AnyOldName3

joined 2 years ago
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[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (4 children)

So for a developer to release a game on the Game Boy without Nintendo knowing, they would have to commit copyright infringement.

That'd be trademark infringement, not copyright infringement.

They used this same tactic on the Switch. They claim the prod keys, which are needed for Switch emulators, are copyrighted.

That's not quite the same thing, and still isn't because the keys are copyrighted. There's Digital Rights Management software running on the Switch, and part of what it does is decrypt encrypted parts of games with the keys. Originally, Nintendo managed to keep the keys secret, but eventually people managed to extract them. The next line of defence is that under the DMCA (or equivalent law in countries with a trade deal with the US), it's illegal to attempt to circumvent DRM, and as the keys are capable of doing that, they themselves might count as a DRM circumvention device, which would be illegal to own or share. It's a legal grey area whether or not they'd really count - lots of companies claim that it's illegal to have these so-called illegal numbers, but Wikipedia are confident enough that that's not what the law really says that their Illegal Number page lists a bunch of them.

This gets even more complicated when it's specifically about emulators, as the DMCA (or equivalent) have a specific carve-out for interoperability, saying you're allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it's specifically for the goal of making computer software work with computer hardware it wasn't originally intended to. For the relevant parts of the DMCA that aren't related to DRM, there's case law confirming that it's okay. However, no emulator developers have ever actually been sued for making an emulator for a system with any DRM (e.g. the thing with Switch emulators several months ago was settled out of court, and the threat was to sue them for things like illegally sharing games between developers, when they could have each bought their own copy, so weren't protected by the carve-out). That means that this is a grey area, too.

If Nintendo wanted to shut down an emulator based on its use of their keys, they'd not only have to set a precedent that the keys really did count as a DRM circumvention device, but also that the interoperability carve-out didn't apply to DRM circumvention devices. It would be a big, expensive case, and as there are well-funded organisations that rely on the precedent not being set against them in both directions, both sides would get interested third parties funding their legal fees. No one wants that, so Nintendo stick to claiming emulators are illegal on their website, not in court documents, and only go after emulator developers who've provably done a second illegal thing they can be punished for.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago (13 children)

100% a trademark violation, and there's nothing like an interoperability carveout for trademarks that could be used to defend it.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

A quick search says steel, tungsten and bismuth or composites including those metals are the typical replacements. Steel is cheap, and the other two are dense but more expensive.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 31 points 2 days ago

This isn't really the same kind of bug. Those bugs made instructions emit the wrong answer, which is obviously really bad, and they're really rare. The bugs in the article make instructions take different amounts of time depending on what else the CPU has done recently, which isn't something anyone would notice except that by asking the kernel to do something and measuring the time to execute affected instructions, an attacker that only had usermode access could learn secrets that should only be available to the kernel.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

The thread's about the law being akin to the law of a police state. A state is a police state if it enforces unjust laws that criminalise reasonable acts.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago

I imagine getting a notification on their phone reminding them if they've not brushed their teeth by a set time might help forgetful people to remember to brush their teeth, and if it's via Home Assistant, which is self-hosted, entirely local, and open-source, there's no downside other than having to set it up in the first place.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

I didn't read it as the OP expressing their own opinion, but instead sharing what the majority of voters in their area think.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The $5 Windows keys have never been legitimate - either they're just people selling keys they've generated with a keygen or bought with a stolen credit card, or it's students reselling free keys they've got from Dreamspark or a sysadmin selling keys from their employer's enterprise licence, which, in Microsoft's eyes, are all piracy. An OEM copy of Windows 11 Pro is about €150 and can't be transferred to a different motherboard, and a retail copy which can be transferred is about €300. A one-time purchase copy of Office is about €120 (it's also available as a subscription). These machines either have at least €270 of software on them, or €0 worth of pirated software on them.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It can't be legitimate because licences for the bundled software cost more than the machines are being sold for. Also, the hardware included isn't officially Windows 11 compatible, so selling it with Windows 11 installed is misleading the customer into thinking they're buying something much more recent than they really are. For a decent number of people buying these, they're likely to own something just as new already, and could get a free upgrade to Windows 11 by doing the same configuration tweaks as the sellers did.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Plenty of people think they're already getting more than they need and anyone who says otherwise is just pretending to be ill to get a free ride at the taxpayers' expense, and could just get a job if they wanted. The right wing press pushes this narrative and people fall for it.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Thermal paper is generally not recyclable, which is another downside.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

Someone might have thought it was so obvious that it didn't need stating and would just ruin the joke. Alternatively, someone who was somehow unaware of the song and assumed that would be the case for nearly everyone else might have overconfidently decided it was a stretch without looking at the first line of the song.

 

I've just been switched from Freestyle Libre 2 to 3, and (at least in the UK) these need to be requested directly from Abbott instead of via regular NHS prescriptions that go to a pharmacist. To do this, you have to use their patient portal, so you need a password and need to go through their password reset process. The listed requirements are a minimum of eight characters, five lower-case letters, one upper-case letter, a number and a symbol, but there's either also a maximum number of characters (I typically use way more than eight) or a restriction on which symbols are permitted. If you don't meet the hidden extra requirements, you'll get a 404 during the password reset process (which isn't even the right error code for this kind of thing).

It took a lot of tries before my password manager came up with something the website was happy with, and no one seems to have written anything on the searchable parts of the internet about it, so I wasn't sure it was going to work and thought I might just have hit outages on both days I tried, so I'm writing this here in the hope that the next time someone sees the same error, this will show up in a search, and they know they need to change the password they're trying to set.

I'm not going to go into what eventually worked and which characters were allowed, as obviously that'd give away more information about the password I ended up with than I'm comfortable disclosing, so sorry for not specifying precisely what the real requirements are.

 

I've got a 3D printed project, and went over it with a couple of airbrushed coats of a 50/50 mix of Tamiya X-35 (their alcohol-based acrylic semi-gloss) and Mr Color Levelling Thinner. As far as I can tell, it looks good so far, but now the room next to the one I sprayed in smells of solvent a few hours later, despite extractor fans running. I knew the lacquer thinner was nasty, so bought a respirator, and haven't been in the room with the model without it (hence only knowing that the next room stinks), but would like to know when I won't need it anymore. The best I've been able to find with Google is the ten-minute touch-dry time, but I'm assuming the VOCs will take longer to be entirely gone.

 

Edit 1: I'm attaching the image again. If there's still no photo, blame Jerboa and not the alcohol I've consumed.

Edit 3: edit 2 is gone. However, an imgur link should now be here!

Edit 4: I promise the photo of some plugs does not contain erotic material (unless you have very specific and abnormal fetishes). I can't find the button to tell that to imgur, though. You can blame that on the alcohol.

Edit 5: s/done/some/g

Edit 6: I regret mentioning the dartboard, which was a safe distance below these sockets, and seems to be distracting people from the fact that one's the wrong way up. I've now replaced the imgur link with a direct upload now I'm back on my desktop the next day.

 

Test post for @testman@lemmy.ml to test posting.

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