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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • In the case of AI, even if consumers actively try and avoid products with AI, it’s difficult. There are studies showing customers are generally less likely to buy a product if it’s described as having AI features, so the overall market demand is already for consumer products to have less AI. The demand companies are catering to is from investors, who don’t need to care about whether it’s viable to sell anything until after the bubble pops.






  • It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem once a past contributor notices.

    It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.

    Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.







  • Most of the UK’s COVID fraud was from giving out contracts to companies that knew full well that they couldn’t deliver, e.g. a £40 million PPE contract to the landlord of the Health Secretary’s local pup, so it’s not absurd to claim that the point of those contracts wasn’t to save the economy, but rather transfer taxpayer money from the treasury to friends of Conservative Party leadership while there was still something left to loot. There was also lots lost in loans to fictional companies and furlough payments to fictional employees, of which a minority went to small businesses gaming the system, and a lot to organised crime gaming the system and then laundering the money so it couldn’t be traced and recovered (without giving the Serious Fraud Office and National Crime Agency enough budget to hire a workable number of forensic accountants).





  • For a start, having a garbage collector doesn’t mean its use is mandatory, but even in a language where the garbage collector is mandatory, keeping an array alive as long as any references to it exist doesn’t stop you doing things like getting muddled about its length and reading/writing past the end. Mandatory garbage collection only prevents temporal memory bugs like use-after-free, not spatial memory safety bugs like buffer overruns, which need to be prevented by other mechanisms like bounds checks.




  • 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.