Nintendo Switch (Currently Plagued) - Here we shit post about the new Nintendo console, The Switch

Anonitolia said:
How'd it take so long?
...I'm only being partially facetious. 3 days before release is surprisingly close to the day considering how huge Nintendo is and how highly-anticipated Pikmin 4 has been for so long
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maybe they somewhat improved thier security measures since the TOTK leak?
 
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FBI Uses Nintendo Switch Data To Find A Missing Girl 2,000 Miles From Home​

A clever use of location data resulted in the safe return of the missing minor.
A recent missing-persons case in Virginia was solved thanks to an unconventional tool, as The Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed a Nintendo Switch was used to locate a missing 15-year-old girl and return her to her family.

According to court documents obtained by ABC 15 in Arizona, the girl--whose name has not been disclosed due to her status as a minor--had disappeared from her home on August 3, 2022. After attempts to find her in the neighborhood failed, a friend noticed the girl's Nintendo Switch Online account was showing recent activity and alerted the authorities.

The girl had befriended a then-28-year-old man named Ethan Roberts on the internet. Roberts traveled to Virginia to meet the minor, and then brought her with him to his home in Tolleson, Arizona, and eventually forced her into child pornography.

As the court documents reveal, Roberts allowed her to bring her Nintendo Switch on the trip, and when she connected it to the internet to "watch YouTube and download a game," a friend notified police of her online status. After an inquiry from Nintendo turned up Roberts's IP address, authorities were able to find his apartment and arrest him 11 days after her disappearance.

"It's probably nothing that anybody even had thought of at this point," retired Arizona Department of Public Safety director Frank Milstead said to ABC 15. "The fact that somebody else down the road--another child--was bright enough to go, 'Hey, look, my friend is online, and she's been missing, and I need to tell somebody.'"

Roberts was indicted in federal court on multiple charges, which included child pornography and transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. After a plea deal, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
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The Dolphin team just put out a formal statement on everything involving Dolphin's (once-)planned Steam release. There's a lot in the article, so I'll summarize it as best I can:
  • The Dolphin team has been consulting with a lawyer to get a full understanding of the legal situation, and all legal details below are backed by that lawyer.
  • Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a DMCA. Valve asked Nintendo if they would be okay with Dolphin being on Steam; Nintendo obviously said no, cited the DMCA as justification, and requested that Valve never allow Dolphin on Steam due to the aforementioned justification.
  • The Common Key, which is used for the decryption of Wii games to allow them to be played on either a real console or emulator, and which many myself included have cited as the sole reason for the DMCA, was added to Dolphin's codebase 15 years ago, and was already very widely shared at the time.
  • Nintendo asserts that the Common Key is an unlawful circumvention of the Wii's security, and that Dolphin is primarily a program for bypassing this security; however, the Dolphin team strongly believes that the use of this Common Key is legally protected by the reverse-engineering exemption clause. This exemption is the reason why Nintendo has yet to challenge any emulator with the DMCA anti-circumvention clauses. There's a lot more to this, so read the full article if you want more details.
  • Even if the Common Key were removed, Nintendo could just as easily make another (equally-invalid) argument that circumventing a Wii disc's encryption by any means is a violation, so removing the key is pointless. Additionally, there are no copyright concerns, and Nintendo's letter to Valve didn't mention anything about copyright violation.
  • Dolphin is not in any legal danger, and Nintendo's statement to Valve is basically a scare tactic (if Nintendo could do something about it, they would have already). That being said, the Steam release of Dolphin is cancelled, presumably because Valve doesn't want to get on Nintendo's bad side, even if Dolphin is legally sound.
  • The changes that were planned for the Steam release, such as a controller-friendly GUI, will still make their way to normal Dolphin.
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Two Dollars said:
the Dolphin team strongly believes that the use of this Common Key is legally protected by the reverse-engineering exemption clause.
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It's hilarious when you actually read it and see this sentence
Only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention.
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"We may have injected a couple milligrams of Speed into that steak, but it's only a very tiny portion of the steak"
This is literally admiting that you did it and hoping that the company (or even anyone else involved) doesn't use this as grounds for a lawsuit.
 
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Dolphin is not in any legal danger, and Nintendo's statement to Valve is basically a scare tactic (if Nintendo could do something about it, they would have already). That being said, the Steam release of Dolphin is cancelled, presumably because Valve doesn't want to get on Nintendo's bad side, even if Dolphin is legally sound.
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Let's not pretend otherwise that plenty of people aren't using emulators with pirated copies of console games.
If Dolphin was released on Steam, it would have set a bad precedence of allowing other emulators on Steam, and sent a message to all third-parties (especially the japanese ones in spite of finally gaining their trust after so many years) that Valve was okay with piracy, as a storefront platform. And a only a matter of time until midwestern boomer judges were convinced that emulators are tools crafted for piracy, which would be catastrophic for emulation development and distribution.

All these risks to undo years of progress in multiple fronts for what? To save a few clicks for a bunch of idiots who can't be bothered to download the standalone on Dolphin's website?
 
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Computer Guardian said:
"We may have injected a couple milligrams of Speed into that steak, but it's only a very tiny portion of the steak"
This is literally admiting that you did it and hoping that the company (or even anyone else involved) doesn't use this as grounds for a lawsuit.
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"Sodium is lethal at large doses, therefore it must also be lethal at small doses"
Read what the article actually says:
The extraction of the Wii Common Key did not elicit any kind of legal response from anyone. It was freely shared everywhere, and eventually made its way into Dolphin's codebase more than 15 years ago (committed by a Team Twiizers member no less).

These keys have been publicly available for years and no one has really cared. US law regarding this has not changed, yet a lot of armchair lawyers have come out talking about how foolish we were to ship the Wii Common Key. Fueling this is Nintendo's letter to Valve, which cites the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 1201), particularly because Dolphin has to decrypt Wii games.

Wii and Nintendo GameCube game files, or ROMs, are encrypted using proprietary cryptographic keys. The Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Thus, use of the Dolphin emulator unlawfully “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under” the Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1). Distribution of the emulator, whether by the Dolphin developers or other third-party platforms, constitutes unlawful “traffic[king] in a[] technology . . . that . . . is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure . . . .” 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2)(A).3Nintendo's Letter to Valve
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This sounds extremely bad at a glance (and we certainly had a moment of panic after first reading it), but now that we have done our homework and talked to a lawyer, we are no longer concerned.

We have a very strong argument that Dolphin is not primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection. Dolphin is designed to recreate the GameCube and Wii hardware as software, and to provide the means for a user to interact with this emulated environment. Only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention. Additionally, GameCube games aren't actually encrypted at all, and Dolphin can also play homebrew and is used in the development of game mods. There are even homebrew and mods that specifically target Dolphin as its own platform, given that it has the ability to emulate more memory and processing power than is possible on the original consoles. That's why there are "Dolphin modes" in many modern homebrew games!

Considering that only a small fraction of what we do involves circumvention, we think that the claim that we are "primarily for circumvention" is a reach. We do not believe this angle would be successful in a US courtroom, if it were ever to come to that. The reason the lawyers representing Nintendo would make such a leap is because they wished to create a narrative where the DMCA's exemptions do not apply to us, as these exemptions are powerful and widely in our favor. Of particular note for Dolphin is the reverse engineering exemption in 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) which states that:

...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(2)
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Dolphin is an independently created computer program that is circumventing Wii disc encryption for interoperability with Wii software. According to this exemption, this does not constitute infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 1201. This exemption even allows distribution of information collected through circumvention, like encryption keys, if it is for software interoperability.

The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(3)
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17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) is a significant legal protection for emulation in the US, and it is why Nintendo has yet to legally challenge any emulator with the DMCA anti-circumvention clauses despite the law going into effect 25 years ago. Unless a court rules that our understanding of the law is incorrect, we have every reason to believe that our decryption of Wii game discs is covered by this exemption.
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BananaSplit² said:
Let's not pretend otherwise that plenty of people aren't using emulators with pirated copies of console games.
If Dolphin was released on Steam, it would have set a bad precedence of allowing other emulators on Steam, and sent a message to all third-parties (especially the japanese ones in spite of finally gaining their trust after so many years) that Valve was okay with piracy, as a storefront platform. And a only a matter of time until midwestern boomer judges were convinced that emulators are tools crafted for piracy, which would be catastrophic for emulation development and distribution.

All these risks to undo years of progress in multiple fronts for what? To save a few clicks for a bunch of idiots who can't be bothered to download the standalone on Dolphin's website?
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Discordniggers don't care about any of that bullshit. They just want what they want and fuck you that's why. Consequences be damned.
 
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