31 ms·

Leaked documents from Nintendo investigation of hacker in 2013

279 points by meibo 6y ago

SommaRaikkonen 6y ago
I think 32c3 (and the amount of hacks after) really opened the gateway to 3DS modding [1]. I had my eyes glued on the screen with what they'd revealed at the time. I hope Smea, Derrek, Pluto et. al were approached by Nintendo in a different way because those guys had been stellar throughout the scene's life. [1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7240-console_hacking https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7240-console_hacking
- meibo 6y ago
  Derrek and Smea seem to appear multiple times in the leaked documents as well, with possible talking points/conversation flow graphs and ways to approach. There's a lot in there, if you are into the subject, I can recommend checking it out for yourself - no links though, of course.
meibo 6y ago
A recent leak shows that Nintendo has "stalked" various console hackers with private investigators, trying to coerce them into settling on an NDA. I thought this was very interesting - is this kind of behaviour/planning common in other industries as well, or is this a consequence of Nintendo's/Japanese company culture? Marcan(popular console hacker, often seen on HN as well) recently tweeted about his experience, apparently noting that the company seems to have changed their ways in recent years: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1341330839993339905 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1341330839993339905
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  I’ve seen similar stories about eastern european companies employing the same tactics against people who reverse engineer their products.
- lima 6y ago
  Engaging PIs to contact reverse engineers/"hackers" is a reasonably common approach in the gaming industry, not just regarding hardware, but also software modifications/cheating/some forms of modding.
  - invokestatic 6y ago
    I used to write and sell cheat software for PC games (I work in anti-cheat now). I’ve never experienced this soft of behavior, nor have any of the many contacts I have in the space. I suspect this only occurs in litigious companies (Blizzard and Nintendo both immediately pop in my mind). Typically, hackers get scooped up by games companies and switch to anti-cheat, at least in my observations. Edit: I do know it’s fairly common for companies to have “dox” on hackers. Actually making use of that information, like hiring a PI, is quite an escalation.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  >or is this a consequence of Nintendo's/Japanese company culture? Now this makes me wonder, because Sony went after George Hotz with guns blazing for his 'OtherOS' efforts on PS3 until he settled the lawsuit on the condition to 'never hack Sony products'! At the same time, Sony has been very welcoming about aftermarket OS efforts on their Android smartphones, they had their official AOSP portal, Jolla support etc. I guess, the bottomline is would it affect the business?
  - ascagnel_ 6y ago
    Your timeline is a little mixed up, and I think fixing it will clear up what happened: - Sony shipped the PS3 with "Other OS" functionality that provided limited hardware support to a guest Linux OS. - Sony removed that "Other OS" feature without providing a reason why. At that point, the main system's protection was still in place. - Hotz, after seeing the spotlight on Sony for removing "Other OS", was able to breach the main system's protection without any hardware modification. - Sony went after Hotz for breaching their OS. The bottom line was business -- providing full hardware support of "Other OS" would let you distribute Linux games without Sony's blessing (and cut of revenues or developer kits), which ultimately wouldn't be as successful without the absolutely massive marketing and deal-making abilities of one of these platform holders. On the other hand, breaking the main system OS allowed things like pirated games and unsigned code (game hacks) to run on the system, which is hugely problematic for a console that had most of its security on the client machines. The big PSN hack in 2011 followed shortly after Hotz broke the system, and while I've never seen it 100% confirmed, there were rumors at the time that the hack revealed enough of a vector inside the network that the hackers were basically unstoppable.
    - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
      I dont remember it going like that all. I explicitly remember OtherOs being removed because of this hack. http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/george_hotz#cite_note-12 http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/george_hotz#cite_note-12 Lets go to World Heritage Encyclopedia. > January 22, 2010, he announced that he had successfully hacked the machine by enabling himself read and write access to the machine's system memory and having hypervisor level access to the machine's processor > On January 26, 2010, Hotz released the exploit to the public. It was done on the original firmware (OFW) 3.15, then using his codes he made it into a 3.15 CFW, or Custom Firmware. It requires the OtherOS function of the machine, and consists of a Linux kernel module and gaining control of the machine's hypervisor via bus glitching > On March 28, 2010, Sony responded by announcing their intention to release a PlayStation 3 firmware update that would remove the OtherOS feature from all models,[17] a feature that was already absent on the newer Slim revisions of the machine. Why lie about something trivially verifiable?
- rsync 6y ago
  "A recent leak shows that Nintendo has "stalked" various console hackers with private investigators, trying to coerce them into settling on an NDA." I know nothing else about this, this has almost zero intersection with my current interests, and I have no prior interests in this area. But boy-howdy am I tempted to perform, or pay to have performed, a minimal level of reverse engineering or independent development of (Nintendo platform) just to see if they'll attempt this. Never mind the infinite free publicity for me, rsync.net, 0x.co, etc. ... the comedy factor alone of their PIs vs. our two mile long private road would be worth the legal fees. I'm struggling to find a reason not to do this... EDIT: my ranch is adjacent to, and surrounded by, Skywalker Ranch ... imagine Nintendo stooges wandering into/through that ... so many lulz.
  - mzs 6y ago
    further along it says that the people largely responsible have retired, so you might not get any worthwhile reaction.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I believe this approach came from NOA (the USA branch) and specifically the Anti-Piracy team led by Jodi Daugherty. It seems things shifted to a different organization after that, and she is now retired.
post_break 6y ago
I don't understand how Nintendo has maintained its fun and harmless image while being worse than Disney when it comes to protecting its assets. You look at stuff like joycon drift, suing literally everyone who even thinks about emulation, or streaming, and they are still in the "good" light by most people.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  I’d argue nostalgia. Nintendo helped save the video game industry after the crash in the 80s while also portraying itself as a “fun” company. Even then, their legal department was still aggressive, but it just wasn’t as publicized. Today, it’s more known, but nostalgia carries a lot of weight in public opinion.
- sli 6y ago
  Add to the list everything going in the Smash community right now, which has spilled over into other communities that support the Smash community. Nintendo is more or less cancelling events because people still like Smash Bros Melee.
  - vlunkr 6y ago
    To be fair, they're cancelling events because they're using emulation to play Melee. They've previously allowed it at events. Not saying that's necessarily the right choice, but it's important to get the facts straight. Also, there's been lots of serious issues with the Melee community leaders recently with sexual misconduct, so it's also possible that Nintendo just wants to distance themselves from the whole scene.
    - CarVac 6y ago
      They canceled the stream for a Splatoon 2 tournament because the players had names supportive of Melee. And the sexual misconduct was mainly in the Ultimate scene. Very few prominent Melee players were involved.
    - mactrey 6y ago
JesseMReeves 6y ago
Can someone try to explain the purpose of console hacks and gaming company internal old documentation leaks? Reading these chat conversations and tweets they seemed to be important for building up some individuals‘ ego. Anything else?
- novok 6y ago
  This leak also has current console info, like the switch development kit. Also such info might be valuable in creating more accurate emulators and such. It's useful for history and to create a more accurate reputation for the company in question.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > This leak also has current console info, like the switch development kit. Also such info might be valuable in creating more accurate emulators and such. There are so many small and indie studios putting stuff in the Switch Store. I seriously wonder why there hasn't been an avalanche of leaks, hacks or someone of the emulator dev teams getting access...
    - meibo 6y ago
      Just because you don't know, that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Breaking NDAs is illegal, and using leaked documentation/SDK code is a very bad look for CFW and emulator developers. Especially when they praise themselves as doing "clean room implementations". Would be stupid to disclose something like this to the public.
  - pokemod97 6y ago
    Most emulator devs hate leaks because it opens them up to lawsuits for using copyrighted material.
jb775 6y ago
I'm just picturing Mario and Luigi showing up at this guys front door
- racl101 6y ago
  Mario: you got a bee on you-a hat. Luigi: do you like your knee caps?
racl101 6y ago
Gotta love Nintendo's hustler attitude. They don't screw around.
snakedoctor 6y ago
Unfortunately this is a common practice in the gaming industry. https://www.vgr.com/take-two-lawsuit-against-gta-online-modder/ https://www.vgr.com/take-two-lawsuit-against-gta-online-modd... GTA coerced a kid in to signing an NDA, and then sued him for hacking GTA 5. Battleye (anti-cheat used on games like Fortnite, rainbow six siege, PUBG etc.) https://www.reddit.com/r/arma/comments/2750n0/battleye_is_sending_files_from_your_hard_drive_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/arma/comments/2750n0/battleye_is_se... founder/lead dev/ceo Bastian Suiter threatened to sue a hacker for publishing some intrusive stuff that Battleye did/is doing. Battleye recently DMCA'd a project that vmcall's club/group published which emulated the heartbeat checks etc. Though Bastian denied doing it on Battleyes twitter accounts (twitter.com/thebattleye). Microsoft sent a PI to members in the Xbox Underground group (https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hackers/ https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hacke...). Microsoft also used to include a console's serial number in the animated xbox 360 logo on the main screen in morse code (https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerprinting https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerp...). In order to identify users who published hacking/modding videos on Youtube.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > Microsoft also used to include a console's serial number in the animated xbox 360 logo on the main screen in morse code (https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerp https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerp...). In order to identify users who published hacking/modding videos on Youtube. Is that even allowed under the GDPR?!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jtvjan 6y ago
    It was before the GDPR was a thing, and it was only used on internal beta versions to catch leakers. [1]: https://archive.is/JTapN https://archive.is/JTapN
- pityJuke 6y ago
aneutron 6y ago
Is it legal in Europe to stalk someone like this ? I feel like it shouldn't be. Especially in Europe.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is literal stalking. According to the law, AFAIK, the detective carries the risk of getting arrested for anything illegal they do, so they probably have very good lawyers standing by whenever. There are exceptions to the law, though. In my country, you need a special permit to run a PI agency, which isn't just blindly given out to anyone. There's also not a lot of useful stuff a private detective can do. No installing of car trackers, no tracking of phone calls, no IMSI catchers, no recording without some specific exceptions (recording on the public road is acceptable, but recording things like a car's license plate isn't, etc.). There's also a limit on what can be shared. If this came to an actual lawsuit, a lot of the evidence would probably be thrown out and a counter suit for infringing the victim's privacy would likely be successful, though the payout in a European court would not be huge. The goal here, though, is to intimidate and keep everything private. With these leaks, the targeted hackers might be able to start a lawsuit against Nintendo, but only because they got caught. Practices like these are why I refuse to give Nintendo any more of my money. I hope someone finds something violating the GDPR so Nintendo can be punished hard.
FreezerburnV 6y ago
An interesting trend to me in the comments here is a conflation of a company like Nintendo as a whole, and the efforts to do creepy things like stalk hackers. Considering the size of companies like Nintendo, I could easily imagine there being one culture in the company of valuing the creation of beloved games and how they impact society. (e.g.: a recent article I have not read but the title suggests an agreement with that culture existing: https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/21/nintendos-shigeru-miyamoto-on-how-he-wants-to-make-the-world-a-better-place https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/21/nintendos-shigeru-mi...) While on the other hand there is a highly litigious culture somewhere else in Nintendo that does creepy things. Whether or not the "happy" side knows about the creepy side or even has much control over it, or even if they encourage it(!), is something I do not know about. I do know that Japanese culture is extremely different from American culture, so something that might seem creepy or aggressive here might be considered effectively normal behavior there, and we could be seeing a clash between the cultures of different countries. (I remember reading something a while ago about how Nintendo of America or Sega of America was extremely mad about some aggressive litigious stuff that happened from the Japanese side of things for some stuff that was effectively harmless or even good for the company in the eyes of at least America, again suggesting at some culture stuff going on potentially) As an example, Japan effectively has a culture of overwork built into their society as a norm that goes beyond even American overtime/overwork cultures. Sleeping under your desk isn't going to be considered an abnormal occurrence, at least in some companies. Getting home (even when married!) at extremely late hours, possibly totally smashed drunk because of office culture valuing (read: effectively requiring) going out for drinks after work is done, is again not abnormal. I'm not defending things like intimidating individuals who are finding security issues in game devices. I'm not defending crazy work hours to produce something. But I did want to at least point out some things that could give context to at least pieces of what's going on here.
umvi 6y ago
I remember I was sad the day Nintendo ruthlessly shut down "Chrono Resurrection"[0] (a fanmade 3d remake of Chrono Trigger). I mean, from a IP standpoint I get why they do it but... it also burns your most loyal fans. Despite the abuse, Nintendo's fans are still as avid as ever, but now fan projects have to be made entirely in secret and then explosively released so that Nintendo can't shut it down before it gets traction (see: AM2R [1], Full Screen Mario, etc.). I just can't believe how hostile Nintendo is to its fans - from C&Ds to fanmade games to heavy handed streaming rules on YouTube... I mean, I still love their games but if they just muzzled their lawyers a bit they would be one of the most loved companies on the planet. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkqKC7nwls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkqKC7nwls [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM2R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM2R
- kibwen 6y ago
  Surely you must be mistaken here; Square Enix owns the Chrono Trigger IP, not Nintendo.
  - umvi 6y ago
    Unfortunately can't edit my original post, but you are correct, I am mistaken here. For some reason I thought Nintendo owned the IP since I played Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo but now that you mention it, I remember the "Square" logo on startup. The other examples (AM2R and Full Screen Mario) were shut down by Nintendo though and I have no doubt Nintendo will quickly shut down any future fanmade project touching their any of their IP if it gains any attention at all.
giantg2 6y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion... I hate these Twitter links. Why can't the info just be on one page instead of a bunch a short blurbs that I have to piece together and keep clicking for more?
- undersuit 6y ago
  A link off the Twitter site wouldn't get as many reads, and I believe if you have a good Titter client it will thread the messages for you.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    That's true, but then it's not a twitter link to a document. It's a client accessing an API. It's an application. There's no real good way to view twitter as a document. Replacing twitter.com with nitter.net is okay but still tedious and it is doing the heavy lifting of being the application.
mechnesium 6y ago
In light of the revelations of these Gestapo tactics employed by Nintendo, I will never again purchase another Nintendo product.
bergstromm466 6y ago
I opened this thread on my PC earlier, and saw upon refresh that the title has been changed. The original title was: > Nintendo “stalked” hackers with private investigators, coercing into settlements This seems like corporate whitewashing to me. Has HN become a tool for corporate PR? It feels dishonest considering the evidence of this scary behavior by Nintendo corporation.
- devenblake 6y ago
  I was under the impression this was obvious. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator.
- dang 6y ago
  We edited the title because it was on the baity side (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and also a little misleading not to mention that the documents were from 2013. No scary behavior was diminished; the thread was on the front page all day and got a thorough discussion.

279 points by meibo 6y ago

I think 32c3 (and the amount of hacks after) really opened the gateway to 3DS modding [1]. I had my eyes glued on the screen with what they'd revealed at the time. I hope Smea, Derrek, Pluto et. al were approached by Nintendo in a different way because those guys had been stellar throughout the scene's life. [1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7240-console_hacking https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7240-console_hacking

meibo 6y ago
Derrek and Smea seem to appear multiple times in the leaked documents as well, with possible talking points/conversation flow graphs and ways to approach. There's a lot in there, if you are into the subject, I can recommend checking it out for yourself - no links though, of course.

meibo 6y ago

A recent leak shows that Nintendo has "stalked" various console hackers with private investigators, trying to coerce them into settling on an NDA. I thought this was very interesting - is this kind of behaviour/planning common in other industries as well, or is this a consequence of Nintendo's/Japanese company culture? Marcan(popular console hacker, often seen on HN as well) recently tweeted about his experience, apparently noting that the company seems to have changed their ways in recent years: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1341330839993339905 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1341330839993339905

tinus_hn 6y ago
I’ve seen similar stories about eastern european companies employing the same tactics against people who reverse engineer their products.
lima 6y ago
Engaging PIs to contact reverse engineers/"hackers" is a reasonably common approach in the gaming industry, not just regarding hardware, but also software modifications/cheating/some forms of modding.
- invokestatic 6y ago
  I used to write and sell cheat software for PC games (I work in anti-cheat now). I’ve never experienced this soft of behavior, nor have any of the many contacts I have in the space. I suspect this only occurs in litigious companies (Blizzard and Nintendo both immediately pop in my mind). Typically, hackers get scooped up by games companies and switch to anti-cheat, at least in my observations. Edit: I do know it’s fairly common for companies to have “dox” on hackers. Actually making use of that information, like hiring a PI, is quite an escalation.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>or is this a consequence of Nintendo's/Japanese company culture? Now this makes me wonder, because Sony went after George Hotz with guns blazing for his 'OtherOS' efforts on PS3 until he settled the lawsuit on the condition to 'never hack Sony products'! At the same time, Sony has been very welcoming about aftermarket OS efforts on their Android smartphones, they had their official AOSP portal, Jolla support etc. I guess, the bottomline is would it affect the business?
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  Your timeline is a little mixed up, and I think fixing it will clear up what happened: - Sony shipped the PS3 with "Other OS" functionality that provided limited hardware support to a guest Linux OS. - Sony removed that "Other OS" feature without providing a reason why. At that point, the main system's protection was still in place. - Hotz, after seeing the spotlight on Sony for removing "Other OS", was able to breach the main system's protection without any hardware modification. - Sony went after Hotz for breaching their OS. The bottom line was business -- providing full hardware support of "Other OS" would let you distribute Linux games without Sony's blessing (and cut of revenues or developer kits), which ultimately wouldn't be as successful without the absolutely massive marketing and deal-making abilities of one of these platform holders. On the other hand, breaking the main system OS allowed things like pirated games and unsigned code (game hacks) to run on the system, which is hugely problematic for a console that had most of its security on the client machines. The big PSN hack in 2011 followed shortly after Hotz broke the system, and while I've never seen it 100% confirmed, there were rumors at the time that the hack revealed enough of a vector inside the network that the hackers were basically unstoppable.
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    I dont remember it going like that all. I explicitly remember OtherOs being removed because of this hack. http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/george_hotz#cite_note-12 http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/george_hotz#cite_note-12 Lets go to World Heritage Encyclopedia. > January 22, 2010, he announced that he had successfully hacked the machine by enabling himself read and write access to the machine's system memory and having hypervisor level access to the machine's processor > On January 26, 2010, Hotz released the exploit to the public. It was done on the original firmware (OFW) 3.15, then using his codes he made it into a 3.15 CFW, or Custom Firmware. It requires the OtherOS function of the machine, and consists of a Linux kernel module and gaining control of the machine's hypervisor via bus glitching > On March 28, 2010, Sony responded by announcing their intention to release a PlayStation 3 firmware update that would remove the OtherOS feature from all models,[17] a feature that was already absent on the newer Slim revisions of the machine. Why lie about something trivially verifiable?
rsync 6y ago
"A recent leak shows that Nintendo has "stalked" various console hackers with private investigators, trying to coerce them into settling on an NDA." I know nothing else about this, this has almost zero intersection with my current interests, and I have no prior interests in this area. But boy-howdy am I tempted to perform, or pay to have performed, a minimal level of reverse engineering or independent development of (Nintendo platform) just to see if they'll attempt this. Never mind the infinite free publicity for me, rsync.net, 0x.co, etc. ... the comedy factor alone of their PIs vs. our two mile long private road would be worth the legal fees. I'm struggling to find a reason not to do this... EDIT: my ranch is adjacent to, and surrounded by, Skywalker Ranch ... imagine Nintendo stooges wandering into/through that ... so many lulz.
- mzs 6y ago
  further along it says that the people largely responsible have retired, so you might not get any worthwhile reaction.
marcan_42 6y ago
I believe this approach came from NOA (the USA branch) and specifically the Anti-Piracy team led by Jodi Daugherty. It seems things shifted to a different organization after that, and she is now retired.

post_break 6y ago

I don't understand how Nintendo has maintained its fun and harmless image while being worse than Disney when it comes to protecting its assets. You look at stuff like joycon drift, suing literally everyone who even thinks about emulation, or streaming, and they are still in the "good" light by most people.

colejohnson66 6y ago
I’d argue nostalgia. Nintendo helped save the video game industry after the crash in the 80s while also portraying itself as a “fun” company. Even then, their legal department was still aggressive, but it just wasn’t as publicized. Today, it’s more known, but nostalgia carries a lot of weight in public opinion.
sli 6y ago
Add to the list everything going in the Smash community right now, which has spilled over into other communities that support the Smash community. Nintendo is more or less cancelling events because people still like Smash Bros Melee.
- vlunkr 6y ago
  To be fair, they're cancelling events because they're using emulation to play Melee. They've previously allowed it at events. Not saying that's necessarily the right choice, but it's important to get the facts straight. Also, there's been lots of serious issues with the Melee community leaders recently with sexual misconduct, so it's also possible that Nintendo just wants to distance themselves from the whole scene.
  - CarVac 6y ago
    They canceled the stream for a Splatoon 2 tournament because the players had names supportive of Melee. And the sexual misconduct was mainly in the Ultimate scene. Very few prominent Melee players were involved.
  - mactrey 6y ago

JesseMReeves 6y ago

Can someone try to explain the purpose of console hacks and gaming company internal old documentation leaks? Reading these chat conversations and tweets they seemed to be important for building up some individuals‘ ego. Anything else?

novok 6y ago
This leak also has current console info, like the switch development kit. Also such info might be valuable in creating more accurate emulators and such. It's useful for history and to create a more accurate reputation for the company in question.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > This leak also has current console info, like the switch development kit. Also such info might be valuable in creating more accurate emulators and such. There are so many small and indie studios putting stuff in the Switch Store. I seriously wonder why there hasn't been an avalanche of leaks, hacks or someone of the emulator dev teams getting access...
  - meibo 6y ago
    Just because you don't know, that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Breaking NDAs is illegal, and using leaked documentation/SDK code is a very bad look for CFW and emulator developers. Especially when they praise themselves as doing "clean room implementations". Would be stupid to disclose something like this to the public.
- pokemod97 6y ago
  Most emulator devs hate leaks because it opens them up to lawsuits for using copyrighted material.

jb775 6y ago

I'm just picturing Mario and Luigi showing up at this guys front door

racl101 6y ago
Mario: you got a bee on you-a hat. Luigi: do you like your knee caps?

racl101 6y ago

Gotta love Nintendo's hustler attitude. They don't screw around.

snakedoctor 6y ago

Unfortunately this is a common practice in the gaming industry. https://www.vgr.com/take-two-lawsuit-against-gta-online-modder/ https://www.vgr.com/take-two-lawsuit-against-gta-online-modd... GTA coerced a kid in to signing an NDA, and then sued him for hacking GTA 5. Battleye (anti-cheat used on games like Fortnite, rainbow six siege, PUBG etc.) https://www.reddit.com/r/arma/comments/2750n0/battleye_is_sending_files_from_your_hard_drive_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/arma/comments/2750n0/battleye_is_se... founder/lead dev/ceo Bastian Suiter threatened to sue a hacker for publishing some intrusive stuff that Battleye did/is doing. Battleye recently DMCA'd a project that vmcall's club/group published which emulated the heartbeat checks etc. Though Bastian denied doing it on Battleyes twitter accounts (twitter.com/thebattleye). Microsoft sent a PI to members in the Xbox Underground group (https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hackers/ https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-underground-videogame-hacke...). Microsoft also used to include a console's serial number in the animated xbox 360 logo on the main screen in morse code (https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerprinting https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerp...). In order to identify users who published hacking/modding videos on Youtube.

mschuster91 6y ago
> Microsoft also used to include a console's serial number in the animated xbox 360 logo on the main screen in morse code (https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerp https://qf0.github.io/blog/2020/01/28/Microsoft-xbox-fingerp...). In order to identify users who published hacking/modding videos on Youtube. Is that even allowed under the GDPR?!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jtvjan 6y ago
  It was before the GDPR was a thing, and it was only used on internal beta versions to catch leakers. [1]: https://archive.is/JTapN https://archive.is/JTapN
pityJuke 6y ago

aneutron 6y ago

Is it legal in Europe to stalk someone like this ? I feel like it shouldn't be. Especially in Europe.

jeroenhd 6y ago
I'm pretty sure this is literal stalking. According to the law, AFAIK, the detective carries the risk of getting arrested for anything illegal they do, so they probably have very good lawyers standing by whenever. There are exceptions to the law, though. In my country, you need a special permit to run a PI agency, which isn't just blindly given out to anyone. There's also not a lot of useful stuff a private detective can do. No installing of car trackers, no tracking of phone calls, no IMSI catchers, no recording without some specific exceptions (recording on the public road is acceptable, but recording things like a car's license plate isn't, etc.). There's also a limit on what can be shared. If this came to an actual lawsuit, a lot of the evidence would probably be thrown out and a counter suit for infringing the victim's privacy would likely be successful, though the payout in a European court would not be huge. The goal here, though, is to intimidate and keep everything private. With these leaks, the targeted hackers might be able to start a lawsuit against Nintendo, but only because they got caught. Practices like these are why I refuse to give Nintendo any more of my money. I hope someone finds something violating the GDPR so Nintendo can be punished hard.

FreezerburnV 6y ago

An interesting trend to me in the comments here is a conflation of a company like Nintendo as a whole, and the efforts to do creepy things like stalk hackers. Considering the size of companies like Nintendo, I could easily imagine there being one culture in the company of valuing the creation of beloved games and how they impact society. (e.g.: a recent article I have not read but the title suggests an agreement with that culture existing: https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/21/nintendos-shigeru-miyamoto-on-how-he-wants-to-make-the-world-a-better-place https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/21/nintendos-shigeru-mi...) While on the other hand there is a highly litigious culture somewhere else in Nintendo that does creepy things. Whether or not the "happy" side knows about the creepy side or even has much control over it, or even if they encourage it(!), is something I do not know about. I do know that Japanese culture is extremely different from American culture, so something that might seem creepy or aggressive here might be considered effectively normal behavior there, and we could be seeing a clash between the cultures of different countries. (I remember reading something a while ago about how Nintendo of America or Sega of America was extremely mad about some aggressive litigious stuff that happened from the Japanese side of things for some stuff that was effectively harmless or even good for the company in the eyes of at least America, again suggesting at some culture stuff going on potentially) As an example, Japan effectively has a culture of overwork built into their society as a norm that goes beyond even American overtime/overwork cultures. Sleeping under your desk isn't going to be considered an abnormal occurrence, at least in some companies. Getting home (even when married!) at extremely late hours, possibly totally smashed drunk because of office culture valuing (read: effectively requiring) going out for drinks after work is done, is again not abnormal. I'm not defending things like intimidating individuals who are finding security issues in game devices. I'm not defending crazy work hours to produce something. But I did want to at least point out some things that could give context to at least pieces of what's going on here.

umvi 6y ago

I remember I was sad the day Nintendo ruthlessly shut down "Chrono Resurrection"[0] (a fanmade 3d remake of Chrono Trigger). I mean, from a IP standpoint I get why they do it but... it also burns your most loyal fans. Despite the abuse, Nintendo's fans are still as avid as ever, but now fan projects have to be made entirely in secret and then explosively released so that Nintendo can't shut it down before it gets traction (see: AM2R [1], Full Screen Mario, etc.). I just can't believe how hostile Nintendo is to its fans - from C&Ds to fanmade games to heavy handed streaming rules on YouTube... I mean, I still love their games but if they just muzzled their lawyers a bit they would be one of the most loved companies on the planet. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkqKC7nwls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkqKC7nwls [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM2R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM2R

kibwen 6y ago
Surely you must be mistaken here; Square Enix owns the Chrono Trigger IP, not Nintendo.
- umvi 6y ago
  Unfortunately can't edit my original post, but you are correct, I am mistaken here. For some reason I thought Nintendo owned the IP since I played Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo but now that you mention it, I remember the "Square" logo on startup. The other examples (AM2R and Full Screen Mario) were shut down by Nintendo though and I have no doubt Nintendo will quickly shut down any future fanmade project touching their any of their IP if it gains any attention at all.

giantg2 6y ago

This might be an unpopular opinion... I hate these Twitter links. Why can't the info just be on one page instead of a bunch a short blurbs that I have to piece together and keep clicking for more?

undersuit 6y ago
A link off the Twitter site wouldn't get as many reads, and I believe if you have a good Titter client it will thread the messages for you.
- superkuh 6y ago
  That's true, but then it's not a twitter link to a document. It's a client accessing an API. It's an application. There's no real good way to view twitter as a document. Replacing twitter.com with nitter.net is okay but still tedious and it is doing the heavy lifting of being the application.

mechnesium 6y ago

In light of the revelations of these Gestapo tactics employed by Nintendo, I will never again purchase another Nintendo product.

bergstromm466 6y ago

I opened this thread on my PC earlier, and saw upon refresh that the title has been changed. The original title was: > Nintendo “stalked” hackers with private investigators, coercing into settlements This seems like corporate whitewashing to me. Has HN become a tool for corporate PR? It feels dishonest considering the evidence of this scary behavior by Nintendo corporation.

devenblake 6y ago
I was under the impression this was obvious. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator.
dang 6y ago
We edited the title because it was on the baity side (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and also a little misleading not to mention that the documents were from 2013. No scary behavior was diminished; the thread was on the front page all day and got a thorough discussion.