mindbleach

Please do not the wolf.

Nintendo Switch Modder Who Refused to Shut Down Now Takes to Court Against Nintendo

Yeah!

Without a Lawyer

... idiot.

Headlines that would have squirted brains out of ears ten years ago.

we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down

Ubisoft's business practices are part of why the industry sucks.

They're not caught in a tide with all the little indie studios. They're one of the 800-pound gorillas setting the rules everyone else has to play by.

For those out of the loop: Youtuber Evbo made a two-hour... shonen anime, basically, about jumping between floating blocks in Minecraft.

It asks very little of its audience.

It's hillbilly Switzerland.

Why the fuck would they need to replicate free software? It's open. Anyone can start doing their own thing with it, independent of external influence.

I miss ToyFare.

Yes, and then a Nazi bought it.

Been there. Skimmed four fucking Youtube links. Reported back to explain in detail why the other guy was wrong about all of them. Didn't work.

This is why enforced civility is a failure of moderation. People need the ability to say, "fuck off." Not just "I strongly disagree and question your motives and blah blah blah." We must be able to communicate: this is stupid, you're being an asshole, polite consideration would be lending undue legitimacy.

Otherwise any stupid asshole can blather on about whatever and demand to be treated like they have a point. Mods who don't remove those people pre-emptively don't understand their role. Mods who actively protect those people are bastards.

For anyone not following this - they're getting cased by venture capital. Some billionaire assholes are trying to use EU laws about minority shareholder rights to fire enough executives that they can just buy the entire company and fire half the employees. Tencent's investment came with the agreement they could not fuck with existing leadership. They are, somehow, the good guys.

It's three separate groups of greedy assholes, each awful in their own way, and honestly the least-shitty outcome of this slapfight is if very little changes.

Burn the phoenix again.

That also doesn't work.

There's a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn't be ideal, but for fuck's sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.

If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I'm not sure I'd be using Firefox anymore, and I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?

One: thirty-year copyright, no exceptions. Culture belongs to its audience.

Two: noncommercial use is not copyright infringement. Copyright is only a monetary incentive for new works. There is no "unpublish." Once it's ours, you are entitled to any money involved, for a time. Take it or fuck off.

"Agreement" is quite a fucking twist on "threat."

The most anticipated release of 2013.

And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they'd absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been "just rewrite!" and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone's options.

Never give Nintendo money.

See also Dumbing Of Age.

Ruth: "You can do karaoke sober."

Jennifer: "You can do karaoke sober."

... unless the customer is over 18, right? The age where an age rating doesn't fucking matter?

This is the same shit as Australia "refusing classification." Oh cool, guess it'll default to the highest bar to entry, oh no wait the whole thing was just an excuse to censor fictional people taking imaginary drugs.

They're scared someone might make a better Star Wars than they did.

Dunno why, when the thinly-disguised competition is Rebel Moon.

And?

Yeah, Bleem won that lawsuit. And the next lawsuit. And the next.

And then they ran out of money.

"But can it run Outsys?"

They sent goons to his house.

What he got out of it is, they left.

Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.

You don't need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don't need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It's perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that's awful, fuck off.

Different compilers have robbed me of all trust in order-of-operations. If there's any possibility of ambiguity - it's going in parentheses. If something's fucky and I can't tell where, well, better parenthesize my equations, just in case.

After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.

Fuckin' bravo. I mean, don't do that, but on a purely technical level - nice.

Copyright's explicit purpose is to encourage new works.

Any form of "unpublishing" is theft from the public. You wanna say a guy can't make money on a thing? Great, fine, go nuts. But nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

Nexus consistently refuses to be a platform for bigotry.

That should not be controversial, at all, in any context.

If this asshat wants to publish it elsewhere - he's free to. Nobody's stopping him. It's just a file. He has every moral right to modify software however he sees fit, and he has every practical right to be a homophobe online with fellow homophobes.

But I don't want anything to do with him. I don't want to use any website that's cool with bigots spreading bigotry. If the people who run the website don't want to deal with that shit either... tough shit, guy. Find another bar. This one's not for Nazis. Warn all your Nazi friends.

I admire the concept behind Denuvo.

Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn't really matter how they're arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn't matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.

This machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering... relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren't warped by years of computer science, but it's just a puzzle with a known answer, and there's decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don't even need to unravel the whole program. They're only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.

So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that's what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinked throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The "attack surface" against pirates becomes enormous. They'll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.

Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.

Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would've made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for this bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they're told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that's read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.

Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you're gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it'll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That's why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.

It has no reason to exist besides being a middle finger to a queer minority.

This is a website deciding not to become a Nazi bar.

C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y'wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin'! Nail that fucker on there good, she'll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they'll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They'll raise the stakes from "accident" to "disaster." Whether or not it works, it's gonna blow people away.

C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you're looking for. He and his... associates... will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They'll assure you, oh no no no, the power cosmic would never pull someone inside-out, without sufficient warning. They don't question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.

Big thanks to Microsoft for their efforts to advertise Linux.

And don't act like voting is a blood oath. You're not pledging undying loyalty to a candidate - you're saying you'd prefer them over the other plausible options. Nobody gives a shit if they're your special favorite. You think we love these people? No. They're just the best we could do, arguing with thousands of other assholes.

If that's "the lesser evil," sure, why the fuck would you want more evil? It's not like staying home means nobody gets to be president.

Flash and Java, honestly, albeit in different ways. Both saw the web as a platform above all platforms.

Flash was the only way for browsers to do anything high-performance or good-looking from like 1997 to 2010. Any idiot could slap together a cool spinning animation with gradient-colored vector graphics. There were countless genuinely-free games, apparently made for the fun of making them, and even more interactive animations, apparently made to be as offensive as humanly possible.

Java was the big-grey-rectangle alternative, where you knew your browser was about to spend five entire minutes loading something, just to demonstrate a bouncing ball experiment or whatever. But: it was a real general-purpose executable format, with no installation or setup. You stuck a program on a page and it worked right there on the page. Eventually. And once it loaded it'd hitch and jerk constantly, because garbage-collection was always a terrible idea. But sometimes you'd find a page that'd hitch and jerk through playing Quake 2 in your goddamn web browser.

What ultimately killed them was that Adobe is among the worst software companies in the world and Oracle is number one. Flash was a security nightmare. It was hacked together for impressive functionality, and then repackaged for ease of use, so it was about as exploit-hardened as a wet paper towel. The fact it ran poorly on phones (and Steve Jobs was a dick) was just the excuse to stop tolerating its endless vulnerabilities. Java meanwhile was an okay format owned by the devil. It served kinda the same role as WebAssembly does now, except absolutely no-one wanted to put up with licensing it, because Oracle likes to sue its competitors and fuckin' loves to sue its customers. The company name is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. And if two devices running Java connect via wifi, he expects the air in-between them to be properly licensed. If the free software movement had not been founded to say "fuck printers," it would have sprung into being in order to say "fuck Oracle."

Anyway.

Google Chrome, intolerable leash that it now is, made Javascript usefully fast in 2008. Prior to that it was interpreted. Javascript calculators in the AOL days could lag. Mozilla responded with asm.js, inviting the language itself to be performant. Nowadays just about anything could be WASM + WebGPU, and quite frankly most things should be. But for some stupid reason even the chat programs written in Javascript bundle their own browser.

I've done the math for how long it'd take to randomly guess the last several kilobytes until something checksummed correctly.

I was not pleased with the answer.

Fascist rhetoric doesn't spread through reasoned consideration.