Gary Bowser from Team Xecuter pleads guilty to charges, agrees to pay Nintendo $4.5 million

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Last year saw the arrest of two members of Team Xecuter, the hacking group behind the infamous SX OS. MaxConsole administrator and GBAtemp user GaryOPA was a part of that, and was extradited from Canada to the United States, where he would face charges. While he initially claimed he was innocent, the opposing prosecution did not accept the defense of SX OS merely allowing Nintendo Switch users to play homebrew software, and asserted that the main goal of Team Xecuter's exploit was to play pirated copies of games.

Faced with 11 felony counts, Bowser has just pleaded guilty to two of them: trafficking in circumvention devices and conspiracy to circumvent technological measures. According to the court, Team Xecuter has caused an estimated number between $65 million to $150 million in losses to video game companies.

This means that Bowser will not have to go to trial, with the plea deal also waiving the other 9 criminal charges. Despite that, he still may face prison time, and as part of the deal, has agreed to pay Nintendo for restitution, to the tune of $4.5 million. Bowser will also have to consent to the destruction or give up the technology seized from his home during his arrest, which includes around 30TB of hard drives, micro SDs, and flash drives, along with laptops, phones, modchips, and hacked game consoles.

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Zajumino

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By pleading guilty instead of being found guilty or not guilty at trial, the court doesn't have to articulate its reasoning behind it's ruling. So in that way precedence wasn't set because we don't know how the court will rule.

Whether the precedence would have been binding or persuasive in the first place is a different story and, at this point, hypothetical. Unless Bowser appeals this ruling within the appropriate timeframe and renters his plea of not guilty.
Hypothetically speaking, I doubt precedence would have been significantly impacted, given the way they marketed their products.


Just wow! and if those 30TB HDD have any kind of questionable porn.... RIP Gary
I don't know about that, but if there was any "bad stuff" on there, we probably would have heard of it by now.


Doing what? Using my Switch with all the bells and whistles? Yes I have. All you do is antagonize. Rants? I guess logic and fact seems intense for your tiny feeble mind. Must suck to be you. Go back to you bridge troll. You owe a debt of gratitude to TX as does the rest of the scene. Selfish ingrate. Show some respect and save whatever dignity you have left, little boy. I don't want to convert anyone. Pay attention Son. You are mook.
Pardon me saying so, but the language you use makes you seem rather unintelligent. Please be polite.

Also, can you point out to me where the facts and logic are in anything you said in this thread? I am having a difficult time finding them.
 
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madafaka

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HaHAHAHa! Take that G.Bowser, next stop more prison years with your SX Core and all their shit products. I was one of the unlucky basterds who bricked his 3DS thanks to that piece of crap 3DS Gateway card and its fucked brick code. Karma karma karma kar 4.5 million :grog::rofl2:
 

SaltyDog

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I've always been perplexed when this happens. Nintendo claims that they've been harmed between 65-150 million, but are made whole by a 4.5 mil restitution. How are they made whole if it's just a fraction of lost sales then? Every year it seems that these companies make such broad claims of piracy damages but fail to provide proof.
 

mikefor20

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I've always been perplexed when this happens. Nintendo claims that they've been harmed between 65-150 million, but are made whole by a 4.5 mil restitution. How are they made whole if it's just a fraction of lost sales then? Every year it seems that these companies make such broad claims of piracy damages but fail to provide proof.

Because they can't possible know how many games you were going to buy. They can just claim averages. That's like trying to predict how many movies you will see or how far you will drive. Averages averages averages. In the court of law when discussing damages they quote the big number. When talking losses to their shareholders they quote the small number. Whatever suits their narrative and their purposes at the time
 
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mikefor20

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Hypothetically speaking, I doubt precedence would have been significantly impacted, given the way they marketed their products.



I don't know about that, but if there was any "bad stuff" on there, we probably would have heard of it by now.



Pardon me saying so, but the language you use makes you seem rather unintelligent. Please be polite.

Also, can you point out to me where the facts and logic are in anything you said in this thread? I am having a difficult time finding them.

Fact. SX was first to have a fully functional CFW.
Fact: SX is still the only real solution to mod a Mariko.(sans their clones)
Fact: Most of you here are pirates. Most of the rest are liars.
Fact: the majority of the hate is just people following the leader and jumping on the bandwagon.
Fact: We all TX a debt of gratitude.
Fact: Atmosphere users are the "cult members." They try to convert people and make them use only one CFW. Not SX users
Fact: you can use both
Fact: USB loading is awesome.
Fact: SX does what Atmos don't
Fact: SJW/cancel culture is what we're dealing with.
Fact: Being glad someone went to jail when you all benefitted is a shitty thing to do
Fact: Most of the people here are trolls and don't deserve to be spoken to politely. No matter what the rules or you say.

The logic: SX hate is unwarranted and lame. SXOS is still the only USB loading,hack the unhackable solution. Anyone saying otherwise is an ingrate and probably has no clue. Just following around the rest of the brain they share.

Can you understand this time?
 

mikefor20

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HaHAHAHa! Take that G.Bowser, next stop more prison years with your SX Core and all their shit products. I was one of the unlucky basterds who bricked his 3DS thanks to that piece of crap 3DS Gateway card and its fucked brick code. Karma karma karma kar 4.5 million :grog::rofl2:

How did you brick. Must be USER error
Gateway worked great. It was first too.
Didn't you make a backup?
 

mima_93

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Fact. SX was first to have a fully functional CFW.
Fact: SX is still the only real solution to mod a Mariko.(sans their clones)
Fact: Most of you here are pirates. Most of the rest are liars.
Fact: the majority of the hate is just people following the leader and jumping on the bandwagon.
Fact: We all TX a debt of gratitude.
Fact: Atmosphere users are the "cult members." They try to convert people and make them use only one CFW. Not SX users
Fact: you can use both
Fact: USB loading is awesome.
Fact: SX does what Atmos don't
Fact: SJW/cancel culture is what we're dealing with.
Fact: Being glad someone went to jail when you all benefitted is a shitty thing to do
Fact: Most of the people here are trolls and don't deserve to be spoken to politely. No matter what the rules or you say.

The logic: SX hate is unwarranted and lame. SXOS is still the only USB loading,hack the unhackable solution. Anyone saying otherwise is an ingrate and probably has no clue. Just following around the rest of the brain they share.

Can you understand this time?
yes! you forgot 4 more facts
fact: sx was the first cfw whose stealth mode failed and caused bans.
fact: sx was the first cfw which copied atmo wrong and caused briks at the time of update the firware
fact: sx was the first cfw that used betas to justify any bug or problem that the user might have had
fact: sx os were the first to go to jail
 

RednaxelaNnamtra

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Fact. SX was first to have a fully functional CFW.
Fact: SX is still the only real solution to mod a Mariko.(sans their clones)
Fact: Most of you here are pirates. Most of the rest are liars.
Fact: the majority of the hate is just people following the leader and jumping on the bandwagon.
Fact: We all TX a debt of gratitude.
Fact: Atmosphere users are the "cult members." They try to convert people and make them use only one CFW. Not SX users
Fact: you can use both
Fact: USB loading is awesome.
Fact: SX does what Atmos don't
Fact: SJW/cancel culture is what we're dealing with.
Fact: Being glad someone went to jail when you all benefitted is a shitty thing to do
Fact: Most of the people here are trolls and don't deserve to be spoken to politely. No matter what the rules or you say.

The logic: SX hate is unwarranted and lame. SXOS is still the only USB loading,hack the unhackable solution. Anyone saying otherwise is an ingrate and probably has no clue. Just following around the rest of the brain they share.

Can you understand this time?
Atmosphere had no releases at that point, but was actually usable if you compiled it. But like sxos, both werent really save to use at release. So no, I'm not really giving them that. The only thing they might have done, would be to be more user friendly for rom usage for some time and allow realtively save backup usage while being online until 9.x dropped.
Yeah, I give them that they created a nice modchip, and its the only situation I would recomend their hardware.
I didn't pirate in the switch time, since I had no reason to, I had enough money to buy what I need and wanted to just have quality of life improvements like the more stable framerates, streaming and usage of valid backups to not need to swap the cardrige. When the last one wasn't possible anymore, and tx didn't gave a fuck about it, I completelly stopped using their software.
I think there are many vallid reasons to not like sx, since they did many things that where problematic, and never really did anything to make up for them.
Only maybe for the modchips, not much more in my opinnion.
Many times there is a reason for the suggestion, some of them are, that sxos has less safety measures build in, has better homebrew support and for some time now is still getting updates, while sx isn't, which results in problems later on for people who don't really know what they are doing.
you can, but switching between them can be annoying, and the difference usb loading does, compared to the greater work needed to get newer games running, or to fix accidental updates is not really woth it for many in the end.
To be fair, I never used it, so no Idea, but I needed the loading as confort feature, so I had every dump on my sd card anyway.
not that much anymore, only really usb/xci loading, while being eol.
Or people that look a bit more into the future, since holding on to something that getting more out of date from day to day can lead to more problems. Also the conscience might be part of it to for some, because while pirating something you wouln't have bought anyway doesn't cost the game developer anything, making money on other peoples free work, without even giving credit it really bad.
I mean they know the risks beforehand and sx was also kinda promoting piracy, instead of trying to fully stick to the homebrew and own backups narative, so they did it to themself, even if the copyright law is broken to some degree.
Treat other like you want to be treatet, if you think they are trolls, either ignore them, or keep treating them like normal human beings, if you need to reakt to them.
 

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This was bound to happen eventually. If you create and sell a device that is mostly designed for piracy, you're basically doomed from the start. It is disappointing that this may be the end of newer-gen Switch hacking. At least from what I understand, their modchip was the only way to hack newer Switch consoles. While I don't condone piracy, not being able to run homebrew is a huge loss.

I have always believed that a computing device is only yours if you can freely run custom software. If you can only run official software and nothing else, it is not truly your device. I would have stopped buying Nintendo consoles long ago for this reason, but I like a lot of the Nintendo-exclusive game franchises.
 

fluggy2013

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I love SX OS and I'm not bothered about switching to Atmo. USB loading is its best feature. I've only found half a dozen new games that don't actually work with SXOS so far, despite claims that new games only work on Switch fw12 and 13. A certain video game company's time would be better served in protecting its own property by not releasing consoles with chipsets that have known, unpatchable vulneralities. ALL new Nintendo published games (Dread/Mario Party etc) seem to still work on SXOS for some baffling reason while a few 3rd party games don't. I think in filing this law suit against the TX team, all they've succeeded in doing is a, made SXOS adopters switch to Atmo or b.. Even worse, made them switch to readily available PC Switch emulation.
 
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mikefor20

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I love SX OS and I'm not bothered about switching to Atmo. USB loading is its best feature. I've only found half a dozen new games that don't actually work with SXOS so far, despite claims that new games only work on Switch fw12 and 13. A certain video game company's time would be better served in protecting its own property by not releasing consoles with chipsets that have known, unpatchable vulneralities. ALL new Nintendo published games (Dread/Mario Party etc) seem to still work on SXOS for some baffling reason while a few 3rd party games don't. I think in filing this law suit against the TX team, all they've succeeded in doing is a, made SXOS adopters switch to Atmo or b.. Even worse, made them switch to readily available PC Switch emulation.
Why switch? Use both!
 

mspy

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Most of the hate TX gets is due to the fact that their products are not free and since the target audience of said products are mostly pirates and because pirates don't like to pay for anything, they think TX is extorting them.

Pirates really think they are entitled to have everything for free and can't stand to see a pirate operation making money on their account.

The thing is that without the money incentive we probably would have way less people involved in the hacking scene and consequently less products would be hacked or would simple take more time to be.
Making money also allows for buying hardware and pay up people with the skills to hack a product, that's the main reason why TX was the first and so far only one (excluding clones) who came up with the modchip solution for v2.

Bottom line is if TX was 100% free no one would be hating on them.
 

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How did you brick. Must be USER error
Gateway worked great. It was first too.
Didn't you make a backup?
But they are known to have been putting brick code in their software that bricks your console if you try to run it without their hardware I believe. If I remember correctly... That is just a very shitty move.

Imagine if Nintendo did not block your account but instead bricked your console on purpose if they identified that you were running custom firmware... :D That would be the the same thing pretty much
 
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GamerzHell9137

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He's facing up to 5 years on the plea deal and his co-conspirators are facing up to 20. Always good to see scum brought to justice. Enjoy your time in prison, Gary!
My dude over here has no chill. Who gives a fuck about a multi billion company vs some dude who's hacking Switches?
Damn, chill the fuck down and connect to reality. Acting like he killed someone or something smh.
 
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