Although, as a practical matter it provides some protection in the sense that most malware is probably not designed to do that and will, at worst, fuck up the Windows environment created by Wine / Proton. It’s not something to rely on but it is a bit safer than running something directly on your home machine as a practical matter.

(Although I guess that depends what the malware does. If it searches every document on your system for credit card numbers and sends them to Albania, that would probably still work.)

tbh it’s not really necessary today because there are so many ways to share files. Additionally, the distributed network has major disadvantages:

1. No meaningful reputation. If you download software from a file-sharing service you’re taking a huge risk.

2. Ease of use. It’s a pain in the ass to new users, which means it doesn’t thrive the way it needs to.

And the advantages aren’t what they once were. There’s so many sites nowadays and it’s so easy to set one up that being resistant to takedowns isn’t worth the trade-off.

I mean, the alternative is Ryujinx, which Nintendo has for some reason ignored for now.

(Ryujinx’s devs are much more cautious about things like banning any references to piracy in their discord and avoiding anything that could look like getting money in exchange for access, both of which may have given them less legal exposure.)

As the article mentions, they’re releasing the Switch successor soon. I suspect the real reason for this push is to try and scare people off from developing an emulator for that one, at least during the lifetime of the console - it’s a bit late to try and kill Switch emulation given that nearly fully-functional emulators already exist.

Near (the creator of BSNES / Higan, as well as a fan-translator who worked on Mother 3 and Bahamut Lagoon) was driven to suicide. It’s a serious issue. And I suspect the sort of people who work on labors of love are often the most susceptible because they’re the sort of people who want to listen and who care if people say something is wrong with their work.

Doesn’t Retroarch just use the cores of other emulators? It’s more of a frontend. I think that for early Genesis stuff it uses Gens.

They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.

While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They’ve been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.

But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said “give us money if you want us to keep doing this” I suspect people would have donated more.

I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.

Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they’ve uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.

I think that addition is mostly interesting because it shows the mindset of the site’s owners - they feel bitter and put-upon, like they’ve put a bunch of work into the site and gotten little or nothing back. Maintaining the site must be a lot of work. Not that surprising that they’d decide to go private, I guess.

While I’m all for piracy (obviously), there’s always a choice. Decades ago when cable was going through this, TV was at the center of culture and absolutely everyone watched it.

That’s just not true anymore. Even aside from piracy, they have to compete for people’s time and attention with videogames, social media, and all sorts of other internet-based entertainment. I suspect a lot of the executives making these decisions don’t realize this - they think it’s still 20 years ago when having some of your biggest shows on your channel guaranteed a big audience. If they squeeze too hard people will just spend their time with other sorts of entertainment.

I think that the publishing industry is a good comparison - look at where it is now. It still produces stuff but its cultural relevance is a pale shadow of what it once was and its margins are razor-thin because few people are going to pay a premium even for a bestseller. I think that that’s the long-term fate of TV and movies, especially as the generation that was weened on them dies off and a new generation that watched much less growing up comes of age.

I’m a firm believer in meritocracy and the importance of rewarding skills. He should still pay a hefty price for his crimes, including jail time, where he will hopefully learn to change his ways, but once he gets out, if he’s truly remorseful for his actions and he’s willing to have others monitor his device usage activities, I don’t see why he shouldn’t be hired by a red team

The thing is, people who are highly skilled at computers and pentesting aren’t that rare. Working in the industry also requires trustworthiness, reliability, communication skills, the ability to work well with others, and many other things - those are all key “merits”, too.

It doesn’t matter how good he is at typing rapidly and then saying “I’m in!” if he’s too unreliable and untrustworthy to actually get work done, or if his communication skills suck to the point where he can’t / won’t convey the problems he finds and how to fix them.

Yes, I mentioned that - but trusted public sources, who often post on places like Reddit or personal websites run out of the US and the like, can post NFOs but can’t post the actual game. If you knew the correct checksum, you could then turn around and grab the game from an untrusted source.

Distributing the game itself is the dangerous part (in terms of making the copyright pinkertons come after you) so it’s better if it can be done as anonymously as possible, but that conflicts with the need to have it distributed by someone trusted. Putting the checksum in the nfo, which is widely reposted by trusted sources, would help avoid this problem.

Yeah. What I mean is that the Steam Deck itself doesn’t add anything special in that regard to fight piracy.

(Plus, I mean, Steam’s base DRM is like a screen door or a “please do not pirate” sign, lol. If Steam dies one day, Steam DRM won’t be a problem because you can basically crack it by breathing on it too hard. I assume that is purpose is to ensure that you have to violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions to pirate their games, not to actually slow down pirates at this point.)

They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.

I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it’s still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam’s servers for cloud saves.

(The fact that it’s hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I’ve absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)

Most likely a bunch of them were copy-pastes of the same site.

I know when I set it up I had to add them manually, but that was years ago. Maybe this is a new thing, or maybe your specific Ubuntu instillation was a custom fork of QB that included a bunch from the start.

(I really think it’s unlikely that base QB would include them, since it would make it more obvious that they intend it to be used for piracy - something they’d want to avoid for legal reasons. Yeah, I know, but I’d rather they not get shut down.)

It’s mostly been fine-ish for anything that can’t be infected with viruses (music, video, roms, etc - usually.) There are way better options today but as long as you’re not going there for software it’s still usable.

If I recall correctly, CODEX’s Denuvo cracker was Empress anyway, so it has been just her for a long while now. There have been one or two cracks by other people for games using ancient versions of Denuvo that nobody bothered to crack before, but she’s the only one doing anything with Denuvo’s current version.

Yeah, it says that they’re all “well we would have rather do it the other way for your sakes” but the fact is that if they thought they could reliably obtain money this way they’d be doing it already. A ton of legal fees are going to be wasted pursuing people they can’t catch for one reason or another, meaning that their desire to make the pirates pay their costs isn’t going to work as reliably as they’d want.

Mastodon account just posted saying they found the issue and it will be fixed later.

I think that it’s because now we’re starting to get judges who have an actual understanding of the internet and its issues. In the past, lawyers for copyright holders could make up whatever theories of it they wanted and frame things in whatever way benefits them the most; that’s no longer the case - these judges (including the original trial judge, the appeals judges, and the Canadian Supreme Court, who handed down the original decision at stake here) plainly understand in at least a basic way how the internet is used, what an IP address is, and the complexities of assigning responsibility related to one.

Whereas ten or twenty years ago you would have had judges who mostly depended on the plaintiff’s lawyers for their understanding and who would therefore basically give them anything they asked for.