It would be better to “git clone” a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It’s possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.

That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.

Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.

Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.

Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.

If a server were an obvious conduit for disinfo then other servers could defederate from it. But if it was different accounts on different servers mixed in with authentic users then it’s almost impossible to remove. What tools does mastodon / lemmy even provide to spot inauthentic behaviour? And because we’re talking different servers run in different ways there is no clear picture from above that can be formed in the same way that a centralized social media platform might have - identifying suspicious clusters of nodes or traffic.

As for federation’s future we’ll wait and see. Both bluesky and threads are talking of providing federation protocols - threads using activitypub and bluesky it’s own API. As for Mastodon & Lemmy I see a lot of positive interest in these things. The fact we’re commenting on Lemmy instead of Reddit says a lot.

I do fear that as federation grows, then so too will potentially the same threats that happen on centralised social media. The fediverse is going to have a lot of vulnerable servers who won’t moderate or detect trolls & bots and over time the issue could become extremely onerous.

All large news orgs and NGOs need to do the same - federate their server which becomes the source of truth, and then mirror the content over other social media which is not federated. This may or may not include Twitter. I imagine that over time having news and reporting across social media will diminish any advantage Twitter possesses and then news orgs / NGOs might decide if they want their content on a platform like Twitter that cannot be bothered with things like stamping out bots, trolls, inauthentic actors, or supporting a free and fair press.

I wonder if there shouldn’t be a way of federating duplicate groups after the fact so one doesn’t have to “win”, they just all combine as one.

I still use Twitter but I think honestly that I could live without it and I reckon most other people could too. It’s just force of habit more than anything else. Mastodon, or Threads, or Blue Sky would all be quite happy to pick up the slack. I actually use Mastodon too but I wish the news media would produce feeds for it rather than rely on mirrors.

The place has become a cesspool tbh and with no moderation it only gets worse with each passing day. Blue ticks actually pay to elevate their moronic hate views above others so more moderate and normal voices get drowned out. Musk is mulling charging everyone money to “combat bots” (bullshit), and mulling pulling out of the EU because of their pesky requirements about moderation. I wish he’d do all this stuff and bring the whole thing crashing down.

I'm on some Disney Plus deal to get 3 months for 99 cents per month. You'd better believe the second the 3 months is up I'm cancelling again. Let's face it, the platform is kind of dogshit and while there is an occasional good show, most of the new content is dreck. A month a year is sufficient to catch up on anything worth watching.

Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it's not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I'm sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.

If they can charge for something then they can adequately explain what the thing is they’re charging for

I think Hogwarts sold well because it was a genuinely good game which captured the spirit of the franchise, a decent story line, an explorable world and had some decent combat mechanics.

I think the JKR boycott did help in an underhanded way because most of the protesting was shrill straw man character assassination. People tuned it out and bought the game anyway based on word of mouth. The real losers in this nonsense were gaming websites who undermined their own credibility by boycotting the game or scoring it badly just and turning the review into a diatribe about gender politics.

Hogwarts Legacy also sold a shit tonne, in part because you got the whole game, not half a game with a “season pass” or pay to win DLC.

Not sure what the thumbs down is about. It’s right there in their own FAQ.

In fact it ends by saying - “Wine is not just an emulator” is more accurate.

I doubt many people are ever going to do what I suggested so the effort / payoff for malware writers makes it very unlikely they’d bother. They’ll just assume 99.999% of people running the binary are doing so on Windows and code accordingly. Of course anything is theoretically possible.

Read their own FAQ. It’s not an emulator in the classic sense of emulating the OS. It is however emulating the API of Windows. I quoted the pertinent line of the FAQ elsewhere and made my point clearer

I know what WINE is and the gist of “Wine is not an emulator”. I have used it extensively and for a while it even contained some of my code (not sure if it still does). But it is still emulating but not in the way people think. WINE is not emulating the operating system but it is emulating the interface that an executable interacts with Windows, aka the Win32 APIs and other DLLs.

They even touch on this in their FAQ - *That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode. *

As far as a potentially malicious executable is concerned, you can create a throwaway wine folder to run the thing and delete it as soon as it is done, e.g.

e.g.

export WINEPREFIX=~/tmpwin
winecfg
# disable wininet from libraries tab, remove Z:, unlink all desktop integration folders
wine keygen.exe
# when done...
rm -rf tmpwin

It doesn’t matter if keygen.exe is evil because it can write anything it likes to the fake C: and the fake registry and it’s blown away. As a precaution disable networking so it can’t reach out either. In the extremely unlikely event that keygen.exe had code to detect it was running under WINE, it would still be subject to the permissions of the uid you had run it as, so you could take even more precautions if you felt so inclined. You could even use a dockerized WINE if you felt like it.

I wouldn’t trust anything from a P2P site that purports to be:

1. A cracked game / application for desktop and mobile platforms. Maybe it’s legit but assume it is malware.
2. A serial number generator. If you absolutely must run one of these do it from a throwaway VM, or via WINE emulation to mitigate what it might do.
3. An encrypted archive with a README. It’s a scam designed to make people sign up to other scams to release a non-existent password.
4. A movie / audio with an extension such as .scr, .wma, .com, .exe etc. It’s malware.

Movies, audio & books are generally safe providing they use a recognized extension - mp3, mp4, pdf, mkv, aac, flac, epub etc. Stuff that runs under emulation like console games is generally safe. I say “generally” because an exploit could still be crafted to escape a popular media player or emulator and cause actual harm to your computer.

All the ads and 3rd party scripts should be considered malicious too and should be erased with an adblocker, or even better use Tor.

So basically use some common sense and if you really want some game or app, just buy the damned thing or wait for it to go on sale.

When an account is signed up, is there information such as client ip address that could also be used to spot more inauthentic activity? And more generally, sign up should probably be made resistant to automated bots by randomizing HTML layout & ids and using captchas so it’s not so easy to drive sign up through scripts.

Ironically the only way to use some old Macbooks these days is to put Chrome OS Flex on them. Apple is far more aggressive about killing off old hardware when it feels like it. You can still use them as-is of course but over time the browser and other web based apps degrade and refuse to work because of issues with TLS, CA certs (expired), discontinued backend APIs and unsupported web content APIs.

I think its more that Google supports them for only so long and then they go bitrotten. The final update for these devices should also unlock the firmware so people can wipe the device and install Linux or something on it.