Gary Bowser, of Team Xecuter infamy, is still serving his three-year prison sentence. The storied court battle may be over, but a new court transcript was released, and uploaded online, courtesy of Axios. In it, is further official comments from Nintendo's lawyers. According to the document, Nintendo's legal team wanted to use the TX case to send a message to other would-be hackers or those in the piracy business. During the proceedings, US district judge Robert Lasnik asked Nintendo's lawyers, "What do you think? What else can we do to convince people that there's no glory in this hacking/piracy?", with Nintendo's side responding, "There would be a large benefit to further education of the public."

Lasnik agreed with the sentiment, though he did not sentence Bowser to the full 5 years that Nintendo was seeking. "I always tell the jurors, 'Your role is not to send a message. Your role is to decide guilt or innocence on the facts'. But my role sometimes does entail sending a message." In response, Bowser said that giving him a longer sentence wouldn't be a deterrent to hackers, stating, “There’s so much money to be made from piracy that it’s insignificant.”

Additionally, the legal documents also reveal that Nintendo blamed hackers for the release of the new Nintendo Switch model, saying they had to design new hardware to circumvent the losses caused by TX. Nintendo's legal team also claimed that those using hacked systems could cheat, thus scaring off children who would lose to the cheaters and feel upset. “Parents should not be forced to explain to their children why people cheat and why sometimes games are not fair, just because one person wants an unfair advantage.”

2) According to the hacker Gary Bowser's lawyer, much of the time Bowser already served while awaiting sentencing was spent in de facto solitary confinement due to Covid and other health issues pic.twitter.com/BezqOq2oeZ

— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) June 7, 2022

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Regarding the means of "sending a message", Bowser's lawyers sought a shorter 19-month sentence, to which Lasnik disagreed, and eventually sentenced Bowser to serve 40 months. The amount sentenced would have initially been 60 months, but was shortened due to the fact that Bowser suffered health issues as he awaited trial in jail, which caused him to be alone in solitary for 23 hours a day over the course of six months. As this also took place during the height of COVID, Bowser would only be allowed out of his cell to shower once every three days. He also had lost 90 pounds over those six months, and was confined to a wheelchair, as a result of his illness going untreated.

This was Bowser's statement regarding the above: "It has been a very traumatic experience for me getting arrested, coming here, going through this. This is my first time actually in a jail going through the court process and everything. And the amount of time I've spent already, 16 months in custody, a lot of that time - I spent six months, basically, locked up due to Covid. I went through all three of the Covid waves before there was even a vaccine available. I personally haven't got the vaccine [as] I am skeptical with my medical condition, how it will affect me, and I haven't been able to actually have proper medical treatment because I haven't been able to have a one-on-one with a doctor to see if the vaccine would be possible with my health conditions. When I first got arrested, I was 410 pounds. I had to use a wheelchair. I spent my life drinking, since I was age 15, after my mom died, and this is the longest time I have been sober in my life."

Source

 

[The Catboy]

There was no known exploit when it was released.

Looked it up real quick and looks like my memory was mistaken.

 

[Elodain]

They had to change their hardware if they didn't want people using SX with it,

Except every Switch is vulnerable to the same chip. They either failed miserably at their goal or that's a fib they used to demonize Gary even more.

 

[phonemonkey]

If you don't want your health to be at risk in prison, don't willfully violate the law repeatedly. He's right where he should be, and is getting free healthcare.

Lmao. I thought we defeated the nazis in WWII.

 

[codezer0]

Lmao. I thought we defeated the nazis in WWII.

They're kept alive by edgelords who descended from Confederate families that still want to grind the metaphysical Axe.

 

[smf]

But the chip doesn't exploit Fuse Gelee, which is what Nintendo is trying accuse TX of them having to release new hardware (patched models) to fix.

How do you know they aren't talking about the fuse gelee dongles that TX were selling?

Lmao. I thought we defeated the nazis in WWII.

Far right attitudes are alive in the US and Russia.

 

[Marc_LFD]

When I first got arrested, I was 410 pounds

Let's blame the real thing here, not Covid.

Far right attitudes are alive in the US and Russia.

Nazis were national socialists, so it's more to the left than right.

I'm just tired of playing that "game." Rather not be associated with either side.

 

[slaphappygamer]

Did the Nazis give free health care to the Jews before OR after the book burnings?

This thread has gone to shit.

 

[porkiewpyne]

Just a gentle reminder to keep politics out of this thread. For your daily name-calling, poop-flinging, salt-inducing shenanigans, the politics subforum is THAT way

 

[CompSciOrBust]

Not really because Atmosphere is used for piracy too. Maybe not out of the box but it takes literally five seconds to make it piracy capable, and it's not like Devs are doing anything to stop sigpatches from working. In the corrupt court that Sent TX's PR guy up the river like he was the sole responsible person, all Ninty probably has to do is say "Not trying to prevent piracy is enabling piracy" and it would fly.

But the chip doesn't exploit Fuse Gelee, which is what Nintendo is trying accuse TX of them having to release new hardware (patched models) to fix.

Despite the fact that Fuse Gelee is a flaw in the Nvidia Tegra X1, effects many other devices using said chip, and has nothing to do with the Switch itself.

Nor was it even discovered by TX, according to my research.

On January 2nd Xecuter was the first team to publicly show CFW running on a Switch in this video:

In the video a Switch can be seen booting an early version of SXOS via BCT glitching.

Fail0verflow then saw this video and were like "oh shit oh fuck we better show off our exploit" and on January 7th / 16th released this on Twitter:

In their video they show off ShofEL2 AKA Fusee-Gelee

Seeing that two other teams had unpatchable boot-time exploits made ReSwitched realize they were falling behind so they set to work on dumping and then reverse engineering the Tegra bootrom. On February 17th, over a month after the other two announcements Kate Temkin (formerly of ReSwitched) shared this showcase of Fusee-Gelee on her twitter:


Some minor stuff happened after that including Team-S4LT discovering the exploit and SwitchBrew Team fits in there somewhere but never made a formal announcement afaik.

On April 4th Kate released this FAQ: https://www.ktemkin.com/faq-fusee-gelee/
In which she says this:

...I'll tell the community straight up that, unless I'm very much mistaken, I've independently discovered their vulnerability and have exactly equivalent 'stuff'.

Either way, the 'modchip' variant is one of many, and has its own benefits and detriments. I discuss some of the other variants in questions below.

This suggests that Kate was under the impression that TX had Fusee when in reality they had only shown off BCT glitching so far.

At some point TX were like "huh, all these people have methods to hack the console via software. Must be easy... maybe we should look in to that!" and then themselves found Fusee-Gelee.

So basically TX were very sneaky and showed off one exploit which baited other teams in to giving away details of their exploits which TX were then able to use to find Fusee-Gelee themselves. This also meant that the BCT vuln could be saved and was eventually used on Ipatched / Mariko / Lite / OLED consoles. Because TX would obviously never admit to this it means that there is some confusion around this on top of people's memories of what happened in the hacking scene 4+ years ago fading over time.

 

[Dr_Faustus]

Imagine blaming someone else for releasing hardware with a known exploit.

There is a term known as "Don't kill the messenger" which in the tech field can be a gamble scenario if you want to report an exploit but the company/person that has the exploit might see this as you actually hacking/threatening to hack them rather than simply being helpful in letting them know they need to patch their shit.

It happened not too long ago with a government run website which stored its login information in plaintext on the site itself which anyone could see if they ran the "view page source" tab in the browser. The guy who reported it to them got arrested "for hacking the website". Just a shining example of how dumbasses run the world.

the only message heard loud and clear here, is that it's ethically and morally correct to pirate the fuck outta Nintendo.

Even if you don't like the guy, the sentencing was obscene.

This hits the nail right on the head.

I do not care about your beliefs on whether it was right for the guy's team to sell his exploits or not, getting this kind of sentencing is a shit outcome that could impact the tech community as a whole in much more negative ways in the future. I mean what kind of shit outcome this has to be before we can start locking up people for jailbreaking iphones because "it might encourage piracy of apps" bullshit. Shit like this just makes me want to hack my Switch even more.

 

[Xzi]

Jesus, 410 pounds. It's a miracle the man survived one bout with Covid, let alone multiple.

And LOL @ Nintendo bitching about a hardware exploit when they're the ones who went to the bargain bin to grab a bunch of old Nvidia chips that were well on their way to discontinuation. What would really send a message is utilizing both modern hardware and a modern online infrastructure in their next console. Otherwise we'll have it emulated within a year again, two tops.

 

[tglaria]

so... they released the OLED switch because of TX?
Seriously? They want us to believe that?

No, but patched units (¿mariko?) and v2 could have been because of it.
There're some parts which would not have been necessary to redesign if it weren't for this.

 

[Ralkila]

So you're telling me that it is ok to steal intellectual property and profit with other's products and the wrong is being send to prison because you may die?

 

[tglaria]

So you're telling me that it is ok to steal intellectual property and profit with other's products and the wrong is being send to prison because you may die?

Who are you asking?

 

[mituzora]

My 2 cents:

Look, Piracy is not great, we all know that. It causes a lot of problems. However, the way Nintendo is handling this whole debacle is, for a lack of better words, totally fucked.

Let's take a case study of the Steam Deck. It provides to a similar market (Handheld on-the-go console with the ability to be docked up and used when you're not on the go). However, if you choose to install third-party games on it, or god forbid, pirating a game on it, that's on you, and Steam isn't going out of their way to stop users from modifying the software on the console in any capacity (just look at how many videos there are of people installing windows on the damn thing). Hell, they even let you run flatpaks on the system without installing or modifying firmware in any capacity.

The real truth is Nintendo is suing Bowser as a power play to tell consumers and hobbyist/security analyst developers that they have to play in their walled garden, otherwise, they're gonna get screwed. This is very reminiscent of the whole "Apple suing Epic" debacle that happened not too long ago. To put it quite simply, they don't want anything running outside of their walled garden because it takes profit out of their hands; control away from Nintendo and back into the people's hands.

Think about it; Nintendo doesn't want anyone modifying their systems, not for piracy, but for control. and monetary gain. plain and simple. This puts fear into anyone who would even consider developing a game for the switch and not going through the proper channels. The piracy ploy is just Nintendo's "exploit" to kill the homebrew community.

Again, this is all subjective, and opinionated, not really based off of factual evidence, but it's not hard to see that these massive companies want as much control as humanly possible, so they can charge an arm and a leg for licensing fees, and content control and censorship.

 

[smf]

Nazis were national socialists, so it's more to the left than right.

Nazi's had socialist in the name, but they weren't socialist.

https://fullfact.org/online/nazis-socialists/

Putin, despite being a member of the communist party since the USSR days, is also far right wing. Like Hitler was.

 

[smf]

This puts fear into anyone who would even consider developing a game for the switch and not going through the proper channels. The piracy ploy is just Nintendo's "exploit" to kill the homebrew community.

Anyone developing a game that is good enough, will just become a licensed developer and make some $$$

Homebrew is mostly ports though.

Nintendo went after TX because there was money there. As soon as someone is making money, they act.

 

[Marc_LFD]

Nazi's had socialist in the name, but they weren't socialist.

https://fullfact.org/online/nazis-socialists/

Putin, despite being a member of the communist party since the USSR days, is also far right wing. Like Hitler was.

If you want to talk about politics/Nazism (I don't, tbh) then use the section GBA Temp has:

Just a gentle reminder to keep politics out of this thread. For your daily name-calling, poop-flinging, salt-inducing shenanigans, the politics subforum is THAT way

 

[CompSciOrBust]

Anyone developing a game that is good enough, will just become a licensed developer and make some $$$

Homebrew is mostly ports though.

Nintendo went after TX because there was money there. As soon as someone is making money, they act.

I disagree. If every dev just wanted money FOSS wouldn't be a thing. Lots of people out there who just want to build cool shit as a side project but don't want the headache of setting up a business and signing legal papers. Making money from your hobby is nice but if you're already making a lot of money from your day job the extra work of becoming officially licensed may not be worth the hassle.

Edit: Also Nintendo won't give you devkits unless you have a history of releasing games on other platforms (Steam, App Store, etc) and you have to make a GDD which a lot of devs just skip because there is little point if you're just making a game by yourself without a big team. Iirc the dev behind Duck Game talked about quickly throwing together a GDD when talking to Nintendo because he didn't think he'd need one.

 

[mituzora]

I disagree. If every dev just wanted money FOSS wouldn't be a thing. Lots of people out there who just want to build cool shit as a side project but don't want the headache of setting up a business and signing legal papers. Making money from your hobby is nice but if you're already making a lot of money from your day job the extra work of becoming officially licensed may not be worth the hassle.

To add on top of that, not every developer wants to pay 450+ for a dev kit AND join their developer program. It was mentioned earlier in this thread, but look at Iguana developing the Turok series on a piracy-focused piece of hardware for their N64 titles, because it was cheaper, and had more freedom.