Nintendo is back at it again with their latest and most well known franchise, the DMCA, and this time they went after quite a handful of GitHub repositories with their DMCA strikes.

The latest and most notable repository attacked by Nintendo's DMCA is the "sigpatch-updater" homebrew application by iTotalJustice (alongside all of its forks) just a few days ago. This isn't the first time for iTotalJustice however, since he got another DMCA takedown previously for the standalone "sipatches" repository before back in 2022. The application worked as its title implies, by basically updating the signature patches from within the Nintendo Switch console itself. This seems like yet another instance of Nintendo trying to stomp on any kind of possibility to run unsigned software on a homebrewed Nintendo Switch, be it actual homebrew applications or pirated ones. Even though the source code is down, the patcher itself seems to still be hosted in other websites, alongside other DMCA taken-down tools.

Unfortunately, "sigpatch-updater" isn't the only software hit with the latest attacks by Nintendo and its crusade against copyright-circumvention tactics, as Incognito_RCM by ScandalUK (this one still being live at the time of writing), kezplez-nx by shchmue, and another fork of Lockpick_RCM by SpaceNX have also been the target for Nintendo's DMCA, adding up to the instances of Nintendo going after homebrew projects for the Nintendo Switch, with one of the first reported being the original Lockpick_RCM, which got being taken down last year with a DMCA notice by Nintendo's lawyers, claiming the same copyright circumvention tactic.

With all of the current legal events taking place in regards to Nintendo both in regards to homebrew apps and Switch emulator Yuzu, it's most likely that they will continue to scour the internet and GitHub repositories for any kind of semblance of alleged copyright-circumvention methods, applications, or even guides to dump Switch keys of any sort. The legal clarity regarding fair and personal use when it comes to copyright-protected technological devices are still unclear to make any kind of counter-claim against their DMCA notices.

iTotalJustice GitHub
DMCA notice for the "sigpatch-updater" repository
DMCA notices for Lockpick_RCM, Incognito_RCM and kezplez-nx
"sigpatch-updater" backup at Archive.org

 

[DaniPoo]

Sorry to tell you I don't suck corporate dick, I'll leave that to you.

I would care less if this company goes down under, from the amount of shenanigans they do they well deserve to go bankrupt. Not a single tear will shed. Another company hopefully will rise up from the ashes to fulfill that void and for the better.

Really? You want Nintendo to go bankrupt because they are fighting back against piracy?
You rather have legendary titles disappear and loads of people loosing their jobs because you can't pirate their games?

Sounds like you're just very selfish.

Luckily Nintendo won't go bankrupt, although had the Switch not been so successful following the WiiU, who knows what could have happened.

Remember, piracy is probably the main reason why Sony abandoned the handheld market.
The PSP and the PSVita was extremely plagued by piracy, especially the PSP.

The PSP sold well, however the games didn't, to attempt to fight piracy on the Vita they made a proprietary memory card, however that backfired due to the cost of the card + the cost of the system.

It should have been possible for them to compete with the DS and 3DS but piracy and pricing made it too difficult to keep up.

And that's the reason Sony gave up on the handheld market. Are you happy about that?

 

[TomSwitch]

I would care less if this company goes down under,

You Australian? Never heard of piracy would make company go there.

I support Australian wine. Not sure about video games.

Also heard that their pension is nice.

 

[raging_chaos]

The only bad pirates are the ones who brag online that they’re a pirate and get stuff like Yuzu shut down.

Nailed it 100%. Everything was always better off when people stuck to a "Fight Club" mindset and didn't talk about it so openly with guides and tweets. The names were redacted in the DMCA notice that GitHub showed but it's probably a safe bet to say this website was one of the names tossed when Nintendo was stating the names of sites with guides that show people how to do this stuff.

 

[SaberLilly]

playing devil's advocate, a lot of the stuff they DMCAed this time is used for pirating games. i'm all for companies legitimately protecting what's theirs.

this does not mean that i don't pirate nintendo games you can't buy from them anymore though.

 

[Danook28]

Shallow. sea!!!! Dowen!!!!! No way!!!!

 

[Hassal]

Really? You want Nintendo to go bankrupt because they are fighting back against piracy?
You rather have legendary titles disappear and loads of people loosing their jobs because you can't pirate their games?

Sounds like you're just very selfish.

Luckily Nintendo won't go bankrupt, although had the Switch not been so successful following the WiiU, who knows what could have happened.

Remember, piracy is probably the main reason why Sony abandoned the handheld market.
The PSP and the PSVita was extremely plagued by piracy, especially the PSP.

The PSP sold well, however the games didn't, to attempt to fight piracy on the Vita they made a proprietary memory card, however that backfired due to the cost of the card + the cost of the system.

It should have been possible for them to compete with the DS and 3DS but piracy and pricing made it too difficult to keep up.

And that's the reason Sony gave up on the handheld market. Are you happy about that?

You sound like that corporate guy that would attend every financial meeting to blame their poor performance on piracy.

Failure of the Sony handheld wasn't piracy but the incompetence of the company itself. They launched the handheld with hardly any first party support. They left it for 3rd party developers thinking someone else can do the heavy lifting for them but they got bitten in their asses when devs started losing faith in it. If the captain abandons his ship what do you think would happen? Again they are repeating the same story with PSVR2 hardly ANY first party game that would sell the unit.

So please stop your BS that piracy is the problem with the industry.

 

[Kioku]

Really? You want Nintendo to go bankrupt because they are fighting back against piracy?
You rather have legendary titles disappear and loads of people loosing their jobs because you can't pirate their games?

Sounds like you're just very selfish.

Luckily Nintendo won't go bankrupt, although had the Switch not been so successful following the WiiU, who knows what could have happened.

Remember, piracy is probably the main reason why Sony abandoned the handheld market.
The PSP and the PSVita was extremely plagued by piracy, especially the PSP.

The PSP sold well, however the games didn't, to attempt to fight piracy on the Vita they made a proprietary memory card, however that backfired due to the cost of the card + the cost of the system.

It should have been possible for them to compete with the DS and 3DS but piracy and pricing made it too difficult to keep up.

And that's the reason Sony gave up on the handheld market. Are you happy about that?

The dumbest post I'll read today. Sony grossly mishandled the Vita, especially after the aggressive marketing they had at the beginning. It has nothing to do with piracy. They fumbled hard, themselves. The PSP was a renowned success, nothing points to the opposite being true, even less that piracy impacted the system. If this were AT ALL the case, then tell me why the DS did so damn well.

 

[DaniPoo]

Sounds like you're just very selfish then

The dumbest post I'll read today. Sony grossly mishandled the Vita, especially after the aggressive marketing they had at the beginning. It has nothing to do with piracy. They fumbled hard, themselves. The PSP was a renowned success, nothing points to the opposite being true, even less that piracy impacted the system. If this were AT ALL the case, then tell me why the DS did so damn well.

The PS Vita's biggest flaw was the proprietary storage solution, that's the complaint you hear everywhere and that was obviously an attempt to hinder piracy, because any way for the enduser to put custom data on a console could potentially be a weak point. That's why they went proprietary, so that you wouldn't be able to just put a MicroSD card into a PC and load it up with exploits (like how it was done on the PSP.

Yes the PSP hardware sold well however the games didn't sell that great, and piracy was the main reason why.
The PSP was ridiculously easy to hack, a lot of people bought the machine just for that reason.

The DS was a different story, because it was marketed mainly towards children, children who didn't know about flashcards.
Sure there was a huge amount of pirates there as well, but because of the huge number of consoles sold and the fact that most owners were children makes me believe that comparably the pirates was a very small percentage of all the customers.

Still nintendo tried fighting off the flashcards during the DS era (Which was within their right to do)

The PSP and the PS Vita however was marketed towards older kid, teenagers and adult, people who are more likely to hack their system if it's easy enough to do. The PSP hacking scene was huge and the PSVita was expected to get a huge hacking scene as well. I had friends buying the Vita at launch and placed it on a shelf until the day someone would release a CFW for it.
And almost everyone who is today holding on to their Vita and praise it has also hacked it (some running legal hombrew software only, some playing pirated games).

I am not against hacking and running hombrew applications, I am against piracy.

Post automatically merged: Mar 20, 2024

You sound like that corporate guy that would attend every financial meeting to blame their poor performance on piracy.

Failure of the Sony handheld wasn't piracy but the incompetence of the company itself. They launched the handheld with hardly any first party support. They left it for 3rd party developers thinking someone else can do the heavy lifting for them but they got bitten in their asses when devs started losing faith in it. If the captain abandons his ship what do you think would happen? Again they are repeating the same story with PSVR2 hardly ANY first party game that would sell the unit.

So please stop your BS that piracy is the problem with the industry.

You sound like you have a personal grudge with corporations in general and just want to see them all burn.

People like you will always try to find arguments to defend piracy at all cost.
Sony had decent first party support on both their handheld.

And 3rd party was great on the PSP at least, but I think many devs were uncertain about the Vita, seeing how many people pirated their games on the PSP.

The PSVR2 is a different story, Yes it's not great in terms of 1st party support, and it was especially bad at launch.
Seems better now though, however VR is a niche market they obviously spend more resources on their main market which is the PS5. And that makes perfect sense from a business perspective.
Still I agree that the PSVR2 library is underwhelming and I am not blaming that on piracy obviously.

It's not like I blame everything on piracy, but some things I do blame it on piracy (Or at least partially)

 

[tsam2]

Really? You want Nintendo to go bankrupt because they are fighting back against piracy?
You rather have legendary titles disappear and loads of people loosing their jobs because you can't pirate their games?

Sounds like you're just very selfish.

Luckily Nintendo won't go bankrupt, although had the Switch not been so successful following the WiiU, who knows what could have happened.

Remember, piracy is probably the main reason why Sony abandoned the handheld market.
The PSP and the PSVita was extremely plagued by piracy, especially the PSP.

The PSP sold well, however the games didn't, to attempt to fight piracy on the Vita they made a proprietary memory card, however that backfired due to the cost of the card + the cost of the system.

It should have been possible for them to compete with the DS and 3DS but piracy and pricing made it too difficult to keep up.

And that's the reason Sony gave up on the handheld market. Are you happy about that?

The psp was a success despite piracy. The PSVita was not a success (in fact a well known commercial failure), not because of the piracy but for it's high price in the beginning and sony's lack of support. Starting price at 250 $ while at the same time you could buy a ps3 with 270$.

 

[Maximumbeans]

Starting to feel like when Reggie left, much of the competency to make a good product left with him.

Feels like 'if it's not fun, why bother?' has slowly become 'if it's only fun, why bother?'.

 

[DaniPoo]

The psp was a success despite piracy. The PSVita was not a success (in fact a well known commercial failure), not because of the piracy but for it's high price in the beginning and sony's lack of support. Starting price at 250 $ while at the same time you could buy a ps3 with 270$.

There's truth in what you are saying, but there's truth in what you're not saying too.

Yes the PSP hardware was successful, but it's no secret that Playstation fought tooth and nails with the hackers like Dark Alex and more to prevent piracy, costly work no doubt, on top of that, there was many rom hosting sites spreading PSP iso files back then with huge number of downloads every day. people pirated like crazy in the PSP.

Many people bought the PSP to pirate games on it.

So even if the hardware sold well, the game sales were affected, that wasn't only a problem for Sony, it was even more of a problem for third parties.

And most of the exploit on the PSP started with the pro duo memory card.. Whether it was a modified save file, a modified TIF file, Pandora Battery and Magic Memory Card or a signed file that exploited the system. the memory card access was usually the entry point for starting exploits.

I can't see any other reason why Sony switched to proprietary storage solution for the Vita.
And yes I already mentioned that one of the reasons the Vita failed was due to cost.
But the super expensive proprietary memory card is I believe that was the last dealbreaker.
And the way I see it, that's something we have the pirates to thank for.

 

[petran79]

It is to wonder why Nintendo's website has not been hacked yet to send a message

 

[Tomtani1]

It is to wonder why Nintendo's website has not been hacked yet to send a message

I hope Anonymous is working on this.

 

[Kioku]

It is to wonder why Nintendo's website has not been hacked yet to send a message

For what, though? At the end of the day, our personal feelings don't matter here.

 

[subcon959]

There's truth in what you are saying, but there's truth in what you're not saying too.

Yes the PSP hardware was successful, but it's no secret that Playstation fought tooth and nails with the hackers like Dark Alex and more to prevent piracy, costly work no doubt, on top of that, there was many rom hosting sites spreading PSP iso files back then with huge number of downloads every day. people pirated like crazy in the PSP.

Many people bought the PSP to pirate games on it.

So even if the hardware sold well, the game sales were affected, that wasn't only a problem for Sony, it was even more of a problem for third parties.

And most of the exploit on the PSP started with the pro duo memory card.. Whether it was a modified save file, a modified TIF file, Pandora Battery and Magic Memory Card or a signed file that exploited the system. the memory card access was usually the entry point for starting exploits.

I can't see any other reason why Sony switched to proprietary storage solution for the Vita.
And yes I already mentioned that one of the reasons the Vita failed was due to cost.
But the super expensive proprietary memory card is I believe that was the last dealbreaker.
And the way I see it, that's something we have the pirates to thank for.

If you stop and think for a minute, it's almost obvious that every handheld with massive sales was in part because of ease of piracy. No one from your side will ever admit that though. You even convinced yourself that only kids bought the DS so it can't have been for piracy.. do you know how enormous the flash card industry was for the DS?

 

[Bladexdsl]

do you know how enormous the flash card industry was for the DS?

yep had one for the original ds all you needed was one official game to plug into it and an sd card than plug into the cartridge slot and away you go. only ever bought one game for the ds it's whole life

 

[CaliousKai]

Nintendo with their DMCA Strikes again...

Why not wait until the console has lost support and not hack it when the system still has support? Because nintendo will keep shutting it down paitence wont kill you. i understand bragging rights but its pointless if its getting patched all the time

 

[DaniPoo]

If you stop and think for a minute, it's almost obvious that every handheld with massive sales was in part because of ease of piracy. No one from your side will ever admit that though. You even convinced yourself that only kids bought the DS so it can't have been for piracy.. do you know how enormous the flash card industry was for the DS?

I never said that only kids bought the DS, I said that it was mainly marketed for kids, and I think the vast majority of DS were owned by children. But I am fully aware of how massive the flashcard market was for the DS.
But we're talking a console right now that sold 154.02 million units. even if only 5% used flashcards that would be +7 million flashcards sold.

Imagine then how much money the flashcard industry has made.
Not to mention how much money was lost to piracy if each flashcard owner pirated multiple games.
7 million x (the cost of games)

I'm not going to lie, I don't have the exact numbers so just look at that as a potentially possible figure.

But the fact that you even admit that the flashcard industry was enormous but refuse to admit the problem in it is kind of funny.

It's absolutely pointless trying to defend piracy and trying to paint it in the light of being a good thing.
Even if the console hardware sells well the console can still be damaged by poor game sales and discouraged game developers.
Historically game developers have complained about piracy and even tried implementing their own anti-piracy measures.
So it's not only hurting Nintendo but game studios as well.


Piracy IS illegal, so no matter what argument you may throw at me, the law is on my side. (unless you live in Russia I guess, but that's probably just a temporary thing)

 

[Hassal]

I never said that only kids bought the DS, I said that it was mainly marketed for kids, and I think the vast majority of DS were owned by children. But I am fully aware of how massive the flashcard market was for the DS.
But we're talking a console right now that sold 154.02 million units. even if only 5% used flashcards that would be +7 million flashcards sold.

Imagine then how much money the flashcard industry has made.
Not to mention how much money was lost to piracy if each flashcard owner pirated multiple games.
7 million x (the cost of games)

I'm not going to lie, I don't have the exact numbers so just look at that as a potentially possible figure.

But the fact that you even admit that the flashcard industry was enormous but refuse to admit the problem in it is kind of funny.

It's absolutely pointless trying to defend piracy and trying to paint it in the light of being a good thing.
Even if the console hardware sells well the console can still be damaged by poor game sales and discouraged game developers.
Historically game developers have complained about piracy and even tried implementing their own anti-piracy measures.
So it's not only hurting Nintendo but game studios as well.


Piracy IS illegal, so no matter what argument you may throw at me, the law is on my side. (unless you live in Russia I guess, but that's probably just a temporary thing)

Yada yada, more baseless claims. You cannot realize profits you were never going to earn in the first place. Pirates already made up their mind if they are going to buy the products, you will never force people to buy something EVER regardless if you push against with anti measures.

 

[ShadowOne333]

Can we please stop using Github, owned by Microsoft - an US corporation? It is getting ridiculous at this point.

List of alternatives;
https://codeberg.org/ - Germany
https://framagit.org/ - France (by Framasoft)
https://gitee.com/ - China. Good luck taking this one down. Shitendo can't do sh*t against China
https://gitflic.ru/ - Russia. Good luck with this one also

GitLab is not an alternative, since it is US based.

I wouldn't trust EU-based repositories neither, since they're also subjected to GPDR crap and most likely also can be DMCA'd.
Gitee and Gitflic on the other hand... Now those are interesting. I've been forever searching for a GitHub equivalent based in Russia, but this is the first time I heard about it, and having one in China is also a plus.

How good and reliable are those two when compared to GitHub? Can they be handled with "git" in a normal computer (or in Linux terminal)?
I'm more inclined to GitFlic for archival purposes, in case anything else gets taken down from GitHub.