Comment by noirscape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noirscape | Hacker News Reader

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Impressive whitewashing of Gary Bowser's reputation rears its head once more. Gary Bowser really isn't the saint articles like to depict him as. His old computer repair shop, OPA (his online nickname comes from this shop) had a bad reputation among computer enthusiasts in the 80s for not shipping parts for whatever reason[0].

Relatedly, the reason he left Canada (something conveniently glossed over) is not because he got in trouble with the housing crisis (which he has stated in other interviews) but rather because he got arrested peddling fake DVDs through his PC repair shop[1].

More recently, he got caught being involved with the new Switch flashcard; a reverse DNS lookup (that is, running the IP through a database of known web addresses and seeing what else is hosted there) revealed that the site is hosted on the same IP as his personal blog. (Bowser blamed a DNS poisoning attack, which strikes me as unlikely from what I know about DNS poisoning - that's basically alledging a conspiracy.)

He's likely just a patsy/fall guy though - the big cheese here is Max Louarn (also Canadian), who last I heard is hiding out in France (he has a French girlfriend) after he managed to slip out of the arrest made by the Dominican Republics authorities.

I get life sucks for him (and I do hope it gets better for him eventually). Just don't fall for the "innocent small criminal being preyed on by the big evil company" - Gary Bowser had a key part in an international piracy hardware manufacturing operation.

[0]: https://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/MICROPENDIUM/mp9501.max.pdf

[1]: https://www.toronto.com/life/pair-charged-over-counterfeit-d...

What is this comment trying to prove? Having read the article, I don’t see anything in your comment that makes “small criminal being preyed on by the big evil company” any less accurate. It certainly doesn’t flatter Bowser or present him as an antihero, it’s just a sad tale of how cruel and unbalanced “justice” can be in these cases.

Gary profited considerably from his shenanigans - by his own admission in interviews shortly after release, he made ~300k USD a year from this operation.

The point is mostly that he's always been a sleazy car salesman kinda guy instead of some small hero standing up for the masses.

So he was asked to pay the equivalent of ~50 years' worth of illegal income? How many companies get the same treatment? Break the law, pay 50 times the amount? How many companies are asked to pay without any harm ever being proven? How many executives go to prison after a company is found guilty of anything?

"Sleazy car salesman" is not an indictment worthy of 1-3 years in prison and 50 years' worth of the profits. Not unless we apply the same for any sleazy company. Are we? Then what is the case you're trying to make?

You won't hear me object to punishing executives harsher for crimes they've been directly responsible for.

One does not preclude the other.

>How many executives go to prison after a company is found guilty of anything?

There's a huge difference between sending an executive to jail for actions of subordinates (which is ludicrous, in my opinion), versus jailing the subordinates for the actual crimes, which apparently happens more than you know.

If an executive makes 10-100x what their subordinates do AND has comprehensive control over the company, why SHOULDN'T they be the one bearing legal responsibility for the company's misdeeds? Whose responsibility is it?

"Oh it was just a couple bad employees doing things that aligned with our strategic executives, how could that have happened" and then the company keeps doing the same stuff after a few shmucks go to prison? Is that good?

> which apparently happens more than you know

There's not much I know everything about so I guess everything happens more than I know... You're right and it's exactly my point: laws are for the plebes. Anyone making the argument "criminal = any punishment is fair" even for relatively small time sleazy criminals chooses to do so selectively.

Regarding the fairness of sending a CEO to jail, CEO remuneration is literally hundreds of times that of the average employee. So they are treated as disproportionately responsible for the company's success. Why not its failures? Is failure all on the one employee? Was the company built so fragile that one employee is able to lead it astray? Disproportionate benefits vs. accountability for executives is again exactly what I'm flagging here as being almost the opposite of how a regular "sleazy small time criminal" gets.

What if the decision leading to the company breaking the law came explicitly from the executives? In all the cases Big Tech was fined by the EU in the past decades no executive was punished for what were explicit business decisions. The (still mostly unpaid) fines weren't 50 years' worth of the benefit. Elon Musk actually is a "sleazy car salesman" in every sense of the words. His decisions lead to laws being broken and losses for others, but no jail time, and barely any monetary punishment.

But execs should be the ones going to jail. That they're not is the entire problem!

You could argue that the fine was too high (or that there should be no fine at all, and just a prison sentence); but the way this article reads is "poor mostly-innocent mostly-law-abiding citizen just ran a little website and now was huge punished for it", and that doesn't seem entirely true.

Whether companies do or don't get prosecuted sufficiently doesn't really matter here.

>What is this comment trying to prove? Having read the article, I don’t see anything in your comment that makes “small criminal being preyed on by the big evil company” any less accurate.

What makes him "small" and the company "evil"? The guy has been involved with and profiting from piracy for a long time, including multiple arrests.

How much money has Nintendo made by prosecuting enthusiasts and individual pirates? How much money have they made? It’s obvious who is small here.

Apropos of anything else, Bowser had a history of actively commercial distributing pirate software/media (regardless of the opinions on that).

And then with this, the spin is "oh, I wasn't involved in anything, I just helped them update a website from time to time because they're not social people" really doesn't pass the smell test (and nor did it to anyone else).

Regardless of the innocence or guilt of Bowser and how bad or good of a person he was leading up to this decision: I think a lot of the beef people have with this case is that it exemplifies how companies like Nintendo can just make up numbers of “losses” with no actual evidence and essentially force, with the blessing of the state, people into indentured servitude to the corporation from said “losses”. That sort of corporate power being enforced by the state should give anyone pause, regardless of whether the victims of this process are good people are not.

That, I'd certainly agree on.

One piece of pirated music, movie, or software does not equate to a lost sale.

To quote H.L. Mencken:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

The way you describe him sounds like you come from someplace where regulatory capture is a good thing.

No, more just ~10+ years of familiarity with Gary's bullshit from the homebrew scene.

Unless you like piracy, there's very little to like about anything made by Xecuter or their previous name, GATEWAY. They just are the piracy option; anything they say about homebrew is just lip service to not get banned from the relevant internet forums.

All their modchips have always as their main focus had piracy. That recent flashcard that debranded TX has made literally can only be used for piracy, not homebrew.

Hell, these are the guys that DRMed their piracy software to password lock the Switch NAND if you tried to reverse engineer it (twice! They did the same thing on 3DS.)

> No, more just ~10+ years of familiarity with Gary's bullshit from the homebrew scene.

Ah, so because you have a grudge you think corporate servitude is good and showing people the story that lead to it (which could lead to them drawing different conclusions) is "whitewashing".

> Hell, these are the guys that DRMed their piracy software to password lock the Switch NAND if you tried to reverse engineer it (twice! They did the same thing on 3DS.)

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

There's no reason to think the guy who's calling out this person's shenanigans is in favor of corporate servitude. Probably they just don't like how the article frames this guy as an agreeable martyr; it seems more nuanced than that.

Yeah - just so we're clear on this: I have problems with how Gary gets lionized by a lot of people but I don't think he should be in corporate servitude - he should just've been able to file for bankruptcy after he served his jailtime and that should've been it. Ideally it'd scare him straight and he could pick up his life again afterwards - maybe build up something to have a bit of a retirement again.

> he should just've been able to file for bankruptcy after he served his jailtime and that should've been it.

The purpose of criminal restitution is to punish you. You shouldn't be able to discharge a punishment.

I am sure a lot of people in this thread would agree with this statement taken with no extra context. The problem that a lot of people have about this specific situation is that this should never have been a criminal punishment or restitution in the first place.

> international piracy hardware manufacturing operation

> peddling fake DVDs

> caught being involved with the new Switch flashcard

I'm OK with this. Literal non-crimes as far as I'm concerned. Literally nothing.

> His old computer repair shop had a bad reputation among computer enthusiasts in the 80s for not shipping parts

So he's guilty of running a shitty store.

Would you consider wage theft of an employee by an employer a non-crime? After all, it's just their time and no physical goods are stolen.

Of course. It's not about tangible or intangible goods. It's about scarcity and whether it's artificial or real. Time is the most scarce resource there is. You can't copy time the way you can trivially copy bits.

"You can't copy time the way you can trivially copy bits."

It took time to arrange the bits in such a way that you desired to copy them.

Copying bits is not stealing. It's worse than stealing, it's counterfeiting.

When you steal a car, the car manufacturer can still sell cars at that value. When you counterfeit software (or anything digital), the original work is devalued over time, because as the counterfeit becomes more widespread, the value approaches $0.

That's a good point. By the same logic, actually, counterfeiting currency wouldn't be a crime either, as the scarcity is artificially sustained by the government, but the consequence of everyone being able to print their own currency is that cash would become worthless.

That's not a good point at all. Counterfeiting physical items is not the same as copying information. Physical items are naturally scarce, information is naturally abundant and artificially made scarce by force of law. Physical items actually exist in the real world, unlike information.

I don't think that applies to cash. Cash is artificially scarce. It's only kept scarce by the fact that it's illegal for anyone but the government to print it, and because printers refuse to print something if they detect a certain pattern that's present on bills. Otherwise, cash would only be worth the paper it's printed on.

It's naturally scarce. Even if it was easy to print dollar bills, they would not be infinite. You actually need physical material to make them. That puts hard limits to the scale of any counterfeiting operation. They could make it legal and it wouldn't have a fraction of the impact of fractional reserve banking which literally creates mountains of money out nowhere via the power of debt.

> It took time to arrange the bits in such a way that you desired to copy them.

Correct. It's that labor which is valuable. The labor of creation, of finding that interesting unique number in the sea of infinity. That's valuable.

Well at least it used to be anyway. AI is proving itself quite adept at finding interesting numbers.

> it's counterfeiting

No, it's copyright infringement. That's what they call it anyway. I don't consider it worse than literally anything. I consider it natural. People do it without even realizing that they're doing it. Every single day. At massive scales.

> the original work is devalued over time, because as the counterfeit becomes more widespread, the value approaches $0.

It doesn't approach zero, it is zero. It always was zero. Once created, information is infinitely copyable, it is infinitely abundant, supply is infinite.

That's the reason why they had to create an artificial scarcity system on top of it. Because it's not actually real.

It's this copyright nonsense that allowed people to delude themselves into thinking numbers could bought and sold. Maybe that was true once in the age of the printing press. It's not true in the 21st century, the age of information and globally networked pocket supercomputers. Copyright was over the second computers were invented.

It's time to let go. Creators need to find alternative business models where they get paid before the act of creating for the act of creating. Because it's that labor which is scarce and valuable. The end result is not.

Also omitted from this story is the fact that he repeatedly violated FOSS licenses by outright stealing from the Atmosphere project so he could turn around and resell the work of the community (who just wants to run their own code on their own devices) at a great personal profit. What tweaks he did make he ensured could not be reverse engineered by the FOSS community by making it brick devices running competing free software. Copyright sucks but this guy was a piece of work.

> Gary Bowser had a key part in an international piracy hardware manufacturing operation

Are you gonna cite this part or just the no-big-deal-really parts?

Sorry - thought the article would be sufficient on that on its own. Xecuter was the international piracy operation.

They moved millions in terms of sold products over the years and had deals with Chinese factories to make that stuff "at scale" and had exchanges on how to get their devices past border controls; all this stuff is in the legal complaint he got jailed for.

Oh, yes, and Bowser was just ... "updating the website from time to time" because "the people actually doing all the manufacture and sales were not really social".

I don't buy that. Piracy operation has some semi-retired guy just "help out" with their website because he's more of a people person than they are, but other than that he had no idea what was really going on?

I don't believe they were selling copies of any games? Modchip operation.

The software their modchips used (called SX OS) took a lazy shortcut that also effectively means it embedded chunks of the Horizon operating system that the Switch uses (the filesystem module to be exact), combined with embedding gamecard headers in the software to trick the gamecard firmware.

It also embedded a massive chunk of the free CFW Atmosphere (which is GPL2.0-Only, with some modifications), and they obviously never open sourced it.

So yes, they were effectively selling their customers (modified) copies of Nintendo's software.

Thanks for the extra information.

Xecuter for some reason decided to also sell access to game dumps instead of just modchips/flash carts. IIRC it was never proven that Bowser was specifically involved in that part, but the group did it for sure.

It seems like the subject of the article, no? What's not clear is that it's really such a bad thing. Sure, maybe it should be illegal and he should get some kind of fined for what he did, but 40 months and garnishing his wages for the rest of his life seems out of balance compared to the actual harm that was done.

Bowser was literally just a site admin. He was not involved in the creation or supply of those mods in any way.

The way you have typed your rant makes it seem you only want to throw a contrarian comment at the expense of a ruined life, which is pathetic.

"Gary Bowser had a key part in an international piracy hardware manufacturing operation."

So what? Why should that get him a $14 million fine? There's nothing morally wrong with what he did and it should not be illegal.

“He was no angel. That’s why corporate servitude should be legal.”

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