8 ms·

Doesn't matter what the reason is this time. Next time it will undoubtedly be DMCA considering what happened to Yuzu. This is the perfect case for some sort of

by mikae1 2y ago

Doesn't matter what the reason is this time. Next time it will undoubtedly be DMCA considering what happened to Yuzu. This is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git[1] or a Git repo via Tor. [1] https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz

square_usual 2y ago
What happened to Yuzu was that they took money to help people pirate a brand new game. I don't think that's a reasonable take.
- squigz 2y ago
  I'm a big advocate of emulation (and piracy, frankly) but yeah, honestly, painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. How much were they pulling in via Patreon? $30,000 a month?
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Mandatory reminder as well, to the emulation community, that $30K a month is probably enough to fund a legal defense...
    - squigz 2y ago
      Perhaps not against Nintendo, but yes.
  - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
    What's wrong with getting money out of a product? The fact that it was an emulator changes nothing. They would have been sued, Patreon or no Patreon. Making an emulator is not illegal. And I don't mean gray-area not illegal, I mean court-precedent not illegal.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      > court-precedent not illegal Under precedents established before the DMCA was law, and under lawsuits filed before the DMCA was applicable, on consoles which did not have encryption on which the DMCA would have applied.
      - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
        Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.
        gjsman-1000 2y ago
        > Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing. That has never been examined or declared, as the DMCA exemptions are much narrower than they appear. The reverse engineering exemption, for example, does not cover the right to make a product that interfaces with the original - only to examine the technology to build your own product. An obvious example of this is DVDs, which have the same exemptions. The US PTO, and the US Librarian of Congress (who has the power to make DMCA exemptions) are unequivocally clear that a private copying exemption does not exist in their view. This is also why the EFF has been begging every 3 years for the last... two decades... to make such an exemption, and has failed.
        EMIRELADERO 2y ago
        The reversing clause doesn't, but the law does. It's "declared" specifically in the Act, here: (1)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title. (2)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title. (3)The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    There's nothing wrong with a team of people getting that much money to code an emulator.
    - croes 2y ago
      >they took money to help people pirate a brand new game That was the wrong part
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        Yeah, but that's not the comment I was responding to. I understand the issue of making money drawing attention to the piracy they (supposedly?) participated in. But there is nothing wrong with the money they got for their development efforts. That money is not a counterpoint to them being victims, regardless of whether they actually are victims or not. I doubt any meaningful amount of it went to piracy, if any. If that's wrong, then okay I'll change my mind. And big citation needed that they had a money collection specifically for some instance of piracy.
        croes 2y ago
        But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted. There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        > But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted. Yes, I dispute the connection they were drawing. > There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games Helpfulness implying some kind of piracy? Maybe but I will doubt it without seeing evidence.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    > painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. Hope you're not thinking I'm the painter here... I know they turned the thing into big business and I don't have a lot of understanding for that. Realistically though, I expect Nintendo to find ways to wipe Ryujinx from Github and sue these developers too, considering people have turned to it now that Yuzu is gone. The only way to escape that fate would be to maintain proper opsec, stay in the right jurisdiction and not rely on (DMCA sensitive) big tech platforms for the development. EDIT: guess I was kind of right... Seems Nintendo succeeded with their goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712399
  - tombert 2y ago
    The lawsuits that effectively legalized console emulation in the 90s were commercial products, enabling you to play PlayStation games on your PC or DreamCast There’s even a video of Steve Jobs showing off Connectix on the Ma.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp.&wprov=rarw1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sony_Computer_E...
- lcouturi 2y ago
  The popular narrative seems to be that Yuzu had something to do and/or profited in some way from the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leak, which isn't true. The Patreon-only Early Access builds could not play the game any more than the public Nightly builds could. Both versions needed an unofficial game patch for the game to launch, a patch which the Yuzu developers had nothing to do with. Yuzu developers also did not implement or work on any bug fixes involving the game before its official release. Perhaps you were alluding to something else, though.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I thought that there was also speculation of people sharing ROMs directly on Discord, with the Yuzu admins being pretty ambivalent about the whole thing? I only followed the story peripherally, so it's possible I'm wrong.
    - CryZe 2y ago
      The Yuzu devs banned anyone even mentioning TotK in the Discord. However, they apparently had some private Discord or something where the Yuzu devs shared ROMs between themselves.
  - theturtletalks 2y ago
    I thought they were sharing Nintendo encryption keys that are "technically" supposed to be from the Switch you're emulating. People were using Yuzu to turn their Steamdeck into a Switch and using Yuzu's private discord to get the keys needed to do that. It's the same reason other emulators ask you to bring your own BIOS file because that is proprietary.
    - thomastjeffery 2y ago
      AFAIK, they were explicitly not sharing those keys. You had to get your own. They provided instructions on how to copy them from your own hardware.
  - 0xDEADFED5 2y ago
asveikau 2y ago
> is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git This is exactly what git is made to be without any extra tooling on top.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  AFAIK git doesn’t concern itself with discoverability, which is presumably what OP means. Sure, if you already know the IP address of someone hosting a git repo you can pull it. But that’s not really a decentralized service (or not any more decentralized than downloading stuff from a known host via HTTPS).
woodrowbarlow 2y ago
git is decentralized and can be served across anything, including tor.
- grzracz 2y ago
  i think you don't know what decentralized means
  - trufas 2y ago
    You're conflating git with git forges. Most popular forges use a centralized model. Git was built as distributed from the start and it's original mode of collaboration was through a federated protocol.
1propionyl 2y ago
Some sort of decentralized Git. You mean Git?
- tombert 2y ago
  I mean, nominally, but honestly how many of us actually use Git in a distributed fashion? I think most of us treat Git more or less like Subversion with local committing and much better merging. I think what the person was referring to was something more along the lines of a DHT (e.g. Pastry or Kademlia), IPFS, or (as they mentioned) Tor, where it can be truly leaderless and owned by everyone and no one at the same time.
  - 1propionyl 2y ago
    I think what they meant was GitHub, not Git. A common conflation these days, and one GitHub works hard to reinforce.
    - tombert 2y ago
      Sure, but a vast majority of people who use Git will centralize it, with Gitlab, or Bitbucket, or SourceForge, even barring Github. While the git program is allowed to be decentralized, pretty much everyone's workflow is decidedly not.
mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
Probably worth reminding that this is the project where the backing company is centered around crypto/blockchain, but they pinkie promise it will never affect this work! https://radicle.xyz/faq https://radicle.xyz/faq Radworks, the organization that has been financing Radicle is organized around the RAD token which is a governance token on Ethereum. It gives off the same odor as Tea did, for me personally.
- john_alan 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
    I'm doing my part!
- j_maffe 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Vegemeister 2y ago
  If you meme yourself into getting the ick around libertarians, you cripple your ability to defend liberty. Imagine that.
  - phatskat 2y ago
    No memeing necessary - most vocal and visible (eg mainstream or platformed) libertarians are…a lot, and not in a good way. I’m sure it’s very similar in nuance to democrat and republican - the faces and voices in the media aren’t necessarily representative of the average people who use the same labels.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    Libertarians call themselves that, that doesn't mean that they're inherently the primary defenders of liberty. Much like how the difference between Republicans and Democrats aren't an argument over whether the United States is better run as a Republic or a Democracy.
hnlmorg 2y ago
git already is decentralised. GitHub isn’t. But you can clone the git repository and mirror that as many places as you want.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  git doesn't have discoverability or any kind of decentralized CDN service AFAIK.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    None of that are requirements for a version control system, let alone a distributed one. What people are after is a decentralised GitHub. Which I think is a good idea. But git itself is already built from the ground up to work decentralised. So if someone were to build a decentralised discovery service for git, then you could take any existing git repository, whether it’s local copies on your laptop or “centralised” versions in GitHub, and use them equally as a seed.
    - saurik 2y ago
      Without the decentralized discovery service; though, you have nothing; one might as well say that hard disk drives are a decentralized storage solution, as everyone who has a copy of a file by definition has a copy of the file... but, obviously, this is meaningless if there is no way for me to find who has a copy of the file to request the download.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
RiverCrochet 2y ago
My niece tells me that decentralized Git is, well Git. As far as a web interface to Git, she was saying the basic pieces are kinda already there with Gitea, and provided the following points: - Gitea is a single executable, fairly easy to install at least on Linux (it does need a database), and while the configuration requires some time it's worth it for all that Gitea does - which is basically be a copy of Github. - Gitea has a migration option which will literally pull in an entire Git repo with one click. So my niece was telling me zany things like "why doesn't everyone run their own Gitea and simply cross migrate everything?" I don't know, I feel like it's dangerous and essentially providing easy tools and paraphernalia to potential evil doers, such as those who may want to infringe copyright, so this is an application I'll never host or run in my life.

by mikae1 2y ago

square_usual 2y ago

What happened to Yuzu was that they took money to help people pirate a brand new game. I don't think that's a reasonable take.

squigz 2y ago
I'm a big advocate of emulation (and piracy, frankly) but yeah, honestly, painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. How much were they pulling in via Patreon? $30,000 a month?
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Mandatory reminder as well, to the emulation community, that $30K a month is probably enough to fund a legal defense...
  - squigz 2y ago
    Perhaps not against Nintendo, but yes.
- EMIRELADERO 2y ago
  What's wrong with getting money out of a product? The fact that it was an emulator changes nothing. They would have been sued, Patreon or no Patreon. Making an emulator is not illegal. And I don't mean gray-area not illegal, I mean court-precedent not illegal.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > court-precedent not illegal Under precedents established before the DMCA was law, and under lawsuits filed before the DMCA was applicable, on consoles which did not have encryption on which the DMCA would have applied.
    - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
      Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing.
      - gjsman-1000 2y ago
        > Correct, but the DMCA has an explicit exception for this kind of thing. That has never been examined or declared, as the DMCA exemptions are much narrower than they appear. The reverse engineering exemption, for example, does not cover the right to make a product that interfaces with the original - only to examine the technology to build your own product. An obvious example of this is DVDs, which have the same exemptions. The US PTO, and the US Librarian of Congress (who has the power to make DMCA exemptions) are unequivocally clear that a private copying exemption does not exist in their view. This is also why the EFF has been begging every 3 years for the last... two decades... to make such an exemption, and has failed.
        EMIRELADERO 2y ago
        The reversing clause doesn't, but the law does. It's "declared" specifically in the Act, here: (1)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title. (2)Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title. (3)The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  There's nothing wrong with a team of people getting that much money to code an emulator.
  - croes 2y ago
    >they took money to help people pirate a brand new game That was the wrong part
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Yeah, but that's not the comment I was responding to. I understand the issue of making money drawing attention to the piracy they (supposedly?) participated in. But there is nothing wrong with the money they got for their development efforts. That money is not a counterpoint to them being victims, regardless of whether they actually are victims or not. I doubt any meaningful amount of it went to piracy, if any. If that's wrong, then okay I'll change my mind. And big citation needed that they had a money collection specifically for some instance of piracy.
      - croes 2y ago
        But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted. There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        > But the comments you were replying too agreed with the point I quoted. Yes, I dispute the connection they were drawing. > There is most likely a correlation between their Patreon donations and their helpfulness regarding games Helpfulness implying some kind of piracy? Maybe but I will doubt it without seeing evidence.
- mikae1 2y ago
  > painting the Yuzu developers as the victims is insane. Hope you're not thinking I'm the painter here... I know they turned the thing into big business and I don't have a lot of understanding for that. Realistically though, I expect Nintendo to find ways to wipe Ryujinx from Github and sue these developers too, considering people have turned to it now that Yuzu is gone. The only way to escape that fate would be to maintain proper opsec, stay in the right jurisdiction and not rely on (DMCA sensitive) big tech platforms for the development. EDIT: guess I was kind of right... Seems Nintendo succeeded with their goal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712399
- tombert 2y ago
  The lawsuits that effectively legalized console emulation in the 90s were commercial products, enabling you to play PlayStation games on your PC or DreamCast There’s even a video of Steve Jobs showing off Connectix on the Ma.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp.&wprov=rarw1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sony_Computer_E...
lcouturi 2y ago
The popular narrative seems to be that Yuzu had something to do and/or profited in some way from the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leak, which isn't true. The Patreon-only Early Access builds could not play the game any more than the public Nightly builds could. Both versions needed an unofficial game patch for the game to launch, a patch which the Yuzu developers had nothing to do with. Yuzu developers also did not implement or work on any bug fixes involving the game before its official release. Perhaps you were alluding to something else, though.
- tombert 2y ago
  I thought that there was also speculation of people sharing ROMs directly on Discord, with the Yuzu admins being pretty ambivalent about the whole thing? I only followed the story peripherally, so it's possible I'm wrong.
  - CryZe 2y ago
    The Yuzu devs banned anyone even mentioning TotK in the Discord. However, they apparently had some private Discord or something where the Yuzu devs shared ROMs between themselves.
- theturtletalks 2y ago
  I thought they were sharing Nintendo encryption keys that are "technically" supposed to be from the Switch you're emulating. People were using Yuzu to turn their Steamdeck into a Switch and using Yuzu's private discord to get the keys needed to do that. It's the same reason other emulators ask you to bring your own BIOS file because that is proprietary.
  - thomastjeffery 2y ago
    AFAIK, they were explicitly not sharing those keys. You had to get your own. They provided instructions on how to copy them from your own hardware.
- 0xDEADFED5 2y ago

asveikau 2y ago

> is the perfect case for some sort of decentralized Git This is exactly what git is made to be without any extra tooling on top.

tshaddox 2y ago
AFAIK git doesn’t concern itself with discoverability, which is presumably what OP means. Sure, if you already know the IP address of someone hosting a git repo you can pull it. But that’s not really a decentralized service (or not any more decentralized than downloading stuff from a known host via HTTPS).

woodrowbarlow 2y ago

git is decentralized and can be served across anything, including tor.

grzracz 2y ago
i think you don't know what decentralized means
- trufas 2y ago
  You're conflating git with git forges. Most popular forges use a centralized model. Git was built as distributed from the start and it's original mode of collaboration was through a federated protocol.

1propionyl 2y ago

Some sort of decentralized Git. You mean Git?

tombert 2y ago
I mean, nominally, but honestly how many of us actually use Git in a distributed fashion? I think most of us treat Git more or less like Subversion with local committing and much better merging. I think what the person was referring to was something more along the lines of a DHT (e.g. Pastry or Kademlia), IPFS, or (as they mentioned) Tor, where it can be truly leaderless and owned by everyone and no one at the same time.
- 1propionyl 2y ago
  I think what they meant was GitHub, not Git. A common conflation these days, and one GitHub works hard to reinforce.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Sure, but a vast majority of people who use Git will centralize it, with Gitlab, or Bitbucket, or SourceForge, even barring Github. While the git program is allowed to be decentralized, pretty much everyone's workflow is decidedly not.

mtndew4brkfst 2y ago

Probably worth reminding that this is the project where the backing company is centered around crypto/blockchain, but they pinkie promise it will never affect this work! https://radicle.xyz/faq https://radicle.xyz/faq Radworks, the organization that has been financing Radicle is organized around the RAD token which is a governance token on Ethereum. It gives off the same odor as Tea did, for me personally.

john_alan 2y ago
[flagged]
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  I'm doing my part!
j_maffe 2y ago
[flagged]
Vegemeister 2y ago
If you meme yourself into getting the ick around libertarians, you cripple your ability to defend liberty. Imagine that.
- phatskat 2y ago
  No memeing necessary - most vocal and visible (eg mainstream or platformed) libertarians are…a lot, and not in a good way. I’m sure it’s very similar in nuance to democrat and republican - the faces and voices in the media aren’t necessarily representative of the average people who use the same labels.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  Libertarians call themselves that, that doesn't mean that they're inherently the primary defenders of liberty. Much like how the difference between Republicans and Democrats aren't an argument over whether the United States is better run as a Republic or a Democracy.

hnlmorg 2y ago

git already is decentralised. GitHub isn’t. But you can clone the git repository and mirror that as many places as you want.

j_maffe 2y ago
git doesn't have discoverability or any kind of decentralized CDN service AFAIK.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  None of that are requirements for a version control system, let alone a distributed one. What people are after is a decentralised GitHub. Which I think is a good idea. But git itself is already built from the ground up to work decentralised. So if someone were to build a decentralised discovery service for git, then you could take any existing git repository, whether it’s local copies on your laptop or “centralised” versions in GitHub, and use them equally as a seed.
  - saurik 2y ago
    Without the decentralized discovery service; though, you have nothing; one might as well say that hard disk drives are a decentralized storage solution, as everyone who has a copy of a file by definition has a copy of the file... but, obviously, this is meaningless if there is no way for me to find who has a copy of the file to request the download.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

RiverCrochet 2y ago

My niece tells me that decentralized Git is, well Git. As far as a web interface to Git, she was saying the basic pieces are kinda already there with Gitea, and provided the following points: - Gitea is a single executable, fairly easy to install at least on Linux (it does need a database), and while the configuration requires some time it's worth it for all that Gitea does - which is basically be a copy of Github. - Gitea has a migration option which will literally pull in an entire Git repo with one click. So my niece was telling me zany things like "why doesn't everyone run their own Gitea and simply cross migrate everything?" I don't know, I feel like it's dangerous and essentially providing easy tools and paraphernalia to potential evil doers, such as those who may want to infringe copyright, so this is an application I'll never host or run in my life.