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      Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 7 days ago - 15:20

    Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

    Enlarge / Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit? (credit: Suyu)

    Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website , and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo .

    While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab's public repository of such requests , a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice "from a representative of the rightsholder." GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

    An email to Suyu contributors being shared on the project's Discord server includes the following cited justification in the DMCA request:

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      Pour Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Nintendo avait plus de 2000 idées

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · 7 days ago - 11:28

    super mario bros wonder

    Tous les développeurs ont mis la main à la patte pour concevoir les mécaniques de Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
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      Super Mario Bros. Wonder devs created 2,000 game-altering “Wonder Effect” ideas

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 21 March - 15:15 · 1 minute

    Just some of the unused Wonder Effect ideas submitted via sticky note by the development team.

    Enlarge / Just some of the unused Wonder Effect ideas submitted via sticky note by the development team. (credit: Kyle Orland)

    SAN FRANCISCO—When thinking about what makes 2D Mario games special, Super Mario Bros. Wonder director Shiro Mouri recalled the excitement he felt playing the original Super Mario Bros. , discovering things like the warp zone and hidden vine blocks for the first time. Across decades of 2D Mario games with similar designs, though, it has been harder and harder to make a game that feels like it's "full of secrets and mysteries," as he said during a Game Developers Conference presentation this week.

    "At some point, all of this has become normal," Mouri said of once-fantastical Mario game elements like mushrooms and coin blocks that have now become staples of the games.

    Recapturing a world full of "secrets and mysteries" was the guiding principle for the development of Super Mario Bros. Wonder , Mouri said, but it took a while to figure out the new perspective necessary to get to that point. When Mouri prototyped an item that warped Mario to a new location, for instance, producer Takashi Tezuka said the effect "isn't so different from how it's always been. What if we changed the environment instead?"

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      Il pirate des joueurs de Pokémon puis supprime leur Pokémon favori

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Wednesday, 20 March - 16:14

    Un hacker s'est amusé à prendre le contrôle du compte Pokémon Go d'un célèbre streamer. Au même moment, Nintendo alerte sur des compromissions de mot de passe.

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      The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 19 March - 10:30 · 1 minute

    "Trimming the Herbs," mapped above, is all that stands between  "Team 0%" and its ultimate goal of clearing every <em>Super Mario Maker</em> level.

    Enlarge / "Trimming the Herbs," mapped above, is all that stands between "Team 0%" and its ultimate goal of clearing every Super Mario Maker level. (credit: Is SMM Beaten Yet? )

    As of late 2017, there were almost 85,000 "uncleared" levels in the original Wii U Super Mario Maker ( SMM )—levels that had never been beaten by anyone except for their original uploaders. As of this writing, a group of persistent players gathered under the banner of "Team 0%" has spent years narrowing the list of uncleared levels to a single entry—a devious, Super Mario World -styled Bob-omb bounce-and-throw gauntlet named "Trimming the Herbs" (the second-to-last uncleared level went down on Thursday, March 14, as noted on the excellent "Is SMM Beaten Yet?" tracker ).

    Given enough time, Team 0% would undoubtedly be able to bring down SMM 's "final boss," as it were. But the collective effort to finally and completely "beat" SMM has an external deadline: April 8, the day Nintendo has announced that it plans to finally shut down the aging Wii U's gameplay servers .

    The next three weeks will determine whether Team 0% can live up to its moniker or if this one final level will leave the team just short of its ultimate achievement. "I’d never think we would be this close to actually achieving this goal," Team 0% founder Jeffie told Ars Technica recently. "How often does a community of gamers do something like this?"

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      Où précommander Princess Peach : Showtime! au meilleur prix ?

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Sunday, 17 March - 14:47

    [Deal du jour] Princess Peach : Showtime! est prévu pour le 22 mars 2024. Le jeu de Nintendo compte bien moderniser le personnage de Peach, à l'aide de transformations et d'une panoplie de capacités qui n'ont rien à envier à Mario. Voilà où le commander au meilleur prix.

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      Nintendo Hits Circumvention Tool Linkers With DMCA Trafficking Violations

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Thursday, 14 March - 10:00 · 3 minutes

    nintendeal2 It took less than a week for Nintendo’s lawsuit against the company behind the Yuzu Switch emulator to have the desired effect.

    After agreeing to hand over $2.4m to Nintendo while complying with the terms of a broad injunction, Tropic Haze LLC evaporated in all but name and its developers drifted away into the night, apologetic and presumably penniless. At least, that’s what the paperwork and subsequent announcement implied, give or take.

    Nintendo: We’re Back

    With plenty of time in the interim to clone the Yuzu repo, many people did, purely for old times’ sake. Others still involved with projects related to Switch hacking and emulation had decisions to make, at least based on the theory that things had somehow changed. Some took evasive action, others took steps towards limiting liability, some appeared to do nothing; the usual mixed bag of responses following a big shutdown event.

    That Nintendo was not too far away comes as zero surprise. Among the targets this week were over 25 GitHub repos offering Sigpatch-Updater, a tool to update SigPatch files created by developer iTotalJustice. In conjunction with a modded console, SigPatches bypass signature verification when games are downloaded digitally, a red line for Nintendo.

    “The necessity of SigPatches to operate pirated copies of Nintendo’s video games is widely discussed in groups dedicated to modifying (hacking) the Nintendo Switch console,” Nintendo’s lengthy DMCA takedown notice reads.

    “For example, [redacted by GitHub], a site that instructs users how to modify their Nintendo Switch console, states that ‘Signature patches or SigPatches allow your device to bypass signature checks performed by [private] for installed titles,” Nintendo notes, before adding the following:

    Trafficking in circumvention software, such as SigPatches, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the United States (specifically, 17 U.S.C. §1201) (the “DMCA”), and infringes copyrights owned by Nintendo.

    Nintendo Gets Reacquainted With iTotalJustice

    Back in the summer of 2022, a previous set of DMCA notices included one that targeted a repo operated by iTotalJustice. Before it was taken down, the repo contained actual SigPatches and Nintendo makes the same allegation here, albeit with additional detail that broadens the scope beyond actual hosting.

    “With the iTotalJustice repository reported in this current notice, iTotalJustice is attempting to evade Nintendo’s enforcement efforts by providing SigPatches via a link to a third-party website ([private]), rather than including SigPatches in the repository itself,” Nintendo writes.

    “The link is accompanied by the statement ‘The patches are downloaded from a new host. Huge thanks to them!’ Several of the forks reported in this notice also link to the third-party website [private] to provide SigPatches.”

    Repos removed for trafficking in circumvention devices sigpatch-repos

    According to Nintendo, a hyperlink posted to a website that links to another website (not even to the SigPatches themselves), which in turn offers the SigPatch files for download, is illegal under the DMCA when the linker demonstrates knowledge and intent.

    “Linking to circumvention software is considered ‘trafficking’ in violation of the DMCA where, as here, the party responsible for the link (a) knows that the offending material is on the linked site, (b) knows that the linked material is circumvention technology, and (c) maintains the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology,” the company explains, citing 17 U.S. Code § 1201 .

    Takedown Notice Targets Lockpick

    A second notice targets a piece of software known as Lockpick. This circumvention tool bypasses Nintendo’s security (Technological Protection Measures, or TPM) on the Switch console, providing access to cryptographic keys, including product keys, which are then decrypted and extracted.

    This allows pirated Switch games to be played on modified consoles or if users prefer, on emulators like Yuzu. Nintendo states that Lockpick is illegal under 17 U.S.C. §1201 and those who facilitate access to it, under the conditions previously outlined for SigPatches, similarly traffic in circumvention software, contrary to the DMCA.

    These won’t be the last notices of their type from Nintendo and another Yuzu-style lawsuit can’t be ruled out either. In an article published by Ars earlier this week, the developers behind apparent Yuzu successor ‘Suyu’ outlined a few of their lawsuit-avoidance strategies.

    After confirming that Suyu is pronounced “sue-you (wink, wink)” the strategy as outlined doesn’t really contain anything that might discourage a fairly litigious Nintendo even slightly. Having read the Contributor License Agreement , it can’t be ruled out that the people behind this have a dark sense of humor.

    Nintendo’s notices are available here and here

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 11 March - 16:22

    Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

    Enlarge / Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit? (credit: Suyu)

    Last week, the developers behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu took down their GitHub and web presence in the face of a major lawsuit from Nintendo . Now, a new project built from the Yuzu source code, cheekily named Suyu , has arisen as "the continuation of the world's most popular, open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu."

    Despite the name—which the project's GitHub page notes is "pronounced 'sue-you' (wink, wink)"—the developers behind Suyu are going out of their way to try to avoid a lawsuit like the one that took down Yuzu.

    "Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of," contributor and Discord moderator Sharpie told Ars in a recent interview. "There are multiple plans and possibilities for what to do next. Things are still being organized and planned."

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