MudMan

No, it cannot.

They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.

Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.

You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.

Right. I think the confusion stems from the linked article framing this as someone getting banned for using a second hand Switch 1 game on a Switch 2.

What actually seems to have happened is someone bought a dumped cart, got their account banned when it was flagged for not being unique and then had a relatively easy time of getting customer support to unban them when he called to explain he actually did own the physical cart.

From that perspective it all makes some sense, it’s just not what Metro decided to report, I’m assuming due to being swept into reports of resold bricked Switch 2s.

Well, no, the dude telling the truth is the first bunch of letters. The point is how the thing that he’s telling the truth about actually happened to him.

Yeah, that seems to be what the user is saying happened after talking to Nintendo, the quote just isn’t on this linked report.

They’re also saying they didn’t get much pushback, which may suggest Nintendo do see this from time to time, I guess. Banning accounts/consoles isn’t exclusive to the Switch 2, just more impactful there. They would have been seeing these scenarios for a while.

Huh. Guess I misremembered that. It’s been a while since I looked into it.

In any case, the point stands. The carts are identifiable but not tied to an account. They clearly keep some record of who (optionally) registered each cart for these purposes, but carts can still be used across multiple unrelated accounts and consoles simultaneously and Nintendo still has no way to differentiate a first purchaser using a cart across consoles/accounts versus someone having re-sold a cart.

Given that there are no good sources of Nintendo storage out there I don’t know how profitable it’d be to make a bootleg single-game cart when you could instead sell the same hardware as a flashcart. Used Switch games aren’t that expensive anyway. I guess it’s technically possible, though.

A false positive is almost weirder, because what does a false positive look like? A false positive on what test? Admittedly I have no idea of how they’re ID’ing flashcarts to ban them. What they have clearly works, but without knowing what the technique is I can’t tell if a false positive is even possible. The “bought a cart that had been used to make a known dump” theory is… possible, but I’d need more proof than just sounding more plausible than anything else.

Either of those hypotheses shows that their EULA overreach has practical implications that they should have considered, but it’s fundamentally different from what the article is putting forward.

Both the carts and the digital downloads are signed, but the cart signature is not stored with the account or associated to it, to my knowledge.

With digital games you can run them on two Switch consoles at once and, while that has been complicated by the “virtual cards” it would not ban you, it’d just kick you out of the game.

I can’t promise that they aren’t flagging physical cards showing up in two places at once. That is possible, as I said above. I am just not aware of that being a thing that they do, and it would not be Switch 2-specific, so it’d be surprising we only hear about it now.

It could be that this guy got himself a bootleg cart, but that sounds expensive to create for how cheap used Switch games are, and you’d get dinged on the flashcart, period, it wouldn’t necessarily require the game to appear in two places at once.

So it’s not that I’m saying this didn’t happen, I’m saying I don’t know what happened or why just from what is currently being reported.

They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.

Eh… I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.

From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.

This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn’t seem like it’d be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.

Or, I guess d) is lying about it?

Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.

At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don’t even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.

That doesn’t mean I’m on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it’s just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.

But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.

EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that’s the most likely scenario?

Nah, they did it with Youtube videos.

But on the underlying point of “everybody is freaking out about AI things that good old big data had been doing for years with zero pushback” I very strongly agree.

Hah. Those used to be a lot more common, this is actually a bit of a blast from the past.

Early graphical Linux interfaces were constantly breaking and telling you to go back to a terminal to restart your X server or fix whatever was broken manually.

That used to be the “but you have to use the terminal” of very early Linux, back when “can you install Debian from scratch?” was the old “can you install Arch from scratch?”

Man, I’m old.

It did happen, but that wasn’t an OS update, it was a third party update that bricked the OS. The fact that it could do that exposed some Windows practices that are a bigger deal than Linux’s general jankyness when they happen, but they also surface less often for end users.

I thought this particular boo-boo was revelatory because Linux is relatively on the ball anticipating updates breaking the system entirely (one wonders if it should have to be, but whatever). But this was a widespread but specific issue within a random system component. Without googling for it an end user wouldn’t immediately understand what’s going on, and even then there was a fair amount of confusion for at least a day. There wasn’t “a workaround”, there were serveral, as normies and newer users struggled to understand what had broken and how to fix it, and people weren’t very clear in reporting what worked and what didn’t. This all happened within forums and bug reports, with no central source of information or even a centralized official organization informing of the status. Definitely not how that would have played out in a commercial environment, for better and worse.

Also, this is a slight tangent, but can I flag a couple of frequent Linux community behaviors you’re engaging in here that I wish we would get rid of?

One, “it works in my machine” is a meaningless statement. It adds nothing to the conversation and it doesn’t mean the issue is less important. It works on your machine, your version or your distro but not in others. That is every bug, it adds no useful information. In this case, a static screen contains specific instructions that report a common default but don’t match implementation on every distro, so this warning screen isn’t always accurate. That, in itself, is a problem.

Two, “here’s all the smart stuff I did to fix it” (or the smart stuff I do to prevent it) is also entirely useless. The issue came and went, everybody fixed it. The goal isn’t to work around the OS or the DE’s jankiness, it is to have it not be janky in the first place. Putting the onus on the user to fix the shortcomings of the product is… a mitigation, I guess, but the goal is to compete with the paid alternatives on a mass scale, which has different requirements. Complaints about a wonky area of Linux shouldn’t be dismissed or excused with offers to teach people manual workarounds or even best practices, they should be addressed with fixes from the developers of the components that have issues.

I know the fix was up for testing, but I saw some people complaining about other issues with it and it wasn’t rolled into the latest live update for me last I checked, so now I’m using a lock screen wallpaper that doesn’t break and I’m not sure I have a way to tell when it’s fixed other than manually checking.

Also, the error message suggesting a way to manually unlock using keyboard shortcuts to a virtual terminal does not match the defaults on my distro, so that added to the confusion.

Say what you will about Windows, but it was a stark reminder of the places where a single monolithic commercial owner would prevent some issues that can happen in Linux/open source projects. A commercial software developer would almost certainly not have shipped something broken in this way, and if they did they would have rolled it back in an update immediately. They also wouldn’t have had a black screen with some tips on how to bypass the issue, presumably, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t have been just… wrong, or mismatched.

Like I said, pros and cons, but it was a disappointing experience. Mostly because… well, yeah, I can understand what happened and troubleshoot it, but a) I didn’t have the time, so I certainly was glad I am dual booting and could just flip to Windows for the time being, and b) a whole bunch of people would not have been able to troubleshoot this or comfortable tryign to do so even if the provided instructions in the workaround were accurate to their system.

Statcounter is… a valid proxy, but I don’t know if I trust it for fine grain changes. Big trends, maybe. Windows overall certainly seems to have lost some ground over time. Whether that’s desktop PCs becoming less popular, the laptop market moving a bit towards Mac, the handheld market being weirdly represented because this only counts devices used for web browsers or whatever else is harder to parse.

They officially changed the name in 2016. I have to assume they changed what the browser reports earlier this year. For tracking purposes it would probably make more sense to count the ARM version separately from the Intel version, but I don’t know if that’s correlated to this change or what is. I’m not a MacOS user, though, so maybe the change is public knowledge and I just don’t know about it.

Yeah, I don’t know who made the offending changes. I don’t think it’s fixed yet, I’m using a workaround at the moment.

I mean, good thing, too. They just broke the lock screen this week. That was an annoying half an hour of troubleshooting to do in the middle of a work day.

Pros and cons in each, I suppose.

I mean, just to be clear on what …

That’d be the red line, there. Assuming you take Statcounter numbers at face value, even.

Incidentally, how have the MacOS and OSX not converged more, speaking of end of life stuff?

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

That’s a weird change of perspective there. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.

To be clear, yes, all social media with likes/votes has information about the likes/votes. That’s all likes/votes is.

The question is whether you surface that information to users. For a system like ActivityPub there are some hard limiters to how much you can keep that info hidden or build features around withholding information from users at all because the entire thing is built on the notion that anybody can be hosting an instance.

My point is that I’m not going to treat it differently or have different expectations of it just because it works in a different way. And if anything, I’d have some additional privacy concerns for a system like than I would for a less open system.

So from there I’m not sure what your argument is. Are you saying that you disagree that Fedi has the same expectations for privacy and usability than other social networks? That they have the same expectations but get there some other way? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth here, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.