roastedpeacock

Nintendo have had a conflicted stance about community projects over the years. From threatening UltraHLE (early Nintendo 64 emulator) developers back in the late 90s to largely ignoring the Wii exploits and homebrew scene in the mid-to-late 2000s to attempting to hire private investigators to identify and implicate 3DS homebrew developers in 'illegal' activities.

A similar case is when the PS3 Slim was released without OtherOS support and later removed from existing consoles with a firmware-update that really incited research and development into the PS3 console security, which led to a full break around late 2010 and Sony attempting to retaliate with smear-campaign and prosecution(s) for copyright infringement across the USA and Europe. Some of those were more successful than others.

There have been public emulators for recent consoles from Nintendo and Sony and they've managed to stay up without any cease-and-desist or lawsuits so one would imagine they are doing something correctly to protect themselves (such as not being associated with piracy and some of the shady monetisation involved with that).

> Why did it take so long to add monero support?

Some third-parties did sell gift-codes using Monero before Mullvad had native support although I had no experience with them.

> I've heard a rumor that you've shared a user IP because of a government subpoena (live during a connection, so it wasn't logged).

Got any details?

FWIW: Correlating the origin IP with real-time traffic out of a single-hop VPN tunnel can be done using traffic-analysis by third-parties that are not the VPN provider themselves.

Not saying not to try but are others pessimistic by the proverbial 'boiling of the frog' when other countries started adopting DMCA type measures in part by US imperialism also pressure from extra-governmental organizations like the WTO?

Hopefully this does not pass and we do not go down this road again...

This makes me think an important question. What can individuals in western countries with imported IP-imperialism do to protect open source and other independent innovation from attempts at censorship by anti-hacking laws such as CFAA, DMCA and their foreign analogues or vaguely worded patent claims leading to a faux-monopoly on innovations?

Better to do something than wave the white flag and surrender all ideas to big-tech companies.

Another disturbing issue is the 'laundering' of DMCA analogues into other countries through trade-deals and other extra-political processes, with the general apathy and sweeping under the rug that precedes these changes.

While not directly related to anti-circumvention, the only recent positive development in the user-rights of proprietary software I can recall is an EU case by a private software vendor against the Belgian government in that courts ruled that reverse-engineering and patching of 'issues' in legitimately obtained software was not a crime and therefore the plaintiff lacked a case, even when a license prohibition applied.

Some persons were unconvinced of impact because defendant was Belgian government (they have taxpayers foot the legal bill) but the facts involved are not trivial because there have been cases with the reverse-engineering and patching of legitimately obtained video-games for purposes that are not piracy that did not end up with a positive outcome.

I see the next decade going one of two ways. Big companies attempt to attach criminal liability to perceived violations of their licenses or the likes of anti-trust wake up and we see more reinforcement of user-rights similar to the EU case.

The lack of per-application isolation with desktops is one of those ugly truths people try and sweep under the rug.

I foresee two potential solutions to this.

1) Run everything in a VM like Qubes (essentially nerfs certain application like 3D acceleration without major R&D)

2) Utilize some container runtime to provide isolation for legacy applications and stub out features such as filesystem calls so they do not to be aware of its existence.

Microsoft tried to produce a crippled application runtime for Windows (UWP) with more security, but considering its lack of backwards compatibility and lesser feature-set it is not that surprising that adoption has been an uphill battle.

Anyone care to comment how hard it would have been for a third-party to reverse engineer the 10NES chip at the time rather then perform the 'easy' way and obtain the source code under questionable circumstances from the copyright office?

Anyone have an archive of the incident notice?

Was it suicide or?

> 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.

Within reason I do believe some things. But given the state of the world and the people in it I respect your view on this.

Million dollar question. Anyone know about the inner workings of the various Switch modchips that allow homebrew on newer consoles with RCM exploit patched?

> allowing a small, incredibly talented, incredibly missed individuals to reverse the firmware/NAND challenges and correctly respond to the challenge.

Let my guess. Related to the various 'stealth' servers that exist for XBL?

Got any more fun stories from that time?

Makes me wonder how thin the lines are for the youtube-dl and yt-dlp projects at this point.

(The former fell victim to a DMCA takedown from RIAA asserting it was a 'circumvention' tool to download publicly accessible content that was copyrighted by the RIAA, but AFAIK Google did not comment on the incident.)

LP is exactly what I was referring to by my previous comment.

Not an attorney, but I suspect two mistakes the YouTube Vanced team did with the project is having "YouTube" in the name (Could be considered as a false association and trademark violation by Google or YouTube), and redistributing complete APKs that were modified YouTube APKs that would be under copyright.

I have not looked into the inner works of this, but on device patching of APK DEX classes from a set of patches is possible. Would not require root as long as it generates a patched APK and installs that using the standard PackageInstaller. That is probably a less risky proposition then distributing modified APKs themselves.

I would assume that relates to lack of substantial case law or precedents outside of US&EU.

The kinds of assignments involved with GPZ also shy away from server-side applications ran by other companies.

Maybe doing approved bug-bounty research in a competitors webapp is a safer proposition.

> And is a Wordpress-hosted blog truly anonymous?

Would not be surprised if someone figured out how to register a free Wordpress account to the point where any disclosed information is a dead-end trail to any corporate investigators. Takes a dedicated discipline and tradecraft.

If I was in the shoes of OP I certainly would not be discussing anything related to my case until either its conclusion or with all publications reviewed by lawyers.

Then again I have not been in this situation but have seen how things can go south when certain advice is ignored.

Unfortunately I just checked with the new onion service and it appears nothing else has changed in that regard.

> The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here:

Can not reply with the entire situation but I would not be surprised if Google does not care enough to stop the project through other means but tries to reduce mindless zombie-bots from sucking up bandwidth all day long. If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes.

Irrespective of that, the complaining party is the RIAA and not Google or YouTube in name.

> I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything

I think the optics are a little different when it's a third party internet service as the medium, but 'we' are still arguing what constitutes fair-use of DRM protected physical media. :-(

Thanks for answering my next question, how much world of hurt would be involved with this solution in terms of breaking userspace.

Kind of insane how Linux kernel developers didn't test and resolve this in a similar manner before this became an issue.

While I am no advocate with regards to for-profit piracy, can we get to prosecuting other serious criminals with comparable sentences? (i.e Capitol rioters, price gouging of certain essential supplies during this pandemic, etc)

Care to describe your favorite subreddit before it rose in popularity?

For those who were not involved before this all happened.

> Nvidia's TOS forbids doing that or publishing any software that does that for others.

IANAL, but just because TOS claims something doesn't mean it is enforcable in all jurisdictions, and could potentially fall against certain interoperability or other provisions.

I'll bite. Has anyone traced the initialization of the NVIDIA binary driver and figured out what is so special for reclocking and/or reproduced it without the binary driver? If you do not want to reply publicly email is in profile.

Good luck

IANAL, but in the act of distributing the emulator not including any decryption keys and/or otherwise copyrighted content by the console vendor gives a valid defense against copyright infringement

> DMCA can not superseded the 1st amendment, sorry

You may think that but unfortunately in several cases either the plaintiff attempts to scare off the defendant(s) with the prospect of a court case, offering a blanket settlement to discontinue certain actions of the plaintiffs choosing, or if the plaintiff is about to lose the case they may drop it entirely to avoid setting a precedent against themselves.

Do not think this has been tested under the DMCA statute unfortunately.

The closest parallel was when 2600 Magazine was prevented from publishing DeCSS on their website by a court decision.

https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...

Because of the risks of agent forwarding it is nice to see sensible mitigations from the OpenSSH team.

What can we do to oppose this idiocy that is trampling legitimate fair-use provisions of otherwise licensed content? It's been 10 years since the SOPA protests and while we may have stopped that three headed monster, the global situation with USA attempting to expand DMCA and similar measures to other countries is atrocious.

Other than recent EU court rulings potentially expanding what constitutes fair-use in that territory the situation is not looking good in the West.