Someone tell the creator of Girls Gone Wild.

I don’t think Joe Francis is going to be the good guy in this scenario.

anyone could read the code and understand how it works

“Anyone” is doing some heavy lifting here.

I hope he’s doing well. Thanks to the code he started, I’m on the Fediverse in the first place.

Okay.

You may notice that OP never provided a link to the instance. It’s not an advertisement, it’s a warning.

There was some Michael Jackson rhythm game for the DS that would, when it detected it was a pirated copy, replace all the normal midi instruments with vuvuzelas.

Arkham Asylum would disable Batman’s glider ability, making pirates plummet to their deaths unexpectedly. Somebody reported this “bug” on the developer’s forums, and a dev replied back “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code” before explaining that it was an intentional anti-piracy hook.

One of the ARMA games (2 or 3, I think) would start playing bugles at random intervals and would make your guns’ accuracy slowly get worse over time.

Some developers are pretty damn clever at it lmao

There was no special chip on the cartridge either, not sure where you heard that from.

Hmm, I may be conflating or misremembering some details, possibly involving the Earthbound Zero prototype cartridges that were floating around for a while. It’s been a long time, but I do distinctly remember that very early in SNES emulation on PC, that there was a bit of a struggle getting Earthbound (Mother 3) to pass the piracy checks, though every emulator for the last ~20 years handles it just fine now.

It may have been a different Nintendo console that did a voltage check. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t just make that up out of nowhere. Now it’s gonna drive me crazy figuring out what I’m trying to remember. :(

Earthbound is notoriously difficult to emulate accurately, because the cartridge had a unique chip on it used to detect if the code was running on an authentic cart, for piracy detection. The game will run a check on this chip to read its voltage; if it’s not at the correct reading or if it returns a null value, the game would know it was running on a bootleg cartridge.

What it did then was kinda sinister. It didn’t stop you from playing the game. But it GREATLY increased the spawn rate of enemies, making the game significantly harder. Then, if you managed to make it through the antipiracy hard mode and get all the way to the final boss, the game would intentionally crash itself as soon as the battle begins, and it deleted your save file. You couldn’t finish the game. It let you get 99.99% of the way there, uphill, and then says “get bent” and wipes all your progress.

So does this mean it’s in a state where people can start hosting their own instances and begin federating yet?

I thought CalcKey renamed themselves to Firefish, and then development on the whole project stopped? I know that Sharkey is a popular fork that still seems to be in development.

You can, it’s just not the most streamlined process. If you’re federated and you can find your instance’s copy of the thread, you can generally reply to Mastodon comments just fine.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s not just an Mbin thing. I’m almost positive Lemmy can do it, too.

Music and analytics are huge news. Those, alone, bring Loops much closer to being a viable platform for users who take content creation/reach seriously.

"All means all.

Not always. For instance if you have NSFW filtered, in which case “all” means “most”.

I feel like you’ve missed the point entirely.

PDSes and relays exist at the whim of Bluesky’s corporate entity. Having all of the endpoints on the network controlled by a single agent is what makes Bluesky centralized. If Bluesky decided so, your server can be removed from their network and is functionally useless at that point. They decide who is and is not allowed to be a part of Bluesky.

For contrast, no such governing body exists with ActivityPub networks. Nobody can decide whether or not an instance should be removed from the network, they can only choose whether or not to federate with that instance. If you wanted to truly silence a Lemmy instance, for example, it would take the cooperation of all the major Lemmy admins to defederate, and is an entirely democratic process as a result.

EDIT: To clarify, ATProto is not what is centralized, “Bluesky” the platform utilizing ATProto, is what’s centralized.

Or Star Trek movies.

I couldn’t find the rabbit on Friendica’s website, but I did find it here: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_mascots#Flaxy_O’Hare

You’re right, it’s awful lol.

What’s crazy is that all I really want out of a social platform is 2010’s Facebook. That was perfect. I was keeping in touch with friends and staying updated with their lives. I want that back so bad.

I’m not sure about the Switch 2, but with the Switch 1, hardware bricking was very possible. There’s a chip on the Switch 1 with a series of fuses, which intentionally burn out after after certain firmware updates. There’s a finite number of fuses (500+, I believe), based on the update schedule Nintendo had planned for the console, and the number of burnt fuses needs to match the firmware version you’re on, otherwise you can’t downgrade the firmware. If Nintendo wanted to, they could target a device to receive several “dummy” updates to burn the remaining fuses, effectively blocking any further firmware updates.

I ended up digging up my old Switch 1 box after reading this story, and it’s packaged very similarly. It was screen-up, with nothing covering it but a plastic baggie and the cardboard layer of the box. Though it was slightly more recessed, there wasn’t much stopping anything that would’ve punctured the box from damaging the screen on that model, either.

I think the lack of any major packaging issues from the Switch 1, and that there aren’t reports of other mass damages on the Switch 2 outside of this particular store, should tell us that the packaging is fine. Not ideal (clearly), but fine for 99.999% of units shipped. I can’t imagine that they didn’t do stress-testing on the packaging designs before shipping and accounted for being kicked around in a FedEx truck, but I doubt they accounted for somebody deliberately puncturing the packaging.