this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.

Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

Since there's now legal precedent, and GitHub already has the signatures of the project code, they will simply now close down any fork that matches the code signatures to avoid getting sued by Nintendo as well.

Hopefully someone forked it to a completely different self-hosted GitHub-like instance or the other GitHub alternatives.

[–] cm0002 92 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's no legal precedent, it was settled out of court

[–] Jarix 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Court cases shouldn't be allowed to be settled out of court after a certain point.

[–] cm0002 -1 points 8 months ago

Wym? Nintendo formerly filed the lawsuit just a few days ago and then Yuzu rolled right over...

I mean I get it, but if they had 2Mil to settle, they could have fought Nintendo, I know that 2 million wouldn't have seen them to the end, but im sure an organization like EFF could have assisted from there

[–] pivot_root 33 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The repository removal was voluntary and done by the Yuzu team. GitHub doesn't have to do anything and won't do anything. Even when they receive a DMCA takedown, they only block forks made through GitHub's "fork" button.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It wasn't voluntary, it was part of the settlement.

[–] pivot_root 5 points 8 months ago

Voluntary from the perspective of GitHub. If it was through a DMCA request, all the forks would be gone with it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Oh there will be forks across the git-verse. There's no way there wouldn't be.

Also does this create precedent? - they settled, its not like it actually went to court.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

There isn't a legal precedent. Unless I misunderstood, this is a settlement and settlements aren't! Legal precedent. Which is why big e.g. pharma likes them, because then they don't have the legal precedent for the next case.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

It would be better to "git clone" a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It's possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.

That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It would be possible to create a dummy "salt" commit and rebase every the branch onto it. The content would effectively be the same, but each commit hash would differ.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@0x0 Why do you think they only check the commit hash?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I don't? You can apply a similar technique to bust file hashes. Add a new comment to each source file, or whatever.

My point is that automated methods to detect unwanted content will only get GitHub so far. It will have to be fuzzy, and that means it's an arms race between detectors and obfuscators.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

how are the signatures build? do they just use a sha hash for checking file identity?