Ironically, criminal damage has its origins in the Frame-Breaking
Act of 1812, carrying the death penalty, and designed to stem the
rising tide of Luddites. Today companies like Nintendo, Microsoft and
Sony are the Luddites.
Because the damage is permanent, to "tangible property", and "without
lawful excuse" (and please don't knee-jerk to arguing "they can do
what they want because you agreed to it" - you didn't and they
can't), I'd think there's a very good case for criminal damage as
distinct action from any computer misuse recourse.
The argument needs to made, not on behalf of the users as a class
action, but on behalf of another stakeholder - the environment. Every
time a company makes and sells products that can be "bricked" they
contribute to e-waste (see [1][2] if this issue isn't yet on your
radar - it's something every hacker should be aware of).
I have faith that smart people in European politics genuinely get
this merging problem, and we have the courage, time and willingness to
bring new legislation or trade restrictions that would make it
impossible to sell such products in Europe. Even better I would like
to see Microsoft made to pay the cleanup costs.
Like if you want to sell illicit XBoxes, it's on you to ensure that the thing can't be rendered inoperable by a third-party software update, it's not the third-party's responsibility to account for your hardware when they do software updates.
Doing software updates that brick tampered hardware is harder to make a sarcastic argument about.
Why can't I tamper with hardware I bought and paid for? It's not theirs to brick, whatever the justification.
I hate that the idea that you rent stuff from companies, instead of buying and owning, is now so ingrained that people defend actively destroying someone's equipment remotely.
We can stop buying electronic Cryptexes, or we can force companies to stop making them.
but from a realistic perspective, the only way to uphold the sanctity of online play, and enforce IP rights, is to have a secure stack, from boot loader, physically integrating the encryption keys with the hypervisor, and to render anything else an inoperable brick.
Lest we have cheaters in console games.
I do agree to a degree, I think "offline mode" should have a legal basis to stand on, but I also like to know that the others in the game are not cheating.
and that is impossible without an inaccessible black box, the Xbox, which is what we bought.
> but I also like to know that the others in the game are not cheating. and that is impossible without an inaccessible black box, the Xbox
Ignoring the fact that reverse engineering is just a matter or time and pressure, eventually people will start hooking up image recognition auto-aimers to the input/output of these devices... what then? do we enter some kind of minority report era of gaming where you have to get your eyeballs replaced with "unhackable" ones - hope they don't burn out your retinas in an update. Point is, a black box is actually not a complete solution - as long as you can play the game, there will always be a way to cheat.
There are various online FOSS games that are completely open and hackable, where it's very easy to download the source and literally set a condition in the make file to enable "wallhacks" (because that is in-fact a useful debugging feature - talking about ioq3 specifically)... those communities just deal with it the old fashioned way, new players get treated with more scrutiny, admins get good at recognising cheaters (most cheaters are not good at hiding it, and experienced players who would better conceal wall-hacking behaviour etc are less likely to want to play with hacks way anyway). It's far from bullet proof, but so are so called "black boxes" despite their cost to the user.
I'm not usually one to judge what others spend their time/energy/motivation on, but you may want to re-evaluate your priorities.
Is having a game with that level of "unhackability" - because lets be honest, there's no such thing as unhackability - really worth everything that would have to be given up, from right to repair, right to own your hardware, the ability to not arbitrarily be locked out of something you put money into because <you were injured and lost an eye|your hardware broke and misread something|You develop a lazy eye| n number of anything else>?
If it's that important to you, play a game where cheaters are dealt with the old fashioned way. I'm ready for a break from corp hosted game servers, give me a server I can run myself.
Some people want to play games, and enjoy themselves in a competitive environment, and pay for the privilege.
If that doesn't appeal to you, that is your priority.
Don't like it?
dont buy a fuckin xbox.
telling others they shouldn't enjoy a game because "muh hardware" is literally a borderline bad-faith statement, and a shallow attempt at virtue signaling.
buy a computer to compute.
buy a console for an assurance of a fair playing enviroment.
you're confusing cryptography with corporate secrecy. Cryptography can be open (in terms of both specification and implementation - only keys need secrecy). This thread is about closed implementations, which is a different topic (even if those implementations happen to leverage cryptography)
how can you have open hardware, but promise fair play?
you cannot. this is the crux of the matter.
consoles dont have cheaters, PC games do.
consoles are locked, pc's are not.
these are separate ideas, that meet when players do: online.
the only way to hide the code to prevent cheating is to physically embalm it into the CPU, in a way that, if physically accessed, will break the machine, rendering the effort fruitless.
PC's are going that way, the way GPU's are containing more "black box" mechanisms themselves.
consoles were this way from the start, on purpose.
Consoles have less anti-cheat bypasses for a number of reasons, mostly related to obscurity, not security. The relative scarcity of gamers running homebrew-ed consoles makes developing bypasses of limited appeal. There's also a cultural difference, where gamers with an interest in mods, etc. will tend to gravitate toward PC as a platform, since it's a multi-use platform. There's still plenty of AC bypass on consoles, just significantly less.
A similar example outside of gaming is Linux as an OS platform: antivirus software isn't a big thing, despite Linux being continuously behind bigger desktop OSes with their security mitigations - (e.g. things like strong ASLR). It's less of a concern, not because Linux is more secure, but just because desktop applications there aren't a large target market for malware, and because of large cultural differences in usage.
On the other hand, AC bypasses on PC happen not because of a lack of console-esque hardware mitigations, but simply because software AC is not particularly advanced (yet). Popular AC solutions tend to employ non-engine-specific solutions that match known cheat signatures - bypasses inject cheat dlls and hope they don't get caught "too often", rather than using in-engine verification of non-cheat behaviours. I think this is primarily just an issue with software maturity and likely to solve itself over time. The general non-gaming software space has gone through similar evolution, whereby we used to rely heavily on signature matching on malware, and have evolved toward a more integrated "zero trust" approach to mitigating threats - signature-matching still exists for things like software-composition analysis, but in general is not a primary mitigation strategy for runtime security.
> the only way to hide the code to prevent cheating is to physically embalm it into the CPU, in a way that, if physically accessed, will break the machine, rendering the effort fruitless.
> PC's are going that way, the way GPU's are containing more "black box" mechanisms themselves.
Hiding code has historically never succeeded in preventing anything. The trend toward black-box is about a combination of corporate IP protection, vendor lock-in (see also the Apple T2 SoCs) and almost certainly APT actors (disclaimer: speculation). It's not about security, least of all anti-cheat.
I don't know why you think console games don't have cheaters. COD on the Xbox 360 was rampant with cheating, including custom games that gave you huge amounts of XP
They have learned from past mistakes with the Xbox 360. You can't mod the Xbox One like you could the Xbox 360. The person you're responding too is one of the most knowledgeable on the subject.
No. First, the primary culprit is who designs and deploys a mechanism
to do harm. If I set a lethal trap on my property with a sign saying
"Beware the 10,00 Volt mantrap", I am not excused when a burglar is
injured - even though they are breaking the law by trespass. Secondly,
it seems that the manufacturer gets to decide, arbitrarily and
post-facto (post-sale/agreement) what constitutes a "scammer".
Finally, with "e-fuses" you are setting a trap mechanism on my
property which I have purchased in fair expectation of my rights.
> it's on you to ensure that the thing can't be rendered inoperable by
a (third-party?) software update
I believe in many places like the US, it could be breaking the law to
ensure that, since reverse engineering and circumvention of
protections would be required.
Of course you're right that there's a sort of moral responsibility on
people not to vandalise serviceable goods such that they become waste.
But people throw away perfectly working technology every day.
If by "third party" (I think we would use "first party" here) you mean
the vendor/manufacturer when you say:
> it's not the (vendors) responsibility to account for your hardware
when they do software updates.
then I heartily disagree. It's certainly their moral responsibility,
and, unless they offer owners a reasonable way to disable updates, it
ought to be their legal responsibility too.
But that's not what's at issue. Otherwise your argument makes it seem
like the update "accidentally" damaged the owners property. Quite the
contrary, the vendor is sending out updates designed to cause harm,
and in full knowledge and punitive intent. Am I mistaken?
> Doing software updates that brick tampered hardware is harder to
make a sarcastic argument about.
I don't follow you. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit and discouraged
per HN guidelines in favour of arguing in "good faith".
> it's not the third-party's responsibility to account for your hardware when they do software updates
What you're describing here is markedly different than what the gp is referring to: intent matters (determining intent may be difficult in some cases, granted, but it's crystal clear in these specific examples)
I have a condition that I cannot listen to media about things I know too much about.
For this reason, I cannot watch/listen to darknet diaries, or a host of other topics. The physical cringe of wanting to correct the record is unbearable, but from what I heard, they are very accurate and have done their research.
Microsoft brags about "pwning" them to this day...in their own Terms of Service, in their enforcement blog posts, and other places.
per gentlemen's agreement (something the soulless, kakfa-esque fucks at M$ will never understand), I can't elaborate further...
but if you ever find a 0-day / bug, don't pursue a bug bounty.
They will put a bounty on you, and squash you like the bug.
Nintendo threatening modders legally is literal child's play compared to the literal mob tactics MS and Activision used against what they perceived as financial or PR threats.
> Nintendo threatening modders legally is literal child's play compared to the literal mob tactics MS and Activision used against what they perceived as financial or PR threats.
I am sure you are aware of what Sony did around 10 years ago to certain people regarding the PS3 and its exploits.
> but if you ever find a 0-day / bug, don't pursue a bug bounty.
It is still elementary days but there has been some controversy among researchers that in reality John Deere's bug-bounty program is being a PR stunt in order to cover up bugs and stall disclosure. So I guess people are slowly waking up to the reality of things not going their way.
refusing to elaborate your argument because of some vague "gentlemen's agreement" is a terrible idea. I dont suggest anyone listen to this guy's advice, trust me I would tell you why but I've made a promise and we pinky-sweared!
Not naming and shaming enables terrible people to do continue doing terrible things. I've never understood (unless there is an NDA, but sometimes even then..)
Companies don't give a damn about REAL laws if they can pay their way out, let alone 'gentleman's agreements'. You are personifying something that will take every chance it gets to screw you over if it's worth it.
Michael Crichton, (as above quoted) didn't get to feel the pain of having the opportunity to correct the newspaper article, as we "do".
That's the pain I feel when facing this new instance of the affect, in a more palatable form:
I could comment on the internet - but knowing my comments will, despite immense reverence, or correctness, be ignored by the silent masses, turns the effect into an affliction.
The man reading the newspaper can mutter the facts under his breath. Had he yell louder, still, nothing will change - his breakfast partner bemoaned.
The miniscule chance of my comment correcting the record pains me. Had I yell louder, maybe someone will take note. But I can't - because they won't, and the possibility of my pertinent, small chance of making a difference gets irrevocably distant, as an algorithm pushes the topic of collective interest to someone else's disdain.
i was explaining the feeling. it's the same shared in the sibling comment, but it is basically more emotionally draining because of the personal involvement, with guilty tinges of self-resentment
Could you switch to attack mode and publish your own story/blog/podcast? This way you wouldn't need to react to an existing article but present the story from afresh.
I am concerned with 3 letter agencies, but still entertain the idea of maintaining two, unrelated, uncorrelatable, and hopefully forever separate, internet identities.
Like an internet-mullet. Business in my name, party behind an alias.
The interesting bit would be writing and maintaining two distinct sites/corpus.
It is generally recommended (OPSEC Bible rule 3) to never publish, however, I have more stories to tell now than future crimes to commit, so, one day, yes, I would like to.
That is the best thing I've read in the last two years.
The internet undermines a lot of this though from a technical perspective. If you are interested in things technically (building PCs! Gaming! Development!) you read the sources from better tech sites and it is not as bad as back in the day when you had newspapers and empty pretty talking heads on CNN. Well, unless you're in the echo chamber as described here...
The other thing is just that mainstream media is just AWFUL at science and technology, because journalists inherit the general anti-scientist bias of the general population and humanities domains. On "people affairs" they usually have sociology and psychology and poli sci background and instincts... they are reporters of human structures and motivations.
So I suppose it is true that they have better reporting of the affairs of non-scientists to some degree.
Just because a reporter covering some fluffy science piece might things wrong does not mean a different reporter, in a different department, covering a completely different subject, got things wrong (to the same degree, or at all.) That "hypothesis" is a genetic fallacy.
It also doesn't distinguish between reporting ("Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain"), analysis ("Dr Bob says wet streets cause rain; is this accurate?") and opinion ("In the opinion of the columnist/author, Dr. Bob is an idiot who thinks wet streets cause rain! This is just yet another example of the violence inherent in the system, decaying the moral fabric of our system."
It also doesn't account for the Dunning-Kruger effect, or on Joe Q Public's near total ignorance on the subject of observational biases and dependency on anecdotes and personal experience.)
That "hypothesis" leverages Joe thinking some reporter covering global warming is "fake news" when it's been a cold, snowy week...to get Joe to think that reporting about current events or politics is equally "fake."
A reminder that a reporter who writes "Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain" is not publishing fake news. It's reporting the fact that there is someone who said/thinks that. That is different from presenting their statement as fact.
The hypothesis doesn’t say that all reporters always get things wrong. The point is that we can read reporting on something we’re very familiar about and notice how flawed it is, but when we read other reporting from the same source we just assume it’s correct. Whether or not it actually is correct is beside the point - it’s about the assumptions we make internally.
| A reminder that a reporter who writes "Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain" is not publishing fake news. It's reporting the fact that there is someone who said/thinks that. That is different from presenting their statement as fact.
Cool well it sounds like they are reporting something interesting or truthful so it's fake news in my book.
The "hypothesis" it's about us reading, not them writing.
We don't notice how little we know on topics we don't fully grasp, but when we notice them in topics we are more experienced about we don't do anything, we just change topic.
It's crazy to hear that story told back to me. I wasn't part of the core of it, but everything as intense as xbox-underground has a huge fringe. I was in that fringe. Listening to the background of all that stuff i was a part of is very cool. I remember the leaks, the return scams, the carding, and the circulation of password dumps. It was a crazy time.
That they built a working Xbox One (before it had even been announced) just by looking at the spec sheets etc. and buying the parts on Newegg is incredible.
I fondly remember flashing my DVD drive on my 360 when I was 15 to play Saints Row (I had an ITCH for a GTA like game). Back then I was scared shitless of possibly bricking it. Now looking back, I laugh because of how trivial the mod was. Pretty sure this was a major contributing factor to me eventually perusing tech in my career.
When I saw that I could fill up my friends list on Xbox live by changing a few variables on the auto aim configuration I learned early on that computers are magic to most people, And if you know how they work that makes you a wizard
I have my bricked retail sitting on my desk, it's my second favorite paperweight.
After CON files were being resigned with 00000' keys, they tried and failed to maintain a "known bad" list of RSA private keypairs that were known to be resigning modified content.
after that patchwork hack failed, because of the spread of CON resigners, they gave up on that effort. You can still find blacklisted keypairs in the NAND, if you looked around.
but my retail was't exactly unmodified, so I was bending the definition of "retail", here...
but yes, they bricked retail consoles posing as xDev and pNET kits.
There are things called fuses on AVRs that cannot be changed by running code but can be set and unset multiple times by an external programmer. These are apparently different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efuse describes the mechanism of action: "eFuses can be made out of silicon or metal traces. In both cases, they work (blow) by electromigration, the phenomenon that electric flow causes the conductor material to move."
Aha, I was under the impression that it was simply and literally a question of passing too much current through a conducting trace internally, causing the internal resistance to overheat it, thus melting it. Perhaps that would be a method too unreliable or something. Perhaps I should read the wikipedia entry before speculating :).
You're not wrong, this was how fuses were originally implemented in their earliest forms in the early days of integrated circuits.
A common technique was using diodes. Zener diodes are normally used to suppress overvoltage, but they're only useful for transients, and easily destroyed by a sustained, constant overvoltage due to excessive power dissipation. This is a serious problem in surge protector designs. "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade". Since they fail as a short circuit, early chip designers exploited this property as a one-time programmable fuse for factory calibration.
Quote Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Robert A. Pease.
> As mentioned earlier, a diode tends to fail by becoming a short circuit when overpowered, and zeners cannot absorb as much power as you would expect from short pulses. How dreadful; but, can IC designers serendipitously take advantage of this situation? Yes!
> The Vos of an op amp usually depends on the ratio of its first-stage load resistors. IC designers can connect several zeners across various small fractions of the load resistor. When they measure the Vos, they can decide which zener to short out - or zap - with a 5-ms, 0.3- to 1.8-A pulse. The zener quickly turns into a low-impedance (= 1 Ω short), so that part of the resistive network shorts out, and the Vos is improved.
> In its LM108, National Semiconductor first used zener zapping, although Precision Monolithics (Santa Clara, CA) wrote about zener zapping first and used it extensively later on. Although zener zapping is a useful technique, you have to be sure that nobody discharges a large electrostatic charge into any of the pins that are connected to the zener zaps. If you like to zap zeners for fun and profit, you probably know that they really do make a cute lightning flash in the dark when you zap them. Otherwise, be careful not to hit zeners hard, if you don’t want them to zap and short out.
> These zener zaps are also becoming popular in digital ICs under the name of “vertical fuses” or, more correctly, “anti-fuses.” If an IC designer uses platinum silicide instead of aluminum metallization for internal connections, the diode resists zapping.
Nowadays they are implemented as a write-only EEPROM or Flash memory (and can even be overwritten in some designs using a special programmer), but the name "fuse" is still used for historical reasons, and to reflect their software-irreversible nature.
Also, fun fact: since fuses are EEPROMs, they're vulnerable to potential data corruption just like any other EEPROMs. If a fuse bit ever "gets loose", it can brick many chips since their boot configurations are no longer correct. It's especially problematic for space applications. This is also used for chip cracking - you can remove the "program read-protection" bit in some microcontrollers by exposing the fuse portion of the decapped silicon die under UV light. BTW, if you ever see a computer that reports an "Intel Core i6" processor model, it's likely a corrupted fuse bit (yes, this was a real incident).
That seems odd, can't high heat cause enough of an "annealing" effect to allow the charge to leak out and reset the cell? I don't know how much heating you could safely manage on a single point on the die but this would seem to be within the realm of feasible if you could uncover the portion of the die without completely destroying the packaging. If it's a plastic encapsulated IC and something like QFP where you can get at the die surface from the top then a laser could probably be used to etch through the plastic and locally heat the memory cell without trashing the chip.
This is commonly used for microcontroller reverse-engineering and cracking - you can remove the "program read-protection" bit in some microcontrollers by exposing the fuse portion of the decapped die under UV light. That being said, in all instances of fuse manipulations I'm aware of, the chips are always decapped. I never heard of a non-destructive technique (asides from fault injection), so I'm not sure how practical is your proposal - though I won't be surprised if it exists. But make sure the chip doesn't depend on a critical bit to boot (e.g. external clock enable) before you try - indiscriminately erasing all the fuse bits can brick chips - you don't want that to happen.
Also, as a matter of fact, corrupted fuse bits are certainly responsible for some hardware failures in the field. If a fuse bit ever "gets loose", it can brick many chips since their boot configurations are no longer correct. Fuses are usually designed with a negligible failure rate in normal use, still, defective chips are occasionally made. Also, if you're going to use it in a high-temperature industry application or a radiative space environment, you definitely need to be careful.
I'd imagine you wouldn't necessarily need to decap the entire chip, just the small part of the die with the fuses. The Xbox 360 Kamikaze hack involved drilling into the package to hit one of the bond wires so coming up with a way to use a laser engraver or just a UV light source sounds plausible. As for erasing all fuse bits bricking the chip, aside from the headache of reverse engineering it surely those fuse bits are all wiped clean when the chip is manufactured. Wouldn't there be some method over a JTAG interface to set the relevant bits if you knew which ones were for some key and which were there for platform configuration values? It might not work in circuit but I'd kind of expect that to be programmed after packaging so surely it's brought out on some pin.
> aside from the headache of reverse engineering it surely those fuse bits are all wiped clean when the chip is manufactured. Wouldn't there be some method over a JTAG interface to set the relevant bits [...]
Correct. It's a pain in the bum. I might add that Fairphone has an official procedure to flash the original rom and re-lock the bootloader, I tried it with the FP3 at least and that worked on the first try.
I unintentionally blow the eFuse on the Qualcomm chips I'm developing for, all the time .. its very frustrating and surprisingly easy to do with their tools.
I'm ideologically opposed to using this feature 'productively', but it definitely makes it simpler (cheaper) for the company to maintain installed base versions...
Why and how does it make stuff easier for the company? Can't the company just... not support older versions of the software?
What's the difference in burden on the company between a user who just declines updates for years and a user who installs upgrades but then downgrades again? Surely the customer support response in all cases is "install the latest version"?
The cability provides for a lot more than blocking software downgrades e.g. setting the boot signing key and then locking it with an efuse so only matching signed images can be booted or the inverse, enable unsigned custom firmware but blow a fuse to mark the device has been allowed to run custom software (which may impact hardware DRM systems during boot).
I already understood that it allows companies to be user-hostile, that's not what I'm asking about. I'm asking how it makes it simpler/cheaper for the company to maintain installed base versions.
Because it allows them to lock in a signing key and manage custom user images. Regardless if you feel that is user hostile or not it does make it simpler/cheaper for the company to manage the installed versions. The only thing they ever need to validate and support is for is upgrading to their images the way they have specified.
So companies could simply not "validate and support" custom user images as general company policy, but instead they resort to design and manufacture chips with the company policy and financial model embedded in the hardware. I think GP is asking why does this make any economical sense?
You have to take into account the fact that a lot of Qualcomm's chips are intended for military/industrial complex applications. They're not just a consumer-chip producer.
Having an installed user base always on the latest firmware version cuts down on support costs. Its a hidden cost but a real one: when a user calls customer service with a problem, you're losing money - anything that reduces the amount of time spent debugging the issue, is a win. This means that if the support engineers can rely on the fact that users will always be pushed forward in software releases, they can focus on contemporary issues/uses cases rather than having to maintain - for years, often - an archaic list of prior versions/faults/issues.
Its not just the case that these eFuses' prevent "ownership" of the firmware by the user - though that is a consideration - its more that, by disallowing downgrades to prior firmware releases, a mechanism is in place that organizationally promotes improvement in the product quality. Well, that's the theory - that the latest OS is always an improvement - and believe me, we software engineers work hard to make sure that is the case. It occasionally doesn't go according to plan and users feel compelled - for whatever reasons they decide - to downgrade to a prior version - but as a software engineer, I much prefer to operate, knowing that my end users will always be encouraged to have the latest and greatest (hopefully) version of the firmware.
Support is a sunk cost. Supporting older versions is a self-imposed force multiplier of that cost.
Why can't iPhone users simply sideload apps on their phones? Apple could make it easy for them to do so but instead the company encodes policy into their hardware and software. They do this likely because the support burden of allowing the alternative path is too high in their calculus and would rather avoid it altogether.
> There are 256 bits in the set of ODM_RESERVED fuses, and there are 8 ODM_RESERVED. This allows for 32 fuses, or 32 future FW versions (provided they burn a fuse on every major release).
32? Is that it? So if Nintendo want to push more than 32 updates, they either need to not blow any more fuses, or stop using the fuses when they've all gone? Wouldn't they be totally useless then?
Not a console player, can someone explain why consumers want to downgrade their console(s)? I Googled a bit and it seems people would like to have more vulnerable to hack their devices, but why did they upgrade in the first place? Is it forced upgrade?
Nearly forced. once the console downloads the update, it will be applied automatically upon reboot.
The alternative is to never connect to WiFi, ever, and some do that.
Generally, consumers would want to downgrade because older versions have vulnerabilities that are fixed in newer versions. these vulnerabilities allow console owners to do what they want with their hardware, and gaming communities have shown Nintendo time and time again that if it is possible to use game hardware for game piracy, it will be widely used for that purpose.
Those of us who want a neat standardized hardware platform to hack on without pirating anything are in the noise floor for companies like Nintendo, so we have no representation among neither pirates nor the console manufacturer.
I've been out of "the scene" for many years now, but back in the day, I had a Flash Cart[0][1] so that I could have all (literally all...) the Nintendo DS games at hand. I was a naughty naughty pirate.
The flash cart also added some really neat features that were missing, such as: the ability to take screenshots, ability to save and restore a game at any point, ability to load cheats like infinite ammo and such.
Nintendo was/is at war with cart users and any update to a DS with a flash cart stood a good chance of either killing the flash cart or rendering it inoperable until a new firmware was released for the flash cart (which may never happen). There's a long and great history here. And if you want to know more, the GBATemp wiki[3] is a great starting point.
I caught on to their game after I bought the 16 bit console. Haven't touched nintendo since. They think they own the second hand market, you couldn't even buy a second hand game without nintendo wanting a cut of the sale. Every console is missing some feature that earlier had, and then they add that later and sell you the same console, just this time with an audio port! I forget all the details though, haven't really thought about nintendo or other consoles in many years.
What are you talking about? Where would Nintendo get the cut of a used game sale? Especially in the 16 bit era? Arguably Microsoft was closest to do this with the whole Xbox One debacle.
Is there a feature that the Game Boy had that the Game Boy Color lacked? Nope. GBA did drop the infrared port that was barely used by GBC games but my PS3 also can't use my PS1 memory cards nor can an Xbox One use a 360 memory card or the HD-DVD drive. And Series X lacks Kinect or HDMI in support. Poorly used or outdated features often go away.
The Game Boy Advance SP removed the traditional TRS headphone jack and replaced it with a custom connector (which was later re-used for the DS's power port). An adapter to allow the use of standard TRS headphones was an optional extra purchase.
Nintendo is a public company. They are sort of supposed to look out for the shareholder, you know?
Many of their new games are still good.
And, of course, there's plenty of competition in both hardware capable of running games and in games themselves, so it's not like Nintendo has a monopoly. (And it's pretty well known up-front to customers that Nintendo likes to keep a tight grip. So it's not like people don't know what's coming.)
In fact, that is exactly what Nintendo is doing and what the fine article is about. Bricking a device is an effective way of prying it from the customers' hands.
The Amazon kindle os does not allow downgrades, not sure if it’s using fuses or not.
In that case it isn’t about access to pirated content either—people want to be able to modify it for basic features the company has neglected to provide.
Not about a console, but sometimes manufacturers or developers change the UI of the system or valued apps.
Examples:
Sony removed Linux OtherOS from the Playstation 3 firmware because even though it didn't have a GPU driver, they were worried it could be leveraged to do whatever. There is no value in running Linux on a PS3 today, but there was once.
Apple notably between iOS 6 and 7 changed their design language from skeuomorphic to flat white "metro" style. If you don't like staring at a glaring white screen, too bad. But more importantly, when it comes to drivers, esp. graphics, they can introduce eyestrain if something isn't as good. Issues with sound, networking, etc. for all sorts of platforms. The Intel Management Engine which is inside your PC (AMD has a counterpart) is a another CPU and another OS that you're not allowed to shut off (or access). Sometimes firmware updates will come out preventing you from rolling back to a previous version that didn't have a bug with the hardware in this or that because of the precious Intel ME backdoor.
Don't know about Switch, but I recently sold a PS4 Pro on eBay and I got a ton of requests to please at the firmware version because they wanted a particular old version that can be rooted
You can still play if you don't upgrade. You only run into an issue with new titles that require a higher firmware. But considering new firmwares can add new features like the ability to boost the CPU clock during loading you also can't reasonably expect them to ensure every game works on every firmware.
If you already have a game and it runs today on the current firmware you can at least keep playing it offline by just skipping the system or game update.
This also applies to routers with custom firmware. Sometimes models manufactured after a certain date will already contain the patches from the factory.
Typically a vulnerability is found on an older version of the software that can be used to attain kernel level access, and a very simple hack is needed in later versions to force an upgrade to an older version of the software.
To prevent the use of older versions of the software, later versions of the software will burn fuses as they surpass versions, preventing them from ever being used again on that device.
Thanks, yeah this is pretty much forced play. I guess it is also possible (technically) to modify the code of the game to remove the firmware requirement, if it is just a version check?
They're doing some cryptographic operations to prevent modified games from being loaded (probably a signature, but I'm not 100% sure). One of the uses for a rooted switch (or any other console I suppose) other than piracy is to play modded games. You can find youtube videos of people doing all sorts of crazy challenges in popular games and many of these challenges require modding the game.
If you think burnable fuses to prevent downgrading is interesting, wait until you see the black magic that Apple cooked up to prevent iPhone downgrades.
No fuses there - just an incredibly complex mess of nonces, digitally signed tickets, and secret generator keys.
Apple internal iOS devices used by engineers are "dev-fused".
This hardware configuration opens up the device to some extent, allowing Apple engineers more latitude when developing software.
There have been articles saying that Apple lets some third party security people use these devices.
I can see how giving that access that might make sense, but I don't know if that article is true.
Dev-fused devices would also be very useful to Apple adversaries like NSO in developing hacks so I would actually expect Apple to continue to keep tight control over them.
> Apple internal iOS devices used by engineers are "dev-fused".
We at Samsung use a similar mechanism called Anti Rollback Prevention (ARP). It is a switch that can be enabled for normal devices if the employees using them are given an approval by their boss. Only a handful of employees have access to it, and the switch turns off by itself after a defined period.
Apple does not provide third parties access to developer fused devices. They do have a "security research device" program that allows nominally more access to the device, kind of equivalent to most jailbreaks these days, but definitely falling short of a development fusing or what something like checkra1n would get you.
Correct me if I'm wrong but those require an internet connection, right? I think Nintendo can't use online codesigning because (certain?) game carts have firmware upgrades that the game itself requires. Nintendo wants the user to be able to install those firmware upgrades offline, like if some kid plays a game for the first time on a road trip or plane ride.
Gads, don't get me started on SPI software upgrades on the Mac Book Pro. Serious cramp in the calvins. Forced non-down-gradable (sp?) OS because of that.
Could you expand on how this causes problems? As far as I'm aware, this has never prevented e.g. downgrading to an older version of macOS. (I assume I would know because I downgrade everything to OS X 10.9.)
A 2012 Macbook Air, a 2014 Macbook Air, and a 2014 Macbook Pro. The 2012 Macbook Air was upgraded to Mojave at one point before it ran Mavericks. I admittedly don't know what OS the two 2014 Macs were running before I bought them in 2020.
Hackers eventually found a way to downgrade but you would not be able to connect to Xbox live. It did allow you to hack the Xbox and play pirated games and homebrew.
You could connect, you would just instantly be banned because the challenge/response pair didn't match, starting with the bright-white dashboard in Feb of '11.
the discovery of the RGH, reset glitch hack, aided in the reversing the early stages of the bootloader, allowing a small, incredibly talented, incredibly missed individuals to reverse the firmware/NAND challenges and correctly respond to the challenge.
Of course these stories are better off told. It's very interesting from a historical and technological standpoint to document these things before they're lost/forgotten
The internet is a small place, and the "it's just a game" defense didn't prevent 17 year olds from catching federal felony charges then, and it sure wouldn't now, barely out of the 10-year statute of limitations.
Between the statute of limitations now being a farce, and the young gentleman who made it out unscathed legally are now battling employment, credit, and security check issues... maybe the stories of SIM swapping, SWATing, social engineering, doxing, DDoS, bribery, conspiracy, nation-state actors, treason, and other miscellany that plagued our late childhood with paranoid fever dreams....be better off untold, at least until more of us are confirmed retired or safe from petty retribution.
Jack Rhysider (Darknet Diaries guy) has done a bunch of interviews with people in your circumstance- they use pseudonyms and keep certain things vague.
You mention wanting to "correct the record" in an earlier comment- why not DM this guy and tell him what you're telling us? https://twitter.com/JackRhysider
Accounts and online services have added a new dimension to hardware hacking, and it's been interesting to see automation similar to what you're mentioning be heavy handed with little recourse. For example automated anti-cheat systems sending out false-positives and banning people based on their hardware IDs, removing access to digital libraries potentially worth hundreds of dollars, yet support rarely has the tools to help. Guilty according to the code, and no-one to hear your counter-argument.
For now that's an issue for games and online services, but everything is getting digitized. Imagine getting banned from your EV's online services and losing authentication to start your car.
You could connect to Xbox live if you had one of the undetectable modchips with a switch that allowed you to flop between regular and modded firmware. Even with modded firmware you could go on live for a while, even cheat at multiplayer games flying around and stuff until you got banned.
ironically, the modchips were only "undetectable" because MS never thought a KV (the keyvault containing the RSA keypair tied to that mobo serial) would not match the motherboard it ran on.
The first players to use a xenon keyvault on a jasper mobo got away with it for years just because MS overlooked a decent assumption.
Well this might not be entirely true. Hackers found a way to downgrade the Xbox 360 after fuses were blown but you would not be able to use online functions with your home brew or pirated games unless they developed a dual kernel boot and used a normal kernel and no home brew to go back online. https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-25-efuse-successfully-blown...
Nintendo is probably still feeling burned by the NDS.
It was a fantastic console, and fairly open. It had two ARM CPUs (one per screen), and there was a terrific homebrew scene. Some of my first embedded C programs were for the NDS lite. It had ebook readers, paint programs, a toy Linux port, the whole 9 yards.
But, that openness also made it open to piracy. The way you loaded code onto the system was through "flashcarts". They were shaped like game cartridges, but they had a microSD slot on the top and an internal MCU which often ran a firmware that could load game ROMs from the filesystem, and even add features like cheats and save-states.
The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games. Developers were dropping off the platform well before the 3DS came out, and Nintendo started to pay much more attention to DRM.
It was sort of a sad situation. The ability to write your own software for a handheld game console was amazing in the 2000s, but that openness ended up suffocating the platform.
> The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games. Developers were dropping off the platform well before the 3DS came out, and Nintendo started to pay much more attention to DRM.
Do you have a source for this? All the data I've seen shows piracy really doesn't impact content creators in a meaningful way.
... the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them. [1]
Curious why you think this applies to the NDS but not in general.
“We definitely found that piracy was a significant factor in our Nintendo DS development efforts. When we approached publishers to propose potential game projects with them, most of them brought up their concerns about piracy at some point. Many publishers even cited the issue of piracy as a specific reason why they decided to back away from our game project, especially with it being an original intellectual property concept. The publishers’ fear was that, in a climate where piracy is commonplace, original games and new mechanics are far less likely to be successful than games based on previously successful mechanics, established licenses, sequels, and sports.”
That page seems to summarize as "publishers worry about piracy, so they reject original content and force sequels/sports/crap" (... that makes zero sense to me, but to continue) plus "an original-content game maker will stop developing for the DS when publishers force sequels/ports/crap".
And they're all fearing the ecosystem decline that occurs when the publishers start forcing crap.
I mean... I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.
Some markets that have started to oust those gatekeepers seem to be doing fairly well, lending weight behind arguments that the gatekeepers are the real problem. Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades, as are video games in general (particularly on PC, where piracy has been even bigger for even longer).
I don't doubt that some things that are working with the current gatekeeping ecosystem will cease to exist if gatekeepers get less powerful. ... but I'm not sure those are things we should be keeping anyway. Sucks in the transition, to be sure, but in the long run?
It is still part of a very, very large shift in power away from the historical gatekeepers though (i.e. from "all-powerful overlords" to "anyone can sign up with any of the big DRM streaming platforms today, and there are moderately-sized others too"). Gatekeepers as a whole can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but they tend to turn into power-amassing despots given time. A bit of churn helps reset that to some degree.
I guess the main difference here is that historically (going back decades here) you had to use the gatekeepers to do things at literally any scale beyond handing out records by hand. They effectively controlled all physical sales, and physical sales were the only option. Now there are many more viable options, including stuff like bandcamp where there are few restrictions or costs of any kind. Gatekeepers of portions of a market will always exist, the difference is in how much power they wield over the entire marketplace.
Eh, if I stab a guy every time you touch a tomato it is literally true that "touching tomatoes causes death", but the sentence does leave out a crucial part of the mechanism - that it's less the tomato, and more me and my stabby knife.
I wouldn't take any publisher's opinion seriously. It's been proven that music piracy is _positively_ correlated with sales, yet the RIAA is still trying to stop youtube-dl from existing. I have to assume these pencil pushers in the game industry are equally ignorant, until hard data proves otherwise.
> It's been proven that music piracy is _positively_ correlated with sales
Which makes sense, things that sell well also are more likely to be pirated. Has it been shown that piracy causes sales to increase? I've looked around but I haven't found anything reliable.
There was one (not replicated) study suggesting that people who consumed more music tended to pirate more, but that's a correlation not a causation, and it doesn't follow that they would not have purchased or subscribed to even more music if the piracy option had not been available.
doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, especially when you are asking for their money. It may be a business, but it's till run by flawed humans whose irrational decisions will affect creators. So this perspective is important for a developer to know before pitching a platform.
I don't have any primary sources, but in a nutshell, the problem was ROM sites.
You could download every NDS game ever made, in every region, in a few days.
Small indie ROMs might be 2-16MiB, but the big Pokemon/etc games went up to 128MiB. With 8-64GiB microSD cards, you could fit a library of games into one cartridge.
Personally, I think that most of the people who pirated NDS games would never have paid for them, so there may not have been many lost sales. But I also can't deny that the small game developers got royally screwed, and IMO the 3DS may have suffered from a dearth of creative small devs.
All the people I knew that had a DS (3 friends) had bought an R4 (a cartridge that allows pirating games). One even never bought a single NDS game because of that!
This is of course "anecdotal evidence".
What is not anecdotal evidence are all the game console manufacturers spending millions to prevent piracy. It means that they estimate that piracy must at least cost them millions.
And whatever game console manufacturers are loosing due to piracy, it's costing gaming studios at least twice as much (due to the 30% - 70% revenue sharing model).
I had a similar experience as a child, it's really hard to oversell how easy it was to pirate games for the nds. The r4 was easily available for $20, and each game cost $35.
I know the internets favorite argument is "piracy doesn't hurt sales", but imagine a scenario where you go to McDonald's and they give you a choice at the registers, pay, or don't pay. Either way you get your meal. That's essentially how easy it was to pirate for the nds.
Does every download equal a sale? No. Do some people pirate instead of buy if they can? Of course.
> Does every download equal a sale? No. Do some people pirate instead of buy if they can? Of course.
It's actually even more nuanced than that. Someone might have a fixed budget that they're willing to spend each month on games. It doesn't matter what it is, just that it's relatively small. Also, they may not be buying games every month, but they will never spend more than that in a single month. If with that budget they can buy a very small number of games (maybe not even one!), more often than not they will not take the chance with any games and will simply try to pirate them. Is that a sale lost to piracy or not? It's hard to say, because they might or might not have purchased a game if it was impossible to pirate; it depends on whether it fits in their budget.
I really think the reason Steam pretty much solved piracy on the PC is because of the expectation of timed discounts. If right now a game is just outside your budget, you know that 6-12 months from now you'll be able to buy it at a significant discount, so if you're patient you don't need to bother with pirating it and you can just wait. Now, some people will still pirate just to be able to play immediately, but piracy is nowhere near as rampant as it used to be on PC. If Nintendo implemented similar policies on its stores (as opposed to trying to sell 30-year-old games for $5) it could solve piracy on its platforms in a day, without resorting to this cat and mouse game.
A quick reminder that study wasn't "suppressed", it wasn't released because it's confidence rate was so poor that none of its conclusions would have passed peer review.
It admitted a 45% error margin in its own conclusions, which pretty much make them indistinguishable from statistical noise.
You should reconsider your trust in any news outlet that ran a story on this study without noting this.
> The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games.
Nintendo sold just shy of a billion software titles for the DS, far more than the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance combined. So when you say "dramatically shrank"… compared to what?!
Even the NES had circuitry against running games that were pirated, unlicensed or for the wrong region. There were workarounds but it didn't get cracked for over twenty years.
I don't think it gets quite mentioned explicitly in this video, and don't I know if it's what the parent comment was referring to, but I recently learned the interesting detail that this lock system was invented for the international NES, and was not a feature of the original japanese Famicom. And apparently Nintendo did have a bit of a problem with large numbers of bad unlicensed games in that market.
This apparently was a small motivator in the development in the japan-only Famicom Disk System, a floppy-disc-like drive addon, which did use a protection system that amusingly was based around trademark law. There was a number of other interesting elements about the Disk System, but I'll suppress my desire to vg history ramble :)
The flash cart era was particularly bad since these carts were so easy to obtain (sold in retail stores) and the internet was available to download games from.
These days they have mostly won through DRM and tying in online multiplayer which can not be pirated.
The dev was operating at that homebrew level, developing his own IP, but he was unhappy with anything less than the "peace of mind" that came with being given the official tools and access to the platform afforded an established developer. Ironically, he was concerned about piracy of his game, yet it was the openness to piracy that allowed him to even develop it for that platform in the first place.
Yes, this is the issue GOG continuously ran into in order to maintain their DRM-free philosophy. DRM is a move made to please publishers, not comsumers.
Being just a platform didn't work so well for Atari (see the crash of 1983). And both the Apple and Play stores have a terrible reputation for allowing (nearly) anything on their stores, which is something that Nintendo would want to avoid.
On a PC, you get the freedom to install what you want.
On consoles, you get a certification of quality, integration, and style for the console. Everything fits with well-defined hardware as well. And since it's just video games, it's not a huge deal if it's limited, you can always install indie games on your actual PC.
With an app store, you just get shovelware that is unduly promoted combined with a gatekeeping what software you can run on your device, which could have otherwise been open.
Why does it need to physically modify the hardware via melting fuse when that fuse is read by enclave / boot loader code itself? If trusted code is trusted then couldn’t it store its state securely without melting fuses?
I must be missing something, either the bootloader execution is trusted and should be able to store state securely, Secure Enclave style, or it’s not and melting things doesn’t solve the problem as compromise of the code means the fuses can be ignored..
Old updates are considered trusted since they were signed by the manufacturer. The state of (a least an approximation of) the current verision is stored using efuses as state.
If you had a secure enclave that had long term storage it it, but prevented decrementing the version would be equivalent, but efuses are much simpler of a construction.
ah right so they do this to avoid having a proper secure enclave, like a very focused secure storage capability related to what the efuses are logically related to. Makes sense, I guess i just assumed they would have a secure enclave like phones etc as consoles are one of the original 'trusted computing' devices that people buy and obviously to avoid piracy etc having it work properly is important but also hardware BOM is a consideration too.
I guess the secure enclave having storage introduces another attack too, wiping/corrupting/replacing that storage somehow, thus efuses, simpler and more straightforward.
Hmm, I have done some work in this field but obviously haven't seen all the board variations out there. The secure enclave (let's call it that because you did) will usually contain a master key that facilitates crypto operations on things in storage. This master key may be programmed using e-fuses. This is a one-time operation (and yes I have once accidentally written a key that I didn't want to write on a development board). You may only get secure storage and secure boot etc. once that is set up. So when the board already has e-fuses on the board it's not a big deal for the manufacturer (of the board) to include a couple or even a whole bunch extra for whatever the user (i.e. manufacturer of the device) has in mind. For example, you may be able to invalidate a master key and add a new one, up to n times.
Million dollar question. Anyone know about the inner workings of the various Switch modchips that allow homebrew on newer consoles with RCM exploit patched?
Last I heard, it was doing some power glitching to bypass/nop-out some signature check or some such. There aren't much details in the public, but a very similar hack is publicly documented for the vita: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08102.pdf .
Honestly a car is one of the items where I could see a safety aspect outweighing... y'know... compared to a game console.
Not saying cars should be locked down like this, I really don't know and my first 'hacker' instinct is to say it should be free-as-in-freedom, but the argument has an extra dimension to it when compared to the Nintendo Switch.
Related to Mercedes saying they take responsibility if their self driving car crashes. It's certainly arguable if you don't take the upgrade they can stop taking responsibility at some point.
Remote attestation isn't inherently evil. Remote attestation can protect your privacy too. You can run code on a public cloud, with remote attestation proving that the cloud provider cannot read the memory of your VM, even if they use a malicious hypervisor.
(That's of course assuming in your threat model you trust the hardware maker but not the cloud provider. The sentiment in this thread is clearly don't trust the hardware maker.)
Or you can just run security-critical code on your own hardware on your own premises, as has been and will always be the answer for strong security. If a legal contract with a datacenter is not enough of a security guarantee, then neither is a wink from a hardware manufacturer. The societal downsides from abuse of remote attestation - eg computational disenfranchisement of end users - far outweigh any claimed benefits.
With secure attestation you only need to trust eg Intel and only when they manufactured your device, and not random cloud providers forever.
Of course, running on your 'own' hardware is a fiction, too: companies themselves are made up of contractual relationships, fiduciary duties and other legal devices.
Even if you are running your software on your own in-house datacentres, remote attestation is still useful.
(Just like git's commit hashes are still useful, not only when your code lives externally on github, but even when some other department of the same company is hosting your source code.)
I didn't say it wasn't useful. As technologists we can easily see how any given feature is useful for good, honest purposes. My point is that these purposes pale in comparison to the abuse that remote attestation directly enables - "big tech" demanding that you only run approved software to interact with them - aka computational disenfranchisement and destruction of the idea of the "user agent".
The societal situation is analogous to "Web 2.0". Everybody thought "this is neat, it lets me make interactive applications that I can share easily with my friends". Few dwelled much on how the intrinsic centralized control was a terrible dynamic. Over time, economic optimization increasingly focused on and exploited that centralized control. Now we've ended up with most people's idea of "the Internet" being choosing between least-bad corporate bundles, and just suffering all the ways they're being controlled. Remote attestation further increases that control, making it infeasible to employ software to represents your own interests.
> The societal downsides from abuse of remote attestation - eg computational disenfranchisement of end users - far outweigh any claimed benefits.
Your new comment is basically re-iterating this sentence I quoted from the old one.
I'm not sure, if I outright agree; but I do see the point and was not arguing against it.
It is indeed worrying!
> Or you can just run security-critical code on your own hardware on your own premises, as has been and will always be the answer for strong security.
My comment was arguing against this part of your original comment. On-premises doesn't have to be more secure; and it misses out on some gains from division of labour and specialisation.
Maybe it's possible in older models. I have a 2021 Model X and asked a service center if I could downgrade the software after the new UI came out, and they told me it was impossible and that not even they could to it.
It's possible they were lying, I suppose, it would not be the first time, but it seems an odd thing to lie about.
Having XOO,OOO to XX,000,000 cars globally on N different firmware packages when your approach involves fast iteration and OTA updates, in an industry where you catch partial flak for any incident regardless of the party at fault ....
Seems reasonable to not allow random downgrading because you didn't like the UI layout.
Well, I can understand the decision, even if I don't agree with it. The new UI has some quite serious (and now, well publicized) design flaws that could lead to a safety issue.
The correct solution would be for Tesla to fix the design flaws, of course. Or maybe to actually test their own products to find such obvious problems before they are released.
As per the article there are 32 fuses, meaning they can support 32 ‘irreversible’ firmware updates. There have already been 13. What happens when update #33 is needed? Or are they banking on the switch being superseded by that point?
Permanently altering the physical state of your device doesn't mean causing destruction from a legal perspective. I wonder if an owner can sue companies that do this.
How is this considered legal? I get the cat and mouse chase between devs and the reverse engineering communities, but this seems to cross the line into physical destruction of property, at least at face value.
Just need California to pass referendum making it illegal for software to modify customer hardware without explicit consent from customer and allowing customer to opt out without penalizing customer with reduced functionality from original purchase.
To me, blowing a fuse in hardware that you've sold sounds like at least unauthorized computer access and/or malicious destruction of property. I'm saddened and surprised to learn there's substantial precedence for this.
If I were authorizing something like that (I'd rather quit my job, but if), I'd be terrified of the repurcussions – for one, what if the device was sold in a region that has consumer protections? The fact that they're casually planning and committing such a careless act speaks volumes to the weakness of consumer protections, I guess.
>To me, blowing a fuse in hardware that you've sold sounds like at least unauthorized computer access and/or malicious destruction of property. I'm saddened and surprised to learn there's substantial precedence for this.
Unless they have auto updates that you can't disable, they can just withhold access to online services until you give them the permission. You're free to refuse of course, and no "malicious destruction of property" happens without your consent.
>If I were authorizing something like that (I'd rather quit my job, but if), I'd be terrified of the repurcussions – for one
IANAL but the chances of you getting civil/criminal penalties is slim to none.
Civil consumer protections should probably be stronger.
But the criminal angle is a big stretch. Nintendo is not breaking into devices to install updates and bricking them. And not liking something is very different, legally, than maliciousness. They're updating them when you click update, after being presented with legalese about it, and adding DRM which serves a function (whether you like the function or not).
The problem is you're running into device security vs. device capability. If you can downgrade your device, then so can someone else. Take the standard example of jailbreaking: New iOS releases generally (sans bootrom bugs) fix security bugs, and definitely break jailbreaks.
If some large organization wants to monitor what you're doing by installing malware, they need to be able get the older OS installed. Assuming you're a sufficiently value target (human rights activists, etc), it can be worth them spying on you to get your device passcode, and then downgrading and installing malware. If it's not across a major version I suspect that the victim would not know.
Part of the attack model the companies like Apple and Google have to consider is direct physical access to the device. Neither company considers it reasonable to say "once someone has physical access to your device it is game over".
The purpose of a fuse is to blow, and the purpose of these fuses is to be DRM to prevent downgrades. The fact that they "blow" has no relevance to a claim of "malicious destruction of property".
This is the device operating the way it was designed. It may be something that should be prevented by civil consumer protection law, but calling it criminal is just unfounded under the definition of what those words legally mean.
Fuses are a safety mechanism to protect against an overcurrent situation heating up wiring and potentially starting a fire.
The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
eFuses are a hackish way that System on a Chip makers have created to try and permit patching flawed hardware with questionable firmware. Permanently breaking electrical contact of a circuit in a chip is definitely damaging that circuit.
> The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
The purpose of these fuses is to blow and serve as write-once storage memory.
> eFuses are a hackish way that System on a Chip makers have created to try and permit patching flawed hardware with questionable firmware.
No, eFuses are literally the only mutable nonvolatile storage that can be implemented inside SoCs in modern silicon processes, because you can't put Flash/EEPROM in them for technical reasons. That is why they are universally used for irreversible configuration actions on every single modern high-performance SoC. You will only find Flash memory in small microcontrollers.
The specific purpose of the fuse doesn’t matter. The permanence doesn’t matter.
The fact that the fuse has a function, means that it isn’t “destruction of property”. They added it for DRM, and there’s no evidence to show that it’s anything other than DRM. For it to be “destruction of property”, you’d need to prove that they didn’t do it for DRM, but because they wanted to hurt users. (whether or not it does hurt users is irrelevant for determining mens rea)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Nintendo; I’m just saying that this is not a criminal matter.
>The purpose of a fuse is not to blow, but to only blow when dangerous amounts of current flow through the wire they are protecting.
Fuses are simply electrical components. They have no more inherent purpose than a capacitor, resistor, or diode. These fuses are working just as intended, even though its in a use case that you're not familiar with.
If you buy a car, and a few months later, the person you bought it from, came to your abode and changed out one wheel for a totally different wheel, would it bother you?
Tesla already has done this by removing supercharging[1], autopilot[2] and ethernet [3] on its cars without notifying the owner prior to disabling these features.
Not if they said the second I bought it "You can have it for $45k and we don't come to your house and swap the wheels, or $43k and we do come to your house in 3 months and swap the wheels", or "Sure you can buy it, but you need to sign on the dotted line that you understand that the wheels are still ours and we'll swap them in a while for some other wheels, also ours and there is no way you can buy or use your own wheels."
Is it an acceptable practice to do this in fine print? I don't know. It's a bit dodgy I'll admit. But I have personally completely given up on the idea that just because I hand over money and receive a physical item I somehow "own" it in the sense that I can do what I want with it, at least if it contains software.
Even that tenuous face value falls apart as soon as you consider that the person who clicks through the UI isn't necessarily the legal owner of the device.
That seems like a dispute between the user of the device and the owner. If an unauthorized user used dd to wipe someone's computer without the owner's consent, you don't go after the FSF, you go after the person who ran the command.
IANAL but contract terms are generally thought to be enforceable unless argued otherwise. Can you furnish the relevant statues/cases that you think make clauses like these unenforceable?
This is doubtful in my opinion, but Nintendo would certainly like us to believe that. I think that Nintendo does this for profiteering purposes, and also because they are irrationally restrictive of unintended usage of their hardware/software/artwork.
Do you remember the nintendo ds? Piracy was really awful on this one, especially in Japan. Almost no one bought original games until flash cards were finally banned.
Everything is legal until it's not. Unless someone takes it to court they will get away with it. When that happens they will find a slightly more expensive and slightly more legal way to prevent piracy. Rinse and repeat.
I wonder if a company included "We have the right to send a company agent to enter your home and destroy this product." in their Terms Of Service, and you "agree" to it, would that simply allow them to do so?
EDIT: I am not a lawyer, but I've always been surprised that Terms Of Service and End User License Agreements aren't routinely voided by courts. Aren't they perfect examples of unconscionable and adhesive [1] contracts? These seem to tick all the boxes: One-sided, no meaningful choice, no meeting of the minds, significant differences in bargaining power between the parties, no ability to negotiate, take-it-or-leave-it terms.
You'd think these things were total junk, but they're everywhere and somehow enforceable? Why?
This would make a good movie or series, about a person whose job it is to go do things like this, and at times it could get dangerous when they encounter people who staunchly believe these EULAs are unenforceable.
Its not really one-sided, if I agree to it then I can play Nintendo games on Nintendo hardware on Nintendo online services. Some people see that as a big benefit.
> no meaningful choice
I definitely have a choice on whether or not I buy/use a Nintendo Switch. My life won't end if I can't play Breath of the Wild or Smash Bros.
Technically pretty interesting, but I'd never buy something like this. Had enough of encrypted BIOSes that you can only downgrade using a hardware programmer, and Samsung's Kox protection (actually also eFuse) which fortunately only blocks their proprietary garbage from being used ever again. I pay to own not get owned.
I hear what you're saying, and I philosophically have similar feelings, but I purchased my Switch to play games I purchased for said Switch. The Switch does exactly what I want it to do, and this technical limitation doesn't impact that.
Could Nintendo do something in a future OS update that I really dislike and will make me change my tune? Possibly.
But they've also built enough trust that I'll take that risk.
Obviously you are free to make purchasing decisions for your own reasons, but I don't fully understand the hardline stance in this context.
I'd never buy a general-purpose computing device that did this, but that's because I buy general-purpose computing devices to do whatever I want.
I bought the Switch to play Breath of the Wild and arguably some of the best games I've played since I started playing games in the early 90s, and don't regret that.
Games are art: if you disagree, consider that cinema is also art, and that the crassness of Michael Bay-style Hollywood films doesn't invalidate arthouse, the same way that this year's Call of Battlefield doesn't invalidate Papers Please or Monument Valley.
And if games are art, and art defines our culture, then consigning titles to the memory-hole in the name of profitability is immoral, so Nintendo's corporate stance is philistinian.
Respecting copyright is important (the software industry, our livelihoods, is built on copyright - and copyleft - after-all), copyrights aren't indefinite because it would be immoral to deny society creative-works because they're being held-hostage by rightsholders for a licensing ransom. And Nintendo isn't a solo-creator, who might have personal reasons for wanting to retract and un-license their work: their adoption of the Disney Vault strategy is entirely soulless and without merit.
I can't argue that Nintendo should be in any way be compelled build and maintain ports of old games for modern hardware, or even official emulators: doing-so is very expensive, but I do think that Nintendo should be legally restrained from continuing with their usual bully-tactics against people involved in game-preservation.
I don't think this argument applies to the switch personally. You aren't "preserving" a game that came out this year and is available in multiple formats, you're just stealing it.
In general I agree though. The shutting down of the old eShop is very sad. There are probably hundreds of digital-only titles that are going to vanish. I like the response of the video game history foundation. Basically, we understand they can't keep the shot up forever, but what are fans supposed to do if they want to play these games and there's no legal way to do so?
I guess we'll keep our 3ds's and hope we're alive when they enter the public domain.
^ For better and absolutely for worse, I don't think Nintendo has ever made large user-facing changes to one of their consoles via a software update. The Wii never got an account system, and the Switch still hasn't gotten a web browser.
The one product that kind of evolved a bit was the 3DS, which gained (poor) support for custom themes and services like Miiverse. However, the UI remained basically the same since day 1.
I do appreciate the ability to buy a product for a specific experience, rather than rely on a company's future whims.
Nintendo blocks downgrades so that it's harder to use an exploit to run unlicensed software and pirated games. The former reason is inherently user-hostile, but it doesn't bother me nearly as much on a game console as on a general purpose device like the iPhone.
> The Wii never got an account system, and the Switch still hasn't gotten a web browser.
the PS5 also did this, but I think both systems are doing it in the pursuit of preventing people from easily jailbreaking/exploiting webkit. It can still be done via DNS trickery and finding an http:// link within a game (some game cartridges with 0 updates have them).
That may have been part of it, but I do suspect it was also an artistic decision, at least on Nintendo's part (I've never used a PS5). The Switch's UI prioritizes launching games above absolutely everything else. The system doesn't ship with any multimedia capabilities, and while there are a handful of apps available in the eShop, major players like Netflix are still completely unavailable.
They included a hidden browser so people can connect to captive portals and play games with online functionality, but I think Nintendo wanted to send a message that the Switch is for games first, last, and everything in between.
P.S. I don't necessarily agree with this approach. The Switch OLED is the best screen that I own, so I would like to use it to view more types of media. But I respect that Nintendo is curating an experience.
Precisely, I just don't buy closed down stuff unless I absolutely have no other choice.
I don't care how good the games are, they're ultimately entertainment, which is at the very bottom of the list when it comes to spending. I did pay for MMOs that turned into garbage after a while, which only reinforced this "hardline" stance, I guess.
Hell, I've hacked my ISPs ONT, the piece of shit wouldn't let me set it to bridged mode or even change the Wifi name/password. Couldn't care less that it's against the terms. There's things that people must compromise on all the time when it comes to personal freedoms - in this case, I'm not going to even if it's illegal.
They'll march me off to war if need be, but God forbid if I upset some company's marketing plan or bottom line.
I don't know really how to argue this here, but there is no such thing as a switch. It's a general purpose computer, implemented on a very specific set of hardware, restricted in its use by software whose only purpose is to maintain the illusion that a switch is a thing.
Are you trying to argue that because the Switch uses components also used to build general purpose devices that this somehow implies some kind of general purpose “identity” on all derivative devices and an expectation that somehow every product should be more clear that “well actually, this product doesn’t exist because it has a CPU and a screen”?
I’m truly grasping trying to understand your argument here.
> The switch runs extremely general software. Drawing a parallel between it and a ti84 is extremely disingenuous.
I specifically mentioned the TI-84 because I have played Mario on mine, among many other things that it was not intended for. Respectfully, it belongs on the list.
But you still haven’t answered my question. Do these products not exist?
> The peloton is a BIKE
The Peloton is also a product, and a product that uses a general purpose OS (Android) and general purpose screen. It’s still built to do one thing.
It’s not just a bike - I have three of those, and none of them have a screen, and I can ride them outside.
The point here is that products are real things, have specific purposes, and often use general purpose tech to achieve a very specific outcome.
Is it cool to run Mario on my TI-84? Yes! But I wouldn’t be bent out of shape if I couldn’t.
Should I be bent out of shape that not every native Mac app has a Windows/PC counterpart? Or vice versa?
Setting that aside, personally, I have no desire to play Switch games on my PC. The Switch is the best device for playing Switch games. Does that imply some kind of moral failing on my part?
If you have philosophical issues with console gaming in general, that's one thing. But then this becomes a conversation about something else entirely.
I'm still curious about why you continue to sidestep the question. This conversation is no longer moving forward.
The Switch has a 720p touchscreen display, a reasonably powerful CPU, and 4GB of RAM. It's not fair to compare that to the specialized embedded hardware in a light bulb.
Do those characteristics somehow automatically equate to some expectation about the hackability of the device? Must hardware creators cater to a niche part of their user base just because they use those components?
Don’t get me wrong. I like to tinker, and I’ve had plenty of fun using hardware for unintended use cases. But I don’t understand the seeming entitlement that some feel that Nintendo is not worthy of their purchase.
In a vacuum, allowing for hackability is easier than building a walled garden. Locking a device down requires hardware and software to be developed that would otherwise be unnecessary. From that perspective, it's understandable that some people feel entitled to be able to use the hardware they paid for in whatever way they please.
Of course, in the real world, hardware like the Switch is subsidized by publishing fees and the like. I imagine that that revenue must outweigh the R&D costs of gimping the device.
Fortunately, I wasn't arguing "it's a turing machine". I'm arguing that a switch is a quite powerful computer that has been crippled by its software to do less. Much less. The result of this is the thing that you think of as a switch, but "being a switch" is not fundamentally different from being banned from a particular bar, or being allergic to peanuts, as a descriptor.
I'm also one of the people who ultimately decided not to buy a switch (despite wanting to) because of nintendo's aggressive and misguided notion of ownership. There are other options that doesn't involve me betraying my principles and financially rewarding those who trample on my rights.
Too bad Nintendo produces some of the most popular game franchises like Pokemon or Zelda, and the only way to play them is to buy their hardware. I used to resist buying a Switch, but Breath of the Wild was such an amazing game that I had to get a Switch myself. And to be honest, other consoles are locked down in the same manner. Probably the most open "console" one could get right now is an x86 PC.
I used to worry more about DRM, at least when it came to books.
These days, it is all about convenience. And the realization that I'm not going to live forever, and how many more times am I really going to read this particular book. Because that's what it is all about. There is some (not large) risk I will loose access to my Amazon account, or Google, or whatever. But for most books, if I get a couple reads out of them, that's practically all the value to be extracted for me.
Because of DRM, there is some small chance that I will loose access to a book that is truly a classic, one that deserves to be read repeatedly. In that case, it is OK to just buy it again in some other format, and give the author a little more money (yes, I know not all of the book's sale price goes to the author in most cases).
Some of my most favorite works I have purchased multiple times, and I don't regret it.
It is the same for games. If you want an exemplary open-world experience, you get a Switch, and buy Breath of the Wild. You then experience it (over months or however long you want to play it) and then it is over. There will probably be something else that will capture your attention next year anyway.
If, ten years from now, you really want to play BotW again, and you don't have a Switch, I'm sure buying a used one would work fine. Or else get the current-gen console, and buy the heavily discounted version on that.
>There is some (not large) risk I will loose access to my Amazon account, or Google, or whatever.
I think people significantly underestimate what it would take to lose access to their entire library or digital identity. The wake up call for me was having my access to Youtube revoked because I watched a livestream of Ukraine coverage. I'm assuming all of the stream viewers (helpfully enumerated in the "who's watching list") got mass reported.
For Amazon, this could be as simple as someone calling up your bank and managing to convince a service representative to charge back a few items. That's a pretty much one-way trip to losing your library for good.
I'd like to be able to add modifications to the best games / content that I return to over and over again. Now that I'm older and have money, for some of them I might be willing to pay 10 times just to be able to have it more open to modding. For a tiny minority maybe even 100+ times, if I ever get to be rich enough to retire early and still want to retro-game all day. It satisfies the desire to play an enjoyable game and the desire to tinker.
I agree. I think Nintendo makes fantastic games but I don't like the idea of consoles. They'll repeatedly port their own games to newer and newer console but won't release the games for any general purpose platform. I don't want a pile of electronic waste growing under my TV to play my favourite games spread over hardware generations, I want to just have one computer that I can use as a computer and playing games.
>> Each software version expects a different number of fuses to be blown — if more than is expected, it fails to boot
That branch in the code could be interfered with. Over writing it with NOOP instructions might not be easily possible due to verification of code signing but there’s other techniques like power glitching.
I went to a 3rd party repair guy to get my PS4 slim repaired. He started talking about efuses and how if the companies detect anomalies in their firmware they blow the fuses so they have to take it back to main company to get it fixed. Its quite strange to see the topic a day after at the top of hackernews.
Does this mean the upgraded Switch can never be upgraded again? If the upgrade fuses are blown this would imply no further upgrades are possible. If Nintendo can bypass the fuses others might be able to also and hence downgrade their systems.
There is one thing about video-game piracy that I never understood. Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of piracy for Playstation 1 games. In my home country you could buy any game for the price of a Big Mac. It didn't matter that the game CDs contained copy-protection, the CDs you could buy also had them and were indistinguishable from the original CDs.
Then PS2 came (or was it PS3?) and all the pirate CDs/DVDs simply disappeared. I never understood what made game media piracy nonviable with newer consoles. Why can't the pirates simply copy every single bit of the newer game media as they did before?. I think the WII had some piracy CDs easily available but you also had to mod your console somehow. I'd be happy to have an answer from any of the hackers here :).
Edit: I'm not talking about "home piracy" where you copy your CD in your PC using cloning software, I'm talking about industrial one, you could buy these games in real stores that also sold other stuff brought from China.
Are you sure that the PlayStations you had weren't modchipped? The PSX had physical copy protection (the "wobble groove") that was relatively easy to circumvent (you could manually switch a genuine game for a pirated game once it had passed the check). Modchips made it even easier by just dummying out the wobble groove check. Later games started using Sony's LibCrypt and various checksumming maneuvers to detect pirated copies, but that was all defeatable.
The PS2 used a lot of the same tricks, it was just better at it. But once consoles started having internet connections, they could start doing checks that way as well, and ban people using modded consoles.
You absolutely can mod modern systems to play pirated games. The tradeoff is that you can never use online services. That's why people don't do it as much anymore.
First generation copy-protection efforts were lackluster.
Case in point: I ordered three DVD box sets from eBay, new and sealed, a few weeks ago. All three were counterfeit, and all three were from different sellers. Very convincing counterfeits all of them - but the single-layer discs (because pirates struggle with the more common dual-layer) and lack of copy protection on studio releases (because pirates can't recreate it) were the giveaways - along with some sloppy data layer cutting edges.
Compare this to, say, Blu-ray. It has also been cracked - but counterfeit Blu-rays are far, far more rare and easily detected. Why? The DRM is stronger, sure - but Blu-rays are also entire Java programs and much harder to replicate or rip than a DVD menu. Many Blu-ray Discs have Cinavia, which embeds invisible data inside the video and audio streams informing the player that the disc should have copy protection. Cinavia can't be removed without massive distortions to the video and audio, and pirates can't create their own copy-protected discs - thus, any attempt to make (even press) an unprotected disc with a protected video stream will fail. And finally, rather than DVD which has the recordable and pressed discs with a similar color, Blu-ray uses almost transparent discs for pressed ones, but dark black for burnables, making spotting fakes visually easy.
Where am I going with this? My point is that DVD used only one real form of protection, and it was weak and broken less than a year after release. Blu-ray uses up to, I believe, five different methods all assuming the others have fallen. And that's for a system that doesn't get software updates and came out 15 years ago, unlike a video game console.
> Why can't the pirates simply copy every single bit of the newer game media as they did before?
Ah! So actually, they implemented a really (technically) cool DRM that is totally sideband to the bits of data on the media. It relied on tracking servo feedback that most (all?) cd burners ignored.
Though, this pertains to ps1, I'm sure they did something similar and perhaps harder to spoof for ps2.
You would love the history of cat and mouse with the Xbox 360! When Microsoft lost another round they came out with the brilliant idea of making the games larger then commercially available dvds had space for. The next round hackers truncated the games so they could burn to standard disc as most games had a lot of padded data it didn’t need and this worked well for a while. Then the ban hammer dropped and a bunch of people playing truncated games got banned. So the next thing the hackers did was so cool. They found a way to burn more data to a standard DVD. DVDs were 7.5gb too small for xbox games which were now made to almost 8gb if I remember correctly. Hackers developed a custom software for certain DVD burners, the one I used was a lite-on drive but they supported a few different ones, and you would flash the firmware of the DVD burner and it allowed you to write to the very edge of the DVD. Typically DVD burners don’t allow you to write to this area because it can sometimes be prone to errors. Hackers didn’t care though they even came out with a program that would scan your disc after and verify it was clean with no errors so it was essentially a clone. Of course you still needed a flasher DVD drive in your Xbox but Microsoft wasn’t able to detect that they were detecting discs. It was such a cool cat and mouse game in the end I stopped with the burnt discs and went for the reset glitch hack which allowed me to play all the games from an external HDD but of course not online with microsoft. Though you still could connect to other servers and do things like album cover downloads and play with other hackers xboxs. Good memories.
>Xbox 360! When Microsoft lost another round they came out with the brilliant idea of making the games larger then commercially available dvds had space for.
When Windows & DOS were still normally installed from 3.5 inch floppies, each Microsoft factory install floppy also had more data on it than a PC would be able to write to a regularly formatted blank floppy.
> Along with the region specific license key data, Sony pressed a special pit into the TOC of every disc. This pit, or “the wobble groove” as it would become known, was virtually impossible for consumer grade CD writers to replicate. A CD writer laser would need to be programmed to physically move in three dimensions in order to burn the wobble groove into a CD-R. So the patented pressing process achieved both copy protection and region encoding simultaneously.
A nice game of and mouse with the modchippers described as well.
I first encountered one of these as a 100 in 1 or 150 in 1, sold at a local flee market. I remember it almost broke my brain seeing that thing. Not only had it more than one game on a single cartridge, it had so very many, but the cartridge was also a lot taller, maybe twice as tall as a regular one. And it was sold at less than the price of one official game.
I never got one, tho. My dad didn't allow me to buy one, saying these things were unethical and also saying these things were of an unknown quality and might break easily or may even break my Gameboy (not sure if he really was concerned about that, or said so to stop me nagging, as the ethics argument went straight over my 7 or 8yo head). But some of my friends eventually got one, so I regularly borrowed these things :P
I remember all sorts of bootleg media prior to the PS2 release, and what I suspect happened is that there were large crackdowns with FBI investigations and raids on bootleggers. They went after homeless people selling bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street, too. I haven't seen much counterfeit media since then.
Modern DRM uses cryptography and remote attestation, but that wasn't around in the PS2 era.
They didn't disappear, they moved online. You modify your own console, download the cracked games and burn your own physical media. Selling actual discs became less profitable (fewer buyers) and riskier (stronger enforcement).
Also selling physical (or digital) copies was rarely done by the crackers themselves (that's actually looked down upon in the community), mostly by third parties who usually had better Internet access/knowledge. When everyone started having unlimited ADSL/etc, their small business dwindled quickly.
Not sure where you grew up, but PS2 piracy was rampant and easily accessible. It probably had more to do with local copyright laws than anything technical.
As far as anti-piracy measures go, the PS3 is where Sony upped their game AFAIK.
There's a really good presentation, by a Microsoft Platform Security Engineer, detailing the lengths they went through to ensure only properly signed executables run on the Xbox One and really answers your question. One of the tools they developed, HVCI, was later incorporated into Windows Hyper-V.
VMware actually filed and was granted a patent for the same technique, years earlier, though to my knowledge they never used it for anything (not even for counter offensive purposes against MSFT :).
Microsoft would have had proof of using the technique earlier. It was designed into the Xbox 360, so it would have been already taped out by that priority date.
Today's 1st party game media has a number of unique properties that are difficult to replicate with your average at-home CD burner. I remember a lot of xbox 360 games had check codes etched into the platic inner ring of the disc, for example.
A number of patches and mods came out to attempt to disable these checks, including mods for the Wii as you mentioned.
PS1 (or PSX) had a technique for copy protection that depended on physical characteristics of the cd, something that was not copied when you made a backup. Still the mechanism was simple enough that you could bypass this check with a modchip, or even with a technique called disk swapping, in which you could swap an original disk at the right time with a pirated one and bypass the check.
PS2 also required a modchip, AFAIK, there was not any technique to get around it.
On the next generations of consoles, ps3 and ps4 were software modded, so you could run copies, but they were loaded from the machine’s hard drive, so no cd copies were necessary.
There’s a modern way to play burnt dvds with no swap on a ps2. It pretends to be a video DVD (so no wobble groove check) and uses a buffer overflow in the DVD menu code handling to boot the game.
Is it possible that people in your country simply got enough DVD burners that selling DVDs on the street was no longer profitable? Or street enforcement stepped up? I think that's what happened to Taiwan, at least.
Edit: People pointed out that PS2 discs had burned sectors that most consumer burners can't replicate. But I don't think that's really a complete answer as to why street vendors went away, considering Swap Magic[0] made disc-based piracy viable again in a few years.
I can remember people brazenly advertising console "chipping" in my local newspaper in the UK. I don't know why it stopped when we went from PS1 to PS2 (or Xbox).
From what my memory recalls, the PS2 era was when Sony started going after companies which made not just modchips, but any kind of device which let gamers use their consoles in ways they did not like. Think: Adapters which let you use PS2 controllers on an Xbox and vice versa.
Lik-Sang was (again as I recall) the primary target of all this, and was eventually forced to shut down. They were definitely the single best place to buy console modding and other weird and crazy accessories from Asia.
After the first volley, Sony and the rest started going after the smaller players, the local console modders, the ROM hosting sites, eventually even the hackers who discovered vulnerabilities themselves. 2002 was when they came for Lik-Sang and it had an immediate chilling effect, and they shut down as of 2006.
By the way - chipping services still operate, but they have a lot of ways of flying not under the radar exactly, but operating in ways which make it not worth it for Sony, Nintendo from going after them. Doing their manufacturing in China (of course), sales from various parts of eastern Europe, and the direct modding services being super-small time modders operating off local sites like OfferUp, Craigslist, or sometimes even eBay. It's overwhelmingly previous generation consoles they offer services for.
There was also a period when you could very easily (I guess you still can) buy "homebrew" cartridges for the DS, like the R4. Piracy was rampant. I have no idea what the scene is like now, but certainly GB/GBC/GBA/NDS files had no copy protection and were easily distributed online. To make things worse for Nintendo, a big SD card could hold a huge catalogue of games. Since it required zero modding, kids started to ask their parents to get them carts for Christmas and you can still buy them on Amazon. At some point there was a lot of scaremongering that the carts were illegal and that you'd get arrested for owning/buying one. There was a big crackdown and a bunch of countries banned them and fined/jailed distributors, but I don't it ever impacted serious pirates (who could just order them from somewhere like DX).
This is going off old memories so don’t take it for 100 gospel, but it’s my recollection of my youth when the consoles were in their life cycles.
PS1 chipping was/is very easy, decent sized pins/pads, depending on the chip it’s almost 8 solder points on the board (other chips had less solder points, it depended on the board revision and if you had a stealth chip or not). Any kid with a crappy soldering iron could install them. The code for the chips also got quickly “leaked” along with the methods the chips used so you could easily find chip code online and program your own chips using cheap microcontrollers. So basically there was very little cost (both in skill and cost) to get started chipping PS1s. So you had a very high success rate chipping them and a decent profit from each console (but as anyone who was so inclined could chip the console, it did lower the cost you could charge per mod. Me and my friend used to mod PS1s at school during our lunch break in the schools technology lab using the schools irons, solder and wire, me and my friend went half’s on a parallel chip programmer, so our overheads would be low, chipping PS1 was basically my first soldering adventures, that’s how low the skill bar was to solder these things in)
Once installed you just slapped a disc in the drive and played the game. (The early chips soon got “detectable” so game devs started putting copy detection in their games, but later chips started becoming “stealth” so would be much harder to detect and would play un-modifyed rips without issue, crackers would also bypass the copy detection in games so they would play on the old chips).
PS2 chipping started off slow, in the early days you would have to push button combinations to put the chip into the right mode for the game you were trying to play (PS1/PS2 CD/PS2 DVD), so the chips were not as user friendly as on the PS1. The chips would also need much better soldering skills to install as you needed to solder wires to some fine pitch ICs on the board. The chips were also more expensive as they required something a bit more “beefy” than the cheap microcontrollers used on the PS1.
So in the PS2 world (esp during the early days) the cost of installing the chips was much higher and they were not as user friendly. So imo the market wasn’t as large as it was for the PS1. (Plus I had started working and had some cash from my PS1 days tucked away, so I just got into the habit of purchasing my PS2 games.
That’s just what I remember, but its 1am, I’ve had a couple of beers, and this was all 20plus years ago so I may not be remembering everything 100% correctly.
Side note: Iirc, chipping an Xbox 1 was much easier than the PS2, and the Xbox 360 “just” involved replacing the firmware on the DVD drive for the console to enable backups so with the right tools (a PC, a ~£15 sata card and a screw driver, a bit later in the console lifecycle you also needed a serial port but a cheap USB serial converter would work, I used to use a cheap Nokia USB data cable with the end cut off and a sewing needle soldered to the RX line) you could flash all the 360s you could get your hands on (there was a decent amount of mail in work on the forums of private torrent trackers, people would open their 360, mail off their drive for £4~ first class recorded (in the UK), and get it back a few days later flashed.
I agree with the idea of full ownership, but I also know it wasn't all that long ago that the user stuck on an old version of IE was the bane of most developers, and that many security vulnerabilities come from software that was patched years ago.
Users weren't running IE6 for years and years because they upgraded to something newer, and decided to go back. The solution to this problem didn't come from making upgrades a purely one-way process.
Device makers have become quite opinionated about how their things are used, and they are in a position to enforce their opinions. I don't know what exactly the right balance is, because there are genuine interests to be balanced... but when a piece of hardware is designed explicitly to allow the manufacturer to remove the device's ability to run the exact same software that it used to, we should meet any claim that this is primarily for the user's advantage with great skepticism. We should also take seriously the possibility that tilting the balance of power in this way creates issues at least as bad as the ones we are hoping to resolve.
It's like a city so fearful of petty criminals, it allows the police the ability to do as they please. And the police are directly hired by the rich people in town.
Not too long ago I was still supporting old versions of IE because employees for large chain we built software for would not allow them to upgrade their computers
Probably because they had some other expensive software that only worked with old IE versions. The cost of fixing the other software was probably more than what it cost to pay you to support yours.
Maybe. It's also likely that they just don't allow any changes. Manual updates require action, automatic updates require no action. People default to no action and it requires a fair amount of effort to get someone to take action.
Why? Like I get why as a purchaser of things I would want to be able to downgrade, but under what premise is it desirable that the government should mandate how companies design and sell products?
This makes far more sense to me if the pitch is that companies must include clear terms for consumers about how they’ll handle software / what the hardware will allow the user to do in terms of software downgrades. That has precedent as an extension of truthful advertising / consumer protection.
But if a company says “we’re selling the Widget 9000, it updates it’s firmware automatically and irreversibly”, I don’t see a coherent reason for the government to say “no, you can’t sell that”. If people don’t want to pay for gear that behaves in that way, they’re free to not buy it.
> but under what premise is it desirable that the government should mandate how companies design and sell products?
The Government already does this and with great success, the ban on lead additives in paint would be one example. By that point, it's harmful effects were already known as early as 1786 (efforts to ban lead paint began around 1921) before it's ban in 1976 (US).
Perhaps the free market just needed more time?
Without government intervention, somehow I suspect we would still see lead paint continue to be bought and sold. I cannot imagine the unthinkable number of individuals that were fucked over through no fault of their own (learning disabilities, poor health, shortened lifespan) because we chose to continue to allow lead paint to be sold on the market.
> I don’t see a coherent reason for the government to say “no, you can’t sell that”.
What about the environment? By artificially reducing the lifespan of these devices, you're sending them to an early grave only to be unnecessarily replaced by a new device because the corporate overlords demand it.
It's unnecessary churn and I'm not sure that we should demand that future generations carry the burden of our poor choices simply because we would prefer to wait until the free market fixes this mess (which may never happen). How long will that take? 10 years? More?
OS updates extend the lifetime of a device, not reduce it.
Another great example is fuel economy standards - the government says "no you cannot sell a car that has fewer than X mpg after the year Y" and it has done wonders for our energy policy despite the government doing what they can to keep gas prices down.
> OS updates extend the lifetime of a device, not reduce it.
They can extend the lifetime. They can also reduce it either by slowing things down to the point of becoming unusable or by preventing certain use cases - for example have you heard that the Nintendo Switch updates prevent subsequent downgrades in order to prevent users from making full use of the hardware by running custom/modded games?
How is provividing updates reducing the lifespan ofa device? Usually not having long term support of a device including security patches is seen as reducing the lifespan.
> How is provividing updates reducing the lifespan ofa device?
Nobody claims it does.
If a manufacturer goes out of business ot decides to stop providing updates, you can be stuck with a piece of junk if you don't control your device. If a device is designed to only allow automatic updates direct from the manufacturer and you have no control over the version of software your device runs, your perfectly functional hardware can become a useless piece of junk. Since updates often further lock devices down to make it harder run your own software, being unable to revert older versions of the software on your device can directly prevent you from being able to modify your device to make it functional.
This is all not just idle speculation, it happens all the time.
> By artificially reducing the lifespan of these devices,
An iPhone 6S will run iOS 15, and if you throw a new battery in it it’ll run like new for almost all tasks, with the only caveat possibly being reduced NAND capacity/slower FS performance.
Yes, and nowhere in the paragraph or comment you pulled that quote from does it claim that providing updates reduces the lifespan of the device.
I clearly explained how aspects of how updates are handled can reduce device lifespan.
Apple has issues, but the length of time they support their devices is pretty good. It would be even better if they hadn't spent lots of time working to prevent devices older than the 6s from running any software not approved by apple.
As a counter example look at how Sonos handled the S1 to S2 transition. Deliberately bricking functional devices to reduce the second hand market. Not only discontuing updates to S1 speakers that had been bought new only a few years before, but also blocking updates to any S2 devices on the same network as a S1 device. Both of these policies were adjusted afterwards only after they garnered bad publicity and sparked a public outcry.
Lead paint has externalities that affect people other than the purchaser. What externalities does a Nintendo Switch not allowing firmware downgrades have?
> under what premise is it desirable that the government should mandate how companies design and sell products?
The premise that benefits individuals and society.
The government already mandates how companies design and sell products. This isn't a radical concept. The reason cars get safer and cleaner every year is due to government regulation. The reason that instant coffee cannot be more than 50% bugs and twigs is government regulation.
> If people don’t want to pay for gear that behaves in that way, they’re free to not buy it.
Or we could just regulate it and then this consumer-hostile issue wouldn't exist.
> Or we could just regulate it and then this consumer-hostile issue wouldn't exist.
But I specifically want a device that only runs code from another company. Why should the government say “only enterprises can establish this absolute security trust relationship with their hardware vendor”?
If changing this permission requires root access then malware can only access it after they have obtained root access to your machine basically after you have already lost.
It this seems too insecure one could gate such a feature behind a physical switch on the device.
If this is indeed still not secure enough one could require a physical switch AND a password or token ensuring that the person physically holding the device can still be restricted by the owner in case the two aren't one in the same while providing all owners absolute privilege on their own hardware.
Cars and coffee are regulated in ways that improve health and safety. What is the health and safety impact of not being able to run homebrew on my Nintendo Wii?
What about environmental and first-sale issues? I have a piece of hardware tied to a company that went out business and it no longer functions. So I'm both deprived of my device and it's now e-waste.
Apple preventing repairs? John Deere preventing repairs? These have real-world impacts.
> I get why as a purchaser of things I would want to <...>
That's actually all you need to say. Anything else is pro-corporate bullshit that you've been spoonfed until you regurgitate it.
The rebuttal to the rest of your comment is "just try and buy a TV that isn't actively hostile to the user". But that's a side conversation, the fundamental reality is that companies are legal fiction that don't have rights. They are allowed certain privileges we grant them, and we should not grant them the ability to screw over people that don't understand what the term firmware means.
I’d appreciate it if you’d not speculate as to my state of mind.
I as a purchaser want all kinds of things; this doesn’t mean that I want the government to mandate that companies give them to me. In part that’s because the people who run and work at businesses also have free agency, and in part it’s because I don’t believe that government interference in commerce is a viable approach to getting what I want in the long term.
People who don't know what firmware is don't care about this. Even people who do don't care. I showed this to my brother who is both a switch owner and works in tech. He didn't care. If the device works and lets them play pokemon they're content. Depressing but it's the truth.
I don't see what corporate personhood has to do with that the parent comment. They are asking if government restrictions on how Nintendo makes their product 'tamperproof' are desirable. We would have to answer the same question even if we removed 'the legal fiction of corporation' and only allowed partnerships and sole traders.
You can, they are just a lot more expensive. The hostile features are a revenue stream and subsidize the cost of the product. Apparently a lot of users are okay with that.
No, most users don't know. The frog was so well boiled it didn't even notice the water getting warm. The problem is that now things are what they are, changing them back is a behemoth effort without any motivation for those who could make it happen.
If part of your premise is that the majority of users has been tricked, you may want to consider the possibility that they just have different priorities than you.
You are oversimplifying things. It sort of overlaps some of the vaccine requirement arguments or perhaps laws that require you lock up your guns. Not updating devices that are connected to the net can and does lead to vulnerabilities that allow huge botnets to be created and deployed against anyone else on the network.
I say do what you want with your equipment if it isn't connected to the web. But if it is, you need to have some responsibility for it being used to harm others.
> companies are legal fiction that don't have rights.
Companies are quite literally legal persons and have the same rights as any natural-born citizen. It’d be a violation of a natural person’s rights if you forbade them from exercising those rights with others, companies only simplify the legal side of asset ownership and taxes.
Virtually everything you own that was sold in the US had a wide variety of terms set by the US government on your behalf on how it was constructed, advertised, and sold. The question was never if the government should set terms it is what terms.
You are also somehow envisioning the government as a separate entity having no relationship to the people as a whole that instead of literally already setting the entire ground rules in which our society exists somehow needs a very high bar to justify any interference whatsoever.
The government is all of us and the only justification it requires is the people's interests. 99.999% of people aren't chicken farmers so if they demand cleaner chicken farms so the chicken they eat are less likely to give them the shits then cleaner farms it is and those who who don't like it can situate their farms somewhere else.
99.999% of people aren't Nintendo executives so if the people are smart enough to demand hardware they actually own then Nintendo is free to exit the entire US market.
I can’t speak for other governments, but the US governments (both federal and state) derive their authority and their limitations from their contract with the people. You’d be hard pressed to find a constitutional scholar who believes the US Constitution stretches to grant the US government any power that it determines is in the people’s interests.
Notably, one of the most fundamental principles of US government is specifically the notion that the majority, even a supermajority, can’t infringe on the rights of a minority. We’ve screwed this up in plenty of cases, but that doesn’t suggest that the underlying goal is invalid and we should steer into the skid.
There is no right to unrestricted commerce. In many cases new restrictions don't even need new laws just new regulations drafted by bureaucracs defined in existing laws.
You seem to believe that one must reach backwards to the constitution in order to justify any new restrictions on your freedoms in a nation where we have happily redefined commerce within a state as subject to regulation based on the commerce clause. Let alone the general welfare clause.
In fact powers are so broadly construed that the only barrier is enumeration of a restriction in federal law and non violation of fundamental rights.
You have no more fundamental right to sell a locked down device than to build a store without proper fire exits. We didn't need to wait for fire exits to be built and vote with our feet.
How could I not have a right to sell a locked down device? Even Stallman doesn’t question the right of manufacturers to provide closed source / non-user-modifiable software on devices that operate as appliances. My alarm clock runs code to manage the menus / configure alarms / change brightness, but it’s implausible to suggest it’s illegal for the manufacturer to have built a locked down device.
People in this comment page keep drawing parallels between “a hardware device whose software I cannot modify” and things like fire code / health and safety laws. If you think there’s actually a line connecting those, draw it. I’m not seeing it.
You couldn't sell a lock down device if we the people tell you that you can't sell a locked down device the same as you can trivially be told that you can't knock down a tree or bulldoze a wetland or build whatever you please where you please even if you own the land or hire someone for less than minimum wage or employ a minor after certain hours in such and such a city or state or any one of a million other things.
You can argue until you are blue in the face that you don't think such a law is needed or a public good but I fail utterly to understand why you think it would be illegal.
Let’s say that the US congress decided that Nintendo games needed to be shipped on mini DVDs. No game carts or usb drives or other form factors would do. So they passed a law saying that Nintendo must switch all their consoles to use mini DVDs.
You can't target a singular entity for punishment in law see bill of attainder. Suppose the law was that game consoles provide software on mini dvd how would that silly example pass muster as far as providing for the general welfare? How are mini dvds better for the public than usbs?
It's ridiculously broad but not infinitely broad. It's fairly trivial to suggest that allowing users full control of their own devices serves their interests.
A deliberately silly idea is liable to fail to hit the mark as far as the point. What if it was made a law that one must wear clown masks in the grocery store or all paint your nails before appearing in public?
The problem is when an upgrade limits or removes features from the time of first purchase - it's akin to changing the terms of an agreement after signing it.
Maybe a small one, but controlling all the software for a device is definitely a type of monopoly - Nintendo has 100% control of what's allowed and permitted to run on the hardware. If I want to sell Switch users software, I can't without Nintendo's blessing because they have complete control of the market.
That’s not really what a monopoly is, at least in any useful sense.
Applebees has 100% control over the food that they put on plates inside Applebees, they can ban you from bringing in outside food and beverages. But we wouldn’t say that Applebees has a monopoly on anything.
Nintendo has total control over the software that runs on their hardware. Their hardware model is similar to the model that my microwave has. People are welcome to try to DIY mod their Nintendo device the same way I can try to DIY mod my microwave, but that doesn’t mean the government ought to be putting a stop to Nintendo’s “monopoly” on how the hardware they build is built and imaged.
Steam Deck has a very similar form factor and is way more open to hacking. It seems like the free market is working. Why should the people who develop products at Nintendo have to design around some politician’s law?
I'm waiting for my Steam Deck. That said, the Deck is a drop in the ocean.
> Why should the people who develop products at Nintendo have to design around some politician’s law?
Sorry, but it must be we live in different planets. Japan has laws tailor made for the commercial interests of their gaming and media industry. Are IP protection and copyright also politician's law?
I'm all against absurd legislation and bureaucracy and I'm glad creators get paid but analyse your sentence:
"Why should the people who develop products at Nintendo have to design around some politician’s law?"
Do you notice that you are equating People=Private Company and Consumer Protection=Politician? I could understand if you are the owner of a company trying to work around some legislative moat, otherwise, it's pure brainwashing.
The alternative is “you can’t provide security updates because those updates might render the device useless”, which would put us back in the 90’s and would render every iPhone not made within the last 2 years a constant exercise in navigating a minefield of spyware sites looking to exploit some WebKit vulnerability.
I will partially disagree with this. Irreparable hardware/software changes like this should absolutely be banned, however, I disagree that we should dictate speech, with speech in this case being how the software was written. An analogy would be telling people they can't protest vs. shooting them when they try to.
But the core issue here is the company restricting users from running their own software so the analogy would be more that a company would not be allowed to tell their hitment to shoot protesters even though that is technically speech.
reading through the replies to this, perhaps it should instead be that if you create a method to prevent downgrades you must also provide documentation on how that prevention method works in great enough detail that it can be circumvented.
Were they to document a way for you to disable the fuse check, then the user could disable the fuse check and do their own downgrades, or if writing this kind of technical documentation is too laborious then they can just provide themselves a downgrade service and just point to that in the documentation.
Even if such a law was enforced, there is a workaround: rent the consoles instead of selling them. That way, you don't legally own the console/phone/car you're playing with and they still can do whatever they want. Leasing is common for expensive items, down to cars, sometimes phones, it can be used for consoles, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lease
Such a workaround only works with weak enough consumer protections. If it quaks like a duck the law can choose to treat it like a duck even if you insist that its actually a goose.
I have a Tesla, and I was stupid enough to upgrade to v11 without reading up first. The UI is so broken that I now literally have hate attacks while driving the car. Oh, and the update somehow broke a window controller unit, which had to be physically replaced.
So: yes. I’d gladly go back to v10 if I could. I actually offered money to do so, but - unsurprisingly - I got refused.
Yes. By the way, the parent comment highlights an important point of having lots of countries and jurisdictions which has very different view on this. My prediction is that it will be fragmented.
Just destroy any company that doesn't comply with the will of the people. (yes, I know this is problematic, but companies like Nintendo for example need to be brought to heel.)
The reason it’s not that easy is that platform holders have contractual obligations with content providers about their content being secure. These obligations are an incentive to content production.
Actually its exactly that easy. The platform holders cannot offer something to content providers that is outside the boundaries of the law nor use a court to compel them to break the law.
Making it the law is about the only thing that would work because incentives are otherwise inherently misaligned.
We are discussing not what IS the law but what in some people's opinion ought to be the law. The comment that started this thread
> I believe we need new laws declaring that consumers can run whatever versions of software they want on devices they OWN.
To which you said
> The reason it’s not that easy is that platform holders have contractual obligations with content providers about their content being secure.
I pointed ought that if the law were modified as requested that such contractual obligations would be mooted because they cannot be obligated to implement restrictions that would fall afoul of the prospective law that commenter proposed and I agree ought to be implemented.
Companies can only get away with this crap because consumers are so still so darn ignorant. I think most people won't accept a car that prevents you from changing your own oil or replacing your own wiper fluid, so it always boggles my mind that so many are still buying computers that lock users out of the firmware and boot process.
A Switch is just a toy anyways. Buy a different toy.
The reason why games on Switch can "just work" is that the OS provides the DRM. Otherwise, we would see rootkits, spyware, or always-online requirements like the DRM hell that we see with Windows games.
It's a trade-off, and I believe there is space for both kinds of devices. I want an unlocked Linux PC and a DRM-monopolized-by-Nintendo Switch so that I can do tinkering, when I want it, but also enjoy games without much technical fuss.
>The reason why games on Switch can "just work" is that the OS provides the DRM. >Otherwise, we would see rootkits, spyware, or always-online requirements like the DRM hell that we see with Windows games.
None of this would be an issue if the companies just released the server-side tools and let people host and moderate their own instances of games. This is basically how the Fediverse works and it's great. People who want to be nasty go into their little corner and everyone else in another.
Only problem is this would mean customers actually get to own the stuff they buy. Companies would rather you be the product.
Hm, I don't know if I understand your ideal world correctly, but back in the days, when you could host your own game servers for e.g. Team Fortress or Counter Strike (all based on Half-Life the original and basically free with every "legitimate" Half-Life license), it was nice and dandy for only a very short time.
Soon you would only want to play on closed/invite-only servers, since the guys that "wanted to be nasty" didn't go into their own little corners, but were glad to spoil it for everyone else. And even then the cheaters invested a lot of time and effort to sneak into closed circles to ... I don't know, simply cheat?
Guys just randomly using your key (at a point were Half-Life was really cheap and easy to come by) were also a constant annoyance.
So Valve had to do something, and this was the Steam client, cheat detection, and a constant cat and mouse game to save the experience for players and assets/investments for the developers and in effect their "platform".
Never underestimate the desire of idiots to ruin it for everyone else.
I unfortunately can't see this working in every scenario. For a Switch it seems like a workable solution as the owner's motivation is the only controlling factor in whether or not the device stays on the secure side or the anything-goes side. (If there are loss-leading/cost changes to the hardware that is a discussion that can be addressed separately.)
For a device like a phone the owner's motivations can become muted, such as by a service provider functionality requirements or an employer's desires. This is similarly where the problem comes about in the discussion about side-loading.
We already know that there are many developers who wish to live on the 'nasty' side, but there is also a laziness motivation in using that side as well, it's less work for the developer.
This then becomes the ever-widening hole where consumers get brought onto the 'nasty' side blindly because that's where the market is - at the same time exposing the users to all of the 'nasty' stuff that technology was originally there to protect them from.
I guess you're mostly talking about multiplayer games. I was talking mostly about single player games. But also, I don't quite get how a publisher could recoup $200 mio in spending on 3D assets with your "free for everyone" model.
What? I get all my games on Windows DRM free from the likes of Gog and Itch.io. If there is a game I want to play that has DRM I get a nice clean pirate copy.
I'm curious now. I have actually never heard of malware of any kind being put into a release by a reputable scene group, cracker or repacker. Eg. Empress, Fitgirl.
Does anyone have any links to instances of this happening?
"If there is a game I want to play that has DRM I get a nice clean pirate copy."
Surely you understand that people who work in building games don't exactly like that attitude ;) So they might decide to release exclusively on Switch and not do a PC port, if pirate copies are plentiful on PC but rare on Switch.
BTW, I believe most of the games I've played recently are Switch-exclusive:
Not all consumers are ignorant, but 99% of switch's consumers don't even care.
I bought the toy because I enjoy Zelda and Mario. I've bought every Nintendo console since the NES and will likely continue to do so because of the enjoyment I get back from it. I'm not interested in modding or downgrading or whatever.
If you are not looking for a toy to enjoy Nintendo only games with then get a Steam Deck or whatever else and mod to your hearts content.
> I think most people won't accept a car that prevents you from changing your own oil or replacing your own wiper fluid, so it always boggles my mind that so many are still buying computers that lock users out of the firmware and boot process.
There are countless variations of this in cars. Changing a fuel pump or ignition control module or sometimes even disconnecting a battery activates 'anti theft' features in many cars and companies frequently use the DMCA to prevent repair and maintenance without $10k/year software licenses.
I recently had to change the transmission in a '13 Juke. The battery was disconnected, and now three months later I still cannot use the radio. We have the placard with the unlock code, but the radio does not unlock.
Had the dealer done the repair, I could probably fight with them to get the radio fixed. But with the independent shop that did the repair, whom I feel did nothing wrong, I do not want to pressure to repair the "collateral damage" that really isn't their fault.
Consumers but game consoles to play games made for the consoles, and as long as they can play, why should they care about firmwares and bootloaders? In fact, I know plenty of Linux kernel recompiling geeks with custom built PCs who buy locked down game consoles because sometimes, they just want to play video games, and game consoles are really good at making it hassle free.
And the fact that they are locked down is not a bad thing. It actually made Nintendo's success. While other manufacturers had to deal with a flood of poor quality titles, Nintendo was able to set quality standards. As for the evil DRM, game publisher sometimes don't want to release games on open platforms (like PC) because of piracy.
Your car analogy doesn't hold, you don't need to change oil and wiper fluid in your consoles, consoles are essentially no maintenance and that's another good thing about them. And in fact, the most likely maintenance operation you may have to do on the Switch is changing the battery, and it is a relatively easy operation. I don't know how long my Switch will last, but consoles tend to last a really long time for consumer electronics.
Game consoles may be computers under the hood, and with hacks, you may turn them into a general purpose machines (and I have done it, it is fun). But really, they are accessories to the games. You are not "darn ignorant" because you buy a console for its intended purpose. Yes it is a toy, literally, you find it it toy stores, but why should you buy a different toy just because it may not do more than advertised?
These fuses are inside the CPU itself. They are programmed in a sense much like the firmware itself is.
These fuses have always been around in microcontrollers. They are used to configure various aspects of the microcontroller operations, like startup sequences, whether or not the contents of the chip can be read out, is their voltage monitoring (brownout detection) enabled, is there a watchdog timer enabled which could reset the chip automatically if needed, etc.
It is common that fuses like this can only be set to progressively stricter settings. And the only way to reset the fuses is to erase the entire chip, firmware and all. It sounds like these fuses in the Nvidia dont even allow this.
There have been attacks against eFuses implemented as flash by way of decapping and using UV light. (I'm on mobile and don't have links at hand. Sorry!)
The article that gp linked mentions that it's stored in non-volatile memory that supposedly is "programmable" only once. Obviously, it depends on the chipset, but how is non-reversibility guaranteed in this case?
The bit cell is programmed by applying a high-voltage pulse not encountered during a normal operation across the gate and substrate of the thin oxide transistor (around 6 V for a 2 nm thick oxide, or 30 MV/cm) to break down the oxide between gate and substrate. The positive voltage on the transistor's gate forms an inversion channel in the substrate below the gate, causing a tunneling current to flow through the oxide. The current produces additional traps in the oxide, increasing the current through the oxide and ultimately melting the oxide and forming a conductive channel from gate to substrate.
So, basically, they intentionally apply an out-of-spec voltage on the cell's output port, overloading the gate and causing a permanent short to ground. The cell always reads as 0 afterwards.
I don't see the "non-volatile" part at first, sorry about that. I guess non-volatile just means the data persists across resets, not necessarily that the fuses are stored in flash or something that can be modified.
This is an interesting idea, but quoting Stalin, isn't the really important thing the program that counts the burnt fuses? Maybe that's also exploitable
Anyway, the article also says that an exploit is already available to bypass that
out of curiosity, what was the original Stalin quote? I'm guessing something like "the important political position is the one that assigns positions to others" or something like that? I would google, but unclear what to search for.
One of Apple's defenses against EU regulators wanting them to allow side-loading is downright whataboutism as they point to games-consoles as similarly locked-down, single-marketplace platforms that extract the same 30% cut of sales revenue from developers. And there are plenty of non-game titles on the Xbox and PlayStation stores (Netflix, alternative web-browsers[1], even a Google Stadia client... sort-of [2]), so I'm surprised you're applying double-standards to games-consoles when they're almost identical in nature to Apple's walled-garden.
I'm not happy that the Nintendo Switch is locked down, and any ruling against Apple which also applied to console manufacturers would be great news in my book. I just have better things to be angry about.
The thing is, I feel quite comfortable asserting that nobody uses a Nintendo Switch as their primary computer. If an app isn't available on the Switch, people can download it on something else. If an app isn't available on the iPhone, protesters in Hong Kong die: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678
Locked down consoles are regrettable; locked down phones are an affront to free society.
> I'm not happy that the Nintendo Switch is locked down, and any ruling against Apple which also applied to console manufacturers would be great news in my book. I just have better things to be angry about.
I'm just sad about where the technology world is heading
Well, I guess that's the other thing—Nintendo has been doing this for as long as they've been in the business. The NES launched with a so-called "lockout chip" to block unlicensed software. This was a key part of Nintendo's strategy for the NES, which launched after the so-called video game crash of 1989, when consumers stopped buying video games because they'd been burned by too many low-quality cash grabs. Nintendo's "seal of quality" program enforced very high standards, unlike anything seen on any platform today.
I hesitate to bring this up, because an old bad thing is still a bad thing. But it's not a new bad thing.
While I generally agree, I think the point most people have with being OK with game consoles and not iPhones boils down to:
A. Game consoles are sold at a loss or very near-cost; often they only end up making some <5% per-unit profit due to the sheer volume of their production. Devices with direct evidence for this are PS5[0] and Steam Deck[1]. For iPhones, it can feel unfair when apple is making app store margins on top of their 30%+ per-device margins, but I support the idea that Apple's profit margins take into account app store margins and the devices would be x% more each year if developers could go completely without IAP for in-app digital purchases.
B. Nintendo et al. specifically sell these as "game consoles", so combined with (A), it feels fine that they get their 30%. For iOS, being locked into the App Store serves only the purpose of total security, where basically nothing downloaded from the app store can siphon data from other apps via a sandbox escape or otherwise jailbreak the phone for silent spyware purposes.
Microsoft bricked thousands of illicit China-developer xbox360 kits one spring morning, in the winter of 2010.
they also have bricked retail xbox360 consoles of nefarious (teenage) actors. cannot go into more detail on that one. maybe after a few more years.