. Many publishers even cited the issue of piracy as a specific reason why they decided to back away from our game project, especially with it being an original intellectual property concept. The publishers’ fear was that, in a climate where piracy is commonplace, original games and new mechanics are far less likely to be successful than games based on previously successful mechanics, established licenses, sequels, and sports.”
And they're all fearing the ecosystem decline that occurs when the publishers start forcing crap.
I mean... I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.
Either way, they are the gatekeepers to please, so the sentiment of:
>The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games.
does hold true. I heard reports of this especially affecting the PSP as well.
Some markets that have started to oust those gatekeepers seem to be doing fairly well, lending weight behind arguments that the gatekeepers are the real problem. Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades, as are video games in general (particularly on PC, where piracy has been even bigger for even longer).
I don't doubt that some things that are working with the current gatekeeping ecosystem will cease to exist if gatekeepers get less powerful. ... but I'm not sure those are things we should be keeping anyway. Sucks in the transition, to be sure, but in the long run?
Music's "booming" is pretty closely correlated with the uptake of DRM streaming services versus non-DRMed files. Remarkably so, in fact.
It is still part of a very, very large shift in power away from the historical gatekeepers though (i.e. from "all-powerful overlords" to "anyone can sign up with any of the big DRM streaming platforms today, and there are moderately-sized others too"). Gatekeepers as a whole can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but they tend to turn into power-amassing despots given time. A bit of churn helps reset that to some degree.
I guess the main difference here is that historically (going back decades here) you had to use the gatekeepers to do things at literally any scale beyond handing out records by hand. They effectively controlled all physical sales, and physical sales were the only option. Now there are many more viable options, including stuff like bandcamp where there are few restrictions or costs of any kind. Gatekeepers of portions of a market will always exist, the difference is in how much power they wield over the entire marketplace.
Which makes sense, things that sell well also are more likely to be pirated. Has it been shown that piracy causes sales to increase? I've looked around but I haven't found anything reliable.
Have any peer reviewed papers supporting your claim in a broad market and timeframe? I find zero.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2132153
Some people want it to be, but it isn't.
There was one (not replicated) study suggesting that people who consumed more music tended to pirate more, but that's a correlation not a causation, and it doesn't follow that they would not have purchased or subscribed to even more music if the piracy option had not been available.
What is not anecdotal evidence are all the game console manufacturers spending millions to prevent piracy. It means that they estimate that piracy must at least cost them millions. And whatever game console manufacturers are loosing due to piracy, it's costing gaming studios at least twice as much (due to the 30% - 70% revenue sharing model).
I know the internets favorite argument is "piracy doesn't hurt sales", but imagine a scenario where you go to McDonald's and they give you a choice at the registers, pay, or don't pay. Either way you get your meal. That's essentially how easy it was to pirate for the nds.
Does every download equal a sale? No. Do some people pirate instead of buy if they can? Of course.
It's actually even more nuanced than that. Someone might have a fixed budget that they're willing to spend each month on games. It doesn't matter what it is, just that it's relatively small. Also, they may not be buying games every month, but they will never spend more than that in a single month. If with that budget they can buy a very small number of games (maybe not even one!), more often than not they will not take the chance with any games and will simply try to pirate them. Is that a sale lost to piracy or not? It's hard to say, because they might or might not have purchased a game if it was impossible to pirate; it depends on whether it fits in their budget.
I really think the reason Steam pretty much solved piracy on the PC is because of the expectation of timed discounts. If right now a game is just outside your budget, you know that 6-12 months from now you'll be able to buy it at a significant discount, so if you're patient you don't need to bother with pirating it and you can just wait. Now, some people will still pirate just to be able to play immediately, but piracy is nowhere near as rampant as it used to be on PC. If Nintendo implemented similar policies on its stores (as opposed to trying to sell 30-year-old games for $5) it could solve piracy on its platforms in a day, without resorting to this cat and mouse game.
You could download every NDS game ever made, in every region, in a few days.
Small indie ROMs might be 2-16MiB, but the big Pokemon/etc games went up to 128MiB. With 8-64GiB microSD cards, you could fit a library of games into one cartridge.
Personally, I think that most of the people who pirated NDS games would never have paid for them, so there may not have been many lost sales. But I also can't deny that the small game developers got royally screwed, and IMO the 3DS may have suffered from a dearth of creative small devs.
It admitted a 45% error margin in its own conclusions, which pretty much make them indistinguishable from statistical noise.
You should reconsider your trust in any news outlet that ran a story on this study without noting this.
Nintendo sold just shy of a billion software titles for the DS, far more than the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance combined. So when you say "dramatically shrank"… compared to what?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s_Game
The dev was operating at that homebrew level, developing his own IP, but he was unhappy with anything less than the "peace of mind" that came with being given the official tools and access to the platform afforded an established developer. Ironically, he was concerned about piracy of his game, yet it was the openness to piracy that allowed him to even develop it for that platform in the first place.
I must be missing something, either the bootloader execution is trusted and should be able to store state securely, Secure Enclave style, or it’s not and melting things doesn’t solve the problem as compromise of the code means the fuses can be ignored..
If you had a secure enclave that had long term storage it it, but prevented decrementing the version would be equivalent, but efuses are much simpler of a construction.
I guess the secure enclave having storage introduces another attack too, wiping/corrupting/replacing that storage somehow, thus efuses, simpler and more straightforward.
Search for e.g. 'imx e-fuses' for details (or try this link https://imxdev.gitlab.io/tutorial/Burning_eFuses_on_i.MX/)
(That's of course assuming in your threat model you trust the hardware maker but not the cloud provider. The sentiment in this thread is clearly don't trust the hardware maker.)
Of course, running on your 'own' hardware is a fiction, too: companies themselves are made up of contractual relationships, fiduciary duties and other legal devices.
Even if you are running your software on your own in-house datacentres, remote attestation is still useful.
(Just like git's commit hashes are still useful, not only when your code lives externally on github, but even when some other department of the same company is hosting your source code.)
Exactly.
The societal situation is analogous to "Web 2.0". Everybody thought "this is neat, it lets me make interactive applications that I can share easily with my friends". Few dwelled much on how the intrinsic centralized control was a terrible dynamic. Over time, economic optimization increasingly focused on and exploited that centralized control. Now we've ended up with most people's idea of "the Internet" being choosing between least-bad corporate bundles, and just suffering all the ways they're being controlled. Remote attestation further increases that control, making it infeasible to employ software to represents your own interests.
Your new comment is basically re-iterating this sentence I quoted from the old one.
I'm not sure, if I outright agree; but I do see the point and was not arguing against it.
It is indeed worrying!
> Or you can just run security-critical code on your own hardware on your own premises, as has been and will always be the answer for strong security.
My comment was arguing against this part of your original comment. On-premises doesn't have to be more secure; and it misses out on some gains from division of labour and specialisation.
Not saying cars should be locked down like this, I really don't know and my first 'hacker' instinct is to say it should be free-as-in-freedom, but the argument has an extra dimension to it when compared to the Nintendo Switch.
It's possible they were lying, I suppose, it would not be the first time, but it seems an odd thing to lie about.
Seems reasonable to not allow random downgrading because you didn't like the UI layout.
2 cents opinion.
The correct solution would be for Tesla to fix the design flaws, of course. Or maybe to actually test their own products to find such obvious problems before they are released.
If doing thing be requires doing thing a that is unreasonable, then just don't do thing b
EDIT: I am not a lawyer, but I've always been surprised that Terms Of Service and End User License Agreements aren't routinely voided by courts. Aren't they perfect examples of unconscionable and adhesive [1] contracts? These seem to tick all the boxes: One-sided, no meaningful choice, no meeting of the minds, significant differences in bargaining power between the parties, no ability to negotiate, take-it-or-leave-it terms.
You'd think these things were total junk, but they're everywhere and somehow enforceable? Why?
1: https://www.jensenlawmn.com/adhesion-contracts-unconscionabl...
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lic... for an example of the difference.
Its not really one-sided, if I agree to it then I can play Nintendo games on Nintendo hardware on Nintendo online services. Some people see that as a big benefit.
> no meaningful choice
I definitely have a choice on whether or not I buy/use a Nintendo Switch. My life won't end if I can't play Breath of the Wild or Smash Bros.
(reduction in functionality) + (fewer options) + (loss of user control) + (handicapped operation) + (hardware underutilization) = higher prices for everyone
This is not including things like (planned obsolescence) which are intended to make things more expensive without raising the sales price.
https://www.upcounsel.com/unfair-contract-terms-regulations
https://www.ttclub.com/news-and-resources/news/tt-talk/2016/....
If I were authorizing something like that (I'd rather quit my job, but if), I'd be terrified of the repurcussions – for one, what if the device was sold in a region that has consumer protections? The fact that they're casually planning and committing such a careless act speaks volumes to the weakness of consumer protections, I guess.
Is that still “malicious destruction of property”?
This is the device operating the way it was designed. It may be something that should be prevented by civil consumer protection law, but calling it criminal is just unfounded under the definition of what those words legally mean.
The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
eFuses are a hackish way that System on a Chip makers have created to try and permit patching flawed hardware with questionable firmware. Permanently breaking electrical contact of a circuit in a chip is definitely damaging that circuit.
The fact that the fuse has a function, means that it isn’t “destruction of property”. They added it for DRM, and there’s no evidence to show that it’s anything other than DRM. For it to be “destruction of property”, you’d need to prove that they didn’t do it for DRM, but because they wanted to hurt users. (whether or not it does hurt users is irrelevant for determining mens rea)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Nintendo; I’m just saying that this is not a criminal matter.
The purpose of these fuses is to blow and serve as write-once storage memory.
> eFuses are a hackish way that System on a Chip makers have created to try and permit patching flawed hardware with questionable firmware.
No, eFuses are literally the only mutable nonvolatile storage that can be implemented inside SoCs in modern silicon processes, because you can't put Flash/EEPROM in them for technical reasons. That is why they are universally used for irreversible configuration actions on every single modern high-performance SoC. You will only find Flash memory in small microcontrollers.
Fuses are simply electrical components. They have no more inherent purpose than a capacitor, resistor, or diode. These fuses are working just as intended, even though its in a use case that you're not familiar with.
1 - https://electrek.co/2021/08/12/tesla-starts-giving-back-supe... 2 - https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-aut... 3 - https://www.tweaktown.com/news/36851/tesla-model-s-owner-fid...
Is it an acceptable practice to do this in fine print? I don't know. It's a bit dodgy I'll admit. But I have personally completely given up on the idea that just because I hand over money and receive a physical item I somehow "own" it in the sense that I can do what I want with it, at least if it contains software.
But the criminal angle is a big stretch. Nintendo is not breaking into devices to install updates and bricking them. And not liking something is very different, legally, than maliciousness. They're updating them when you click update, after being presented with legalese about it, and adding DRM which serves a function (whether you like the function or not).
Unless they have auto updates that you can't disable, they can just withhold access to online services until you give them the permission. You're free to refuse of course, and no "malicious destruction of property" happens without your consent.
>If I were authorizing something like that (I'd rather quit my job, but if), I'd be terrified of the repurcussions – for one
IANAL but the chances of you getting civil/criminal penalties is slim to none.
If some large organization wants to monitor what you're doing by installing malware, they need to be able get the older OS installed. Assuming you're a sufficiently value target (human rights activists, etc), it can be worth them spying on you to get your device passcode, and then downgrading and installing malware. If it's not across a major version I suspect that the victim would not know.
Part of the attack model the companies like Apple and Google have to consider is direct physical access to the device. Neither company considers it reasonable to say "once someone has physical access to your device it is game over".
I mean, if they have your device passcode, they already have pretty broad access to your device already.
Skyline is a Switch emulator for android https://github.com/skyline-emu/skyline
Both still require an actual console for actually making backups of your games.
I used to worry more about DRM, at least when it came to books.
These days, it is all about convenience. And the realization that I'm not going to live forever, and how many more times am I really going to read this particular book. Because that's what it is all about. There is some (not large) risk I will loose access to my Amazon account, or Google, or whatever. But for most books, if I get a couple reads out of them, that's practically all the value to be extracted for me.
Because of DRM, there is some small chance that I will loose access to a book that is truly a classic, one that deserves to be read repeatedly. In that case, it is OK to just buy it again in some other format, and give the author a little more money (yes, I know not all of the book's sale price goes to the author in most cases).
Some of my most favorite works I have purchased multiple times, and I don't regret it.
It is the same for games. If you want an exemplary open-world experience, you get a Switch, and buy Breath of the Wild. You then experience it (over months or however long you want to play it) and then it is over. There will probably be something else that will capture your attention next year anyway.
If, ten years from now, you really want to play BotW again, and you don't have a Switch, I'm sure buying a used one would work fine. Or else get the current-gen console, and buy the heavily discounted version on that.
There are a few movies that I would rewrite if I could.
All I can say is that there are good games that are very open to the mod community, and they would welcome more contributors.
I think people significantly underestimate what it would take to lose access to their entire library or digital identity. The wake up call for me was having my access to Youtube revoked because I watched a livestream of Ukraine coverage. I'm assuming all of the stream viewers (helpfully enumerated in the "who's watching list") got mass reported.
For Amazon, this could be as simple as someone calling up your bank and managing to convince a service representative to charge back a few items. That's a pretty much one-way trip to losing your library for good.
Yes, and it's called the Steam Deck. It will be interesting to see how it affects the console industry over the coming years.
You'd never buy a Switch because of this?
I hear what you're saying, and I philosophically have similar feelings, but I purchased my Switch to play games I purchased for said Switch. The Switch does exactly what I want it to do, and this technical limitation doesn't impact that.
Could Nintendo do something in a future OS update that I really dislike and will make me change my tune? Possibly.
But they've also built enough trust that I'll take that risk.
Obviously you are free to make purchasing decisions for your own reasons, but I don't fully understand the hardline stance in this context.
I'd never buy a general-purpose computing device that did this, but that's because I buy general-purpose computing devices to do whatever I want.
I bought the Switch to play Breath of the Wild and arguably some of the best games I've played since I started playing games in the early 90s, and don't regret that.
And subsequently extracted the most value they could get from that trust and goodwill: https://www.inverse.com/gaming/nintendo-eshop-closure-3ds-wi...
Games are art: if you disagree, consider that cinema is also art, and that the crassness of Michael Bay-style Hollywood films doesn't invalidate arthouse, the same way that this year's Call of Battlefield doesn't invalidate Papers Please or Monument Valley.
And if games are art, and art defines our culture, then consigning titles to the memory-hole in the name of profitability is immoral, so Nintendo's corporate stance is philistinian.
Respecting copyright is important (the software industry, our livelihoods, is built on copyright - and copyleft - after-all), copyrights aren't indefinite because it would be immoral to deny society creative-works because they're being held-hostage by rightsholders for a licensing ransom. And Nintendo isn't a solo-creator, who might have personal reasons for wanting to retract and un-license their work: their adoption of the Disney Vault strategy is entirely soulless and without merit.
I can't argue that Nintendo should be in any way be compelled build and maintain ports of old games for modern hardware, or even official emulators: doing-so is very expensive, but I do think that Nintendo should be legally restrained from continuing with their usual bully-tactics against people involved in game-preservation.
In general I agree though. The shutting down of the old eShop is very sad. There are probably hundreds of digital-only titles that are going to vanish. I like the response of the video game history foundation. Basically, we understand they can't keep the shot up forever, but what are fans supposed to do if they want to play these games and there's no legal way to do so?
I guess we'll keep our 3ds's and hope we're alive when they enter the public domain.
The one product that kind of evolved a bit was the 3DS, which gained (poor) support for custom themes and services like Miiverse. However, the UI remained basically the same since day 1.
I do appreciate the ability to buy a product for a specific experience, rather than rely on a company's future whims.
Nintendo blocks downgrades so that it's harder to use an exploit to run unlicensed software and pirated games. The former reason is inherently user-hostile, but it doesn't bother me nearly as much on a game console as on a general purpose device like the iPhone.
the PS5 also did this, but I think both systems are doing it in the pursuit of preventing people from easily jailbreaking/exploiting webkit. It can still be done via DNS trickery and finding an http:// link within a game (some game cartridges with 0 updates have them).
They included a hidden browser so people can connect to captive portals and play games with online functionality, but I think Nintendo wanted to send a message that the Switch is for games first, last, and everything in between.
P.S. I don't necessarily agree with this approach. The Switch OLED is the best screen that I own, so I would like to use it to view more types of media. But I respect that Nintendo is curating an experience.
I don't care how good the games are, they're ultimately entertainment, which is at the very bottom of the list when it comes to spending. I did pay for MMOs that turned into garbage after a while, which only reinforced this "hardline" stance, I guess.
Hell, I've hacked my ISPs ONT, the piece of shit wouldn't let me set it to bridged mode or even change the Wifi name/password. Couldn't care less that it's against the terms. There's things that people must compromise on all the time when it comes to personal freedoms - in this case, I'm not going to even if it's illegal.
They'll march me off to war if need be, but God forbid if I upset some company's marketing plan or bottom line.
> implemented on a very specific set of hardware, restricted in its use by software whose only purpose is to maintain the illusion
Don’t get me wrong. I like to tinker, and I’ve had plenty of fun using hardware for unintended use cases. But I don’t understand the seeming entitlement that some feel that Nintendo is not worthy of their purchase.
Of course, in the real world, hardware like the Switch is subsidized by publishing fees and the like. I imagine that that revenue must outweigh the R&D costs of gimping the device.
- My LG Smart TV
- A TI-84 calculator
- The Peloton (exercise equipment)
Are you trying to argue that because the Switch uses components also used to build general purpose devices that this somehow implies some kind of general purpose “identity” on all derivative devices and an expectation that somehow every product should be more clear that “well actually, this product doesn’t exist because it has a CPU and a screen”?
I’m truly grasping trying to understand your argument here.
The smart TV is basically just a worse version of a monitor with a very cheap computer attached.
The peloton is a BIKE.
I specifically mentioned the TI-84 because I have played Mario on mine, among many other things that it was not intended for. Respectfully, it belongs on the list.
But you still haven’t answered my question. Do these products not exist?
> The peloton is a BIKE
The Peloton is also a product, and a product that uses a general purpose OS (Android) and general purpose screen. It’s still built to do one thing.
It’s not just a bike - I have three of those, and none of them have a screen, and I can ride them outside.
The point here is that products are real things, have specific purposes, and often use general purpose tech to achieve a very specific outcome.
Is it cool to run Mario on my TI-84? Yes! But I wouldn’t be bent out of shape if I couldn’t.
Should I be bent out of shape that not every native Mac app has a Windows/PC counterpart? Or vice versa?
Setting that aside, personally, I have no desire to play Switch games on my PC. The Switch is the best device for playing Switch games. Does that imply some kind of moral failing on my part?
If you have philosophical issues with console gaming in general, that's one thing. But then this becomes a conversation about something else entirely.
I'm still curious about why you continue to sidestep the question. This conversation is no longer moving forward.
Now that the steam deck is out, I'm glad I did.
That branch in the code could be interfered with. Over writing it with NOOP instructions might not be easily possible due to verification of code signing but there’s other techniques like power glitching.
I don’t think anyone has ever referred to the process of power glitching a chip as “simple”.
Then PS2 came (or was it PS3?) and all the pirate CDs/DVDs simply disappeared. I never understood what made game media piracy nonviable with newer consoles. Why can't the pirates simply copy every single bit of the newer game media as they did before?. I think the WII had some piracy CDs easily available but you also had to mod your console somehow. I'd be happy to have an answer from any of the hackers here :).
Edit: I'm not talking about "home piracy" where you copy your CD in your PC using cloning software, I'm talking about industrial one, you could buy these games in real stores that also sold other stuff brought from China.
Lik-Sang was (again as I recall) the primary target of all this, and was eventually forced to shut down. They were definitely the single best place to buy console modding and other weird and crazy accessories from Asia.
After the first volley, Sony and the rest started going after the smaller players, the local console modders, the ROM hosting sites, eventually even the hackers who discovered vulnerabilities themselves. 2002 was when they came for Lik-Sang and it had an immediate chilling effect, and they shut down as of 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang
By the way - chipping services still operate, but they have a lot of ways of flying not under the radar exactly, but operating in ways which make it not worth it for Sony, Nintendo from going after them. Doing their manufacturing in China (of course), sales from various parts of eastern Europe, and the direct modding services being super-small time modders operating off local sites like OfferUp, Craigslist, or sometimes even eBay. It's overwhelmingly previous generation consoles they offer services for.
PS1 chipping was/is very easy, decent sized pins/pads, depending on the chip it’s almost 8 solder points on the board (other chips had less solder points, it depended on the board revision and if you had a stealth chip or not). Any kid with a crappy soldering iron could install them. The code for the chips also got quickly “leaked” along with the methods the chips used so you could easily find chip code online and program your own chips using cheap microcontrollers. So basically there was very little cost (both in skill and cost) to get started chipping PS1s. So you had a very high success rate chipping them and a decent profit from each console (but as anyone who was so inclined could chip the console, it did lower the cost you could charge per mod. Me and my friend used to mod PS1s at school during our lunch break in the schools technology lab using the schools irons, solder and wire, me and my friend went half’s on a parallel chip programmer, so our overheads would be low, chipping PS1 was basically my first soldering adventures, that’s how low the skill bar was to solder these things in)
Once installed you just slapped a disc in the drive and played the game. (The early chips soon got “detectable” so game devs started putting copy detection in their games, but later chips started becoming “stealth” so would be much harder to detect and would play un-modifyed rips without issue, crackers would also bypass the copy detection in games so they would play on the old chips).
PS2 chipping started off slow, in the early days you would have to push button combinations to put the chip into the right mode for the game you were trying to play (PS1/PS2 CD/PS2 DVD), so the chips were not as user friendly as on the PS1. The chips would also need much better soldering skills to install as you needed to solder wires to some fine pitch ICs on the board. The chips were also more expensive as they required something a bit more “beefy” than the cheap microcontrollers used on the PS1.
So in the PS2 world (esp during the early days) the cost of installing the chips was much higher and they were not as user friendly. So imo the market wasn’t as large as it was for the PS1. (Plus I had started working and had some cash from my PS1 days tucked away, so I just got into the habit of purchasing my PS2 games.
That’s just what I remember, but its 1am, I’ve had a couple of beers, and this was all 20plus years ago so I may not be remembering everything 100% correctly.
Side note: Iirc, chipping an Xbox 1 was much easier than the PS2, and the Xbox 360 “just” involved replacing the firmware on the DVD drive for the console to enable backups so with the right tools (a PC, a ~£15 sata card and a screw driver, a bit later in the console lifecycle you also needed a serial port but a cheap USB serial converter would work, I used to use a cheap Nokia USB data cable with the end cut off and a sewing needle soldered to the RX line) you could flash all the 360s you could get your hands on (there was a decent amount of mail in work on the forums of private torrent trackers, people would open their 360, mail off their drive for £4~ first class recorded (in the UK), and get it back a few days later flashed.
Also selling physical (or digital) copies was rarely done by the crackers themselves (that's actually looked down upon in the community), mostly by third parties who usually had better Internet access/knowledge. When everyone started having unlimited ADSL/etc, their small business dwindled quickly.
Modern DRM uses cryptography and remote attestation, but that wasn't around in the PS2 era.
As far as anti-piracy measures go, the PS3 is where Sony upped their game AFAIK.
Ah! So actually, they implemented a really (technically) cool DRM that is totally sideband to the bits of data on the media. It relied on tracking servo feedback that most (all?) cd burners ignored.
Though, this pertains to ps1, I'm sure they did something similar and perhaps harder to spoof for ps2.
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/05/how-the-sony-playstation-was...
> Along with the region specific license key data, Sony pressed a special pit into the TOC of every disc. This pit, or “the wobble groove” as it would become known, was virtually impossible for consumer grade CD writers to replicate. A CD writer laser would need to be programmed to physically move in three dimensions in order to burn the wobble groove into a CD-R. So the patented pressing process achieved both copy protection and region encoding simultaneously.
A nice game of and mouse with the modchippers described as well.
On bootleg chinese games, you could get 20 in 1 cartridges for the Game Boy on your local video renting store.
I never got one, tho. My dad didn't allow me to buy one, saying these things were unethical and also saying these things were of an unknown quality and might break easily or may even break my Gameboy (not sure if he really was concerned about that, or said so to stop me nagging, as the ethics argument went straight over my 7 or 8yo head). But some of my friends eventually got one, so I regularly borrowed these things :P
The one I remember looked something like this in size.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bootleggames/images/d/db/G...
When Windows & DOS were still normally installed from 3.5 inch floppies, each Microsoft factory install floppy also had more data on it than a PC would be able to write to a regularly formatted blank floppy.
Case in point: I ordered three DVD box sets from eBay, new and sealed, a few weeks ago. All three were counterfeit, and all three were from different sellers. Very convincing counterfeits all of them - but the single-layer discs (because pirates struggle with the more common dual-layer) and lack of copy protection on studio releases (because pirates can't recreate it) were the giveaways - along with some sloppy data layer cutting edges.
Compare this to, say, Blu-ray. It has also been cracked - but counterfeit Blu-rays are far, far more rare and easily detected. Why? The DRM is stronger, sure - but Blu-rays are also entire Java programs and much harder to replicate or rip than a DVD menu. Many Blu-ray Discs have Cinavia, which embeds invisible data inside the video and audio streams informing the player that the disc should have copy protection. Cinavia can't be removed without massive distortions to the video and audio, and pirates can't create their own copy-protected discs - thus, any attempt to make (even press) an unprotected disc with a protected video stream will fail. And finally, rather than DVD which has the recordable and pressed discs with a similar color, Blu-ray uses almost transparent discs for pressed ones, but dark black for burnables, making spotting fakes visually easy.
Where am I going with this? My point is that DVD used only one real form of protection, and it was weak and broken less than a year after release. Blu-ray uses up to, I believe, five different methods all assuming the others have fallen. And that's for a system that doesn't get software updates and came out 15 years ago, unlike a video game console.
DRM in breadth and in depth.
Edit: People pointed out that PS2 discs had burned sectors that most consumer burners can't replicate. But I don't think that's really a complete answer as to why street vendors went away, considering Swap Magic[0] made disc-based piracy viable again in a few years.
A number of patches and mods came out to attempt to disable these checks, including mods for the Wii as you mentioned.
The PS2 used a lot of the same tricks, it was just better at it. But once consoles started having internet connections, they could start doing checks that way as well, and ban people using modded consoles.
You absolutely can mod modern systems to play pirated games. The tradeoff is that you can never use online services. That's why people don't do it as much anymore.
On the next generations of consoles, ps3 and ps4 were software modded, so you could run copies, but they were loaded from the machine’s hard drive, so no cd copies were necessary.
This applies to iPhones, Gaming consoles, and Teslas too.
Companies must allow downgrades, and consumers must be able to permanently disable update prompts.
Just destroy any company that doesn't comply with the will of the people. (yes, I know this is problematic, but companies like Nintendo for example need to be brought to heel.)
Sorry google, that means you are technically going before Apple. (Alphabet)
This makes far more sense to me if the pitch is that companies must include clear terms for consumers about how they’ll handle software / what the hardware will allow the user to do in terms of software downgrades. That has precedent as an extension of truthful advertising / consumer protection.
But if a company says “we’re selling the Widget 9000, it updates it’s firmware automatically and irreversibly”, I don’t see a coherent reason for the government to say “no, you can’t sell that”. If people don’t want to pay for gear that behaves in that way, they’re free to not buy it.
I don't know of any company that's been seriously challenged for disabling hacks, though.
That's actually all you need to say. Anything else is pro-corporate bullshit that you've been spoonfed until you regurgitate it.
The rebuttal to the rest of your comment is "just try and buy a TV that isn't actively hostile to the user". But that's a side conversation, the fundamental reality is that companies are legal fiction that don't have rights. They are allowed certain privileges we grant them, and we should not grant them the ability to screw over people that don't understand what the term firmware means.
I as a purchaser want all kinds of things; this doesn’t mean that I want the government to mandate that companies give them to me. In part that’s because the people who run and work at businesses also have free agency, and in part it’s because I don’t believe that government interference in commerce is a viable approach to getting what I want in the long term.
I say do what you want with your equipment if it isn't connected to the web. But if it is, you need to have some responsibility for it being used to harm others.
I don't see what corporate personhood has to do with that the parent comment. They are asking if government restrictions on how Nintendo makes their product 'tamperproof' are desirable. We would have to answer the same question even if we removed 'the legal fiction of corporation' and only allowed partnerships and sole traders.
Companies are quite literally legal persons and have the same rights as any natural-born citizen. It’d be a violation of a natural person’s rights if you forbade them from exercising those rights with others, companies only simplify the legal side of asset ownership and taxes.
The premise that benefits individuals and society.
The government already mandates how companies design and sell products. This isn't a radical concept. The reason cars get safer and cleaner every year is due to government regulation. The reason that instant coffee cannot be more than 50% bugs and twigs is government regulation.
> If people don’t want to pay for gear that behaves in that way, they’re free to not buy it.
Or we could just regulate it and then this consumer-hostile issue wouldn't exist.
Apple preventing repairs? John Deere preventing repairs? These have real-world impacts.
But I specifically want a device that only runs code from another company. Why should the government say “only enterprises can establish this absolute security trust relationship with their hardware vendor”?
It this seems too insecure one could gate such a feature behind a physical switch on the device.
If this is indeed still not secure enough one could require a physical switch AND a password or token ensuring that the person physically holding the device can still be restricted by the owner in case the two aren't one in the same while providing all owners absolute privilege on their own hardware.
The Government already does this and with great success, the ban on lead additives in paint would be one example. By that point, it's harmful effects were already known as early as 1786 (efforts to ban lead paint began around 1921) before it's ban in 1976 (US).
Perhaps the free market just needed more time?
Without government intervention, somehow I suspect we would still see lead paint continue to be bought and sold. I cannot imagine the unthinkable number of individuals that were fucked over through no fault of their own (learning disabilities, poor health, shortened lifespan) because we chose to continue to allow lead paint to be sold on the market.
> I don’t see a coherent reason for the government to say “no, you can’t sell that”.
What about the environment? By artificially reducing the lifespan of these devices, you're sending them to an early grave only to be unnecessarily replaced by a new device because the corporate overlords demand it.
It's unnecessary churn and I'm not sure that we should demand that future generations carry the burden of our poor choices simply because we would prefer to wait until the free market fixes this mess (which may never happen). How long will that take? 10 years? More?
Nobody claims it does.
If a manufacturer goes out of business ot decides to stop providing updates, you can be stuck with a piece of junk if you don't control your device. If a device is designed to only allow automatic updates direct from the manufacturer and you have no control over the version of software your device runs, your perfectly functional hardware can become a useless piece of junk. Since updates often further lock devices down to make it harder run your own software, being unable to revert older versions of the software on your device can directly prevent you from being able to modify your device to make it functional.
This is all not just idle speculation, it happens all the time.
> By artificially reducing the lifespan of these devices,
An iPhone 6S will run iOS 15, and if you throw a new battery in it it’ll run like new for almost all tasks, with the only caveat possibly being reduced NAND capacity/slower FS performance.
I clearly explained how aspects of how updates are handled can reduce device lifespan.
Apple has issues, but the length of time they support their devices is pretty good. It would be even better if they hadn't spent lots of time working to prevent devices older than the 6s from running any software not approved by apple.
As a counter example look at how Sonos handled the S1 to S2 transition. Deliberately bricking functional devices to reduce the second hand market. Not only discontuing updates to S1 speakers that had been bought new only a few years before, but also blocking updates to any S2 devices on the same network as a S1 device. Both of these policies were adjusted afterwards only after they garnered bad publicity and sparked a public outcry.
Another great example is fuel economy standards - the government says "no you cannot sell a car that has fewer than X mpg after the year Y" and it has done wonders for our energy policy despite the government doing what they can to keep gas prices down.
They can extend the lifetime. They can also reduce it either by slowing things down to the point of becoming unusable or by preventing certain use cases - for example have you heard that the Nintendo Switch updates prevent subsequent downgrades in order to prevent users from making full use of the hardware by running custom/modded games?
Applebees has 100% control over the food that they put on plates inside Applebees, they can ban you from bringing in outside food and beverages. But we wouldn’t say that Applebees has a monopoly on anything.
Nintendo has total control over the software that runs on their hardware. Their hardware model is similar to the model that my microwave has. People are welcome to try to DIY mod their Nintendo device the same way I can try to DIY mod my microwave, but that doesn’t mean the government ought to be putting a stop to Nintendo’s “monopoly” on how the hardware they build is built and imaged.
You are also somehow envisioning the government as a separate entity having no relationship to the people as a whole that instead of literally already setting the entire ground rules in which our society exists somehow needs a very high bar to justify any interference whatsoever.
The government is all of us and the only justification it requires is the people's interests. 99.999% of people aren't chicken farmers so if they demand cleaner chicken farms so the chicken they eat are less likely to give them the shits then cleaner farms it is and those who who don't like it can situate their farms somewhere else.
99.999% of people aren't Nintendo executives so if the people are smart enough to demand hardware they actually own then Nintendo is free to exit the entire US market.
Pray we don't alter the deal further.
Notably, one of the most fundamental principles of US government is specifically the notion that the majority, even a supermajority, can’t infringe on the rights of a minority. We’ve screwed this up in plenty of cases, but that doesn’t suggest that the underlying goal is invalid and we should steer into the skid.
You seem to believe that one must reach backwards to the constitution in order to justify any new restrictions on your freedoms in a nation where we have happily redefined commerce within a state as subject to regulation based on the commerce clause. Let alone the general welfare clause.
In fact powers are so broadly construed that the only barrier is enumeration of a restriction in federal law and non violation of fundamental rights.
You have no more fundamental right to sell a locked down device than to build a store without proper fire exits. We didn't need to wait for fire exits to be built and vote with our feet.
People in this comment page keep drawing parallels between “a hardware device whose software I cannot modify” and things like fire code / health and safety laws. If you think there’s actually a line connecting those, draw it. I’m not seeing it.
You can argue until you are blue in the face that you don't think such a law is needed or a public good but I fail utterly to understand why you think it would be illegal.
Is such a law constitutional?
It's ridiculously broad but not infinitely broad. It's fairly trivial to suggest that allowing users full control of their own devices serves their interests.
A deliberately silly idea is liable to fail to hit the mark as far as the point. What if it was made a law that one must wear clown masks in the grocery store or all paint your nails before appearing in public?
Under all circumstances in which the profit motive does not align with societies desires. Safety, health, discrimination, consumer rights, etc.
(ie6, activex)
Device makers have become quite opinionated about how their things are used, and they are in a position to enforce their opinions. I don't know what exactly the right balance is, because there are genuine interests to be balanced... but when a piece of hardware is designed explicitly to allow the manufacturer to remove the device's ability to run the exact same software that it used to, we should meet any claim that this is primarily for the user's advantage with great skepticism. We should also take seriously the possibility that tilting the balance of power in this way creates issues at least as bad as the ones we are hoping to resolve.
It's like a city so fearful of petty criminals, it allows the police the ability to do as they please. And the police are directly hired by the rich people in town.
I think it’s more that they realized it makes them more money, and nobody is there to stop them.
> Why should the people who develop products at Nintendo have to design around some politician’s law?
Sorry, but it must be we live in different planets. Japan has laws tailor made for the commercial interests of their gaming and media industry. Are IP protection and copyright also politician's law?
I'm all against absurd legislation and bureaucracy and I'm glad creators get paid but analyse your sentence:
"Why should the people who develop products at Nintendo have to design around some politician’s law?"
Do you notice that you are equating People=Private Company and Consumer Protection=Politician? I could understand if you are the owner of a company trying to work around some legislative moat, otherwise, it's pure brainwashing.
Were they to document a way for you to disable the fuse check, then the user could disable the fuse check and do their own downgrades, or if writing this kind of technical documentation is too laborious then they can just provide themselves a downgrade service and just point to that in the documentation.
So: yes. I’d gladly go back to v10 if I could. I actually offered money to do so, but - unsurprisingly - I got refused.
Making it the law is about the only thing that would work because incentives are otherwise inherently misaligned.
> I believe we need new laws declaring that consumers can run whatever versions of software they want on devices they OWN.
To which you said
> The reason it’s not that easy is that platform holders have contractual obligations with content providers about their content being secure.
I pointed ought that if the law were modified as requested that such contractual obligations would be mooted because they cannot be obligated to implement restrictions that would fall afoul of the prospective law that commenter proposed and I agree ought to be implemented.
A Switch is just a toy anyways. Buy a different toy.
There are countless variations of this in cars. Changing a fuel pump or ignition control module or sometimes even disconnecting a battery activates 'anti theft' features in many cars and companies frequently use the DMCA to prevent repair and maintenance without $10k/year software licenses.
Had the dealer done the repair, I could probably fight with them to get the radio fixed. But with the independent shop that did the repair, whom I feel did nothing wrong, I do not want to pressure to repair the "collateral damage" that really isn't their fault.
It's a trade-off, and I believe there is space for both kinds of devices. I want an unlocked Linux PC and a DRM-monopolized-by-Nintendo Switch so that I can do tinkering, when I want it, but also enjoy games without much technical fuss.
While I abhor DRM, I also am averse to the potential malware lurking in there. There may be password and credit card sniffers.
I only play non-DRM and open-source games.
Imo it's more common for the "legit" copy of the software to have dodgy spyware and such in it, which is removed by the cracker.
Does anyone have any links to instances of this happening?
Here's an example of malware delivered via purportedly cracked software.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ransomware-hits-research-facility...
Also, from the description there is, it kinda sounds like guy just googled and downloaded a random exe from internet.
Surely you understand that people who work in building games don't exactly like that attitude ;) So they might decide to release exclusively on Switch and not do a PC port, if pirate copies are plentiful on PC but rare on Switch.
BTW, I believe most of the games I've played recently are Switch-exclusive:
- Super Smash Bros.
- Super Mario Odyssey
- Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Wars
I am a game dev.
None of this would be an issue if the companies just released the server-side tools and let people host and moderate their own instances of games. This is basically how the Fediverse works and it's great. People who want to be nasty go into their little corner and everyone else in another.
Only problem is this would mean customers actually get to own the stuff they buy. Companies would rather you be the product.
It's not "free for everyone". It's "free to use the software you bought and paid for in any way you see fit". I call this new concept "ownership".
For a device like a phone the owner's motivations can become muted, such as by a service provider functionality requirements or an employer's desires. This is similarly where the problem comes about in the discussion about side-loading.
We already know that there are many developers who wish to live on the 'nasty' side, but there is also a laziness motivation in using that side as well, it's less work for the developer.
This then becomes the ever-widening hole where consumers get brought onto the 'nasty' side blindly because that's where the market is - at the same time exposing the users to all of the 'nasty' stuff that technology was originally there to protect them from.
Soon you would only want to play on closed/invite-only servers, since the guys that "wanted to be nasty" didn't go into their own little corners, but were glad to spoil it for everyone else. And even then the cheaters invested a lot of time and effort to sneak into closed circles to ... I don't know, simply cheat?
Guys just randomly using your key (at a point were Half-Life was really cheap and easy to come by) were also a constant annoyance.
So Valve had to do something, and this was the Steam client, cheat detection, and a constant cat and mouse game to save the experience for players and assets/investments for the developers and in effect their "platform".
Never underestimate the desire of idiots to ruin it for everyone else.
Minecraft is an example of this sort of system done right. It was so successful Microsoft had to own it.
I bought the toy because I enjoy Zelda and Mario. I've bought every Nintendo console since the NES and will likely continue to do so because of the enjoyment I get back from it. I'm not interested in modding or downgrading or whatever.
If you are not looking for a toy to enjoy Nintendo only games with then get a Steam Deck or whatever else and mod to your hearts content.
And the fact that they are locked down is not a bad thing. It actually made Nintendo's success. While other manufacturers had to deal with a flood of poor quality titles, Nintendo was able to set quality standards. As for the evil DRM, game publisher sometimes don't want to release games on open platforms (like PC) because of piracy.
Your car analogy doesn't hold, you don't need to change oil and wiper fluid in your consoles, consoles are essentially no maintenance and that's another good thing about them. And in fact, the most likely maintenance operation you may have to do on the Switch is changing the battery, and it is a relatively easy operation. I don't know how long my Switch will last, but consoles tend to last a really long time for consumer electronics.
Game consoles may be computers under the hood, and with hacks, you may turn them into a general purpose machines (and I have done it, it is fun). But really, they are accessories to the games. You are not "darn ignorant" because you buy a console for its intended purpose. Yes it is a toy, literally, you find it it toy stores, but why should you buy a different toy just because it may not do more than advertised?
The bit cell is programmed by applying a high-voltage pulse not encountered during a normal operation across the gate and substrate of the thin oxide transistor (around 6 V for a 2 nm thick oxide, or 30 MV/cm) to break down the oxide between gate and substrate. The positive voltage on the transistor's gate forms an inversion channel in the substrate below the gate, causing a tunneling current to flow through the oxide. The current produces additional traps in the oxide, increasing the current through the oxide and ultimately melting the oxide and forming a conductive channel from gate to substrate.
So, basically, they intentionally apply an out-of-spec voltage on the cell's output port, overloading the gate and causing a permanent short to ground. The cell always reads as 0 afterwards.
These fuses have always been around in microcontrollers. They are used to configure various aspects of the microcontroller operations, like startup sequences, whether or not the contents of the chip can be read out, is their voltage monitoring (brownout detection) enabled, is there a watchdog timer enabled which could reset the chip automatically if needed, etc.
It is common that fuses like this can only be set to progressively stricter settings. And the only way to reset the fuses is to erase the entire chip, firmware and all. It sounds like these fuses in the Nvidia dont even allow this.
a clever but despicable tool.
Anyway, the article also says that an exploit is already available to bypass that
I did not know this is a false quote
:)
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/internet-browser-may-be-remov... [2] https://www.reviewgeek.com/98799/you-can-now-play-google-sta...
A. Game consoles are sold at a loss or very near-cost; often they only end up making some <5% per-unit profit due to the sheer volume of their production. Devices with direct evidence for this are PS5[0] and Steam Deck[1]. For iPhones, it can feel unfair when apple is making app store margins on top of their 30%+ per-device margins, but I support the idea that Apple's profit margins take into account app store margins and the devices would be x% more each year if developers could go completely without IAP for in-app digital purchases.
B. Nintendo et al. specifically sell these as "game consoles", so combined with (A), it feels fine that they get their 30%. For iOS, being locked into the App Store serves only the purpose of total security, where basically nothing downloaded from the app store can siphon data from other apps via a sandbox escape or otherwise jailbreak the phone for silent spyware purposes.
0: https://www.techradar.com/news/ps5-has-only-just-stopped-los...
1: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/gabe-newell-says-steam-... (pretty heavily implied; Steam will also end up making money post-sale via their 30% cut)
The thing is, I feel quite comfortable asserting that nobody uses a Nintendo Switch as their primary computer. If an app isn't available on the Switch, people can download it on something else. If an app isn't available on the iPhone, protesters in Hong Kong die: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678
Locked down consoles are regrettable; locked down phones are an affront to free society.
I'm just sad about where the technology world is heading
I hesitate to bring this up, because an old bad thing is still a bad thing. But it's not a new bad thing.