MudMan

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.

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.

I am remarkably annoyed by this guy making predictions on measurable things that he then entirely vibe-checks.

It is entirely possible that the entire construct of copyright just isn’t fit to regulate this and the “right to train” or to avoid training needs to be formulated separately.

The maximalist, knee-jerk assumption that all AI training is copying is feeding into the interests of, ironically, a bunch of AI companies. That doesn’t mean that actual authors and artists don’t have an interest in regulating this space.

The big takeaway, in my book, is copyright is finally broken beyond all usability. Let’s scrap it and start over with the media landscape we actually have, not the eighteenth century version of it.

Less bad, maybe?

Either way it’s definitely a good example of why you should write good emails to your customers that explain things properly.

If this is what they’re saying I’m assuming they didn’t want to be too clear about what info they’re storing if you don’t opt out and ended up making an email that sounds like a threat.

Either way I won’t be using Gemini as an assistant any time soon. Or any other voice assistant, for that matter.

Right. They have an opt-out for Gemini storing your in-app activity, which I believe is a requirement to get the assistant to be able to do things in the app. This seems to say you may be able to interact with some messaging apps even if you opt out (presumably they would have a rebuilt way to interact with those that doesn’t store any of your data?).

So there’s an opt-out.

The article seems concerned that the email announcing this doesn’t include a specific path to the opt-out right in the email (which is a weird concern, considering the email provides two links to… presumably that information)?

I’m not sure what this means, either, but it seems the “whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off” line is saying that you can still have Gemini send texts for you even if you disable Google storing your apps usage server-side? I don’t use Gemini as an assistant, so I’m not sure, but looking at the Gemini settings menu on my Android phone that’s what it seems to map to.

I guess it depends on how much you do your homework. I just spent a while listening to Satya Nadella regurgitate self-congratulatory CEO-speak just to verify that yes, indeed, this link is gargbage. I feel entitled to at least a bit of resentment for that.

Ironically, the time I spent doing this was much shorter because the podcast that originates the blatant misquote has an AI-generated searchable transcript.

He doesn’t. He says he cares more about generating growth (and thus presumably revenue) than about AGI.

Also, this thing is from February.

Social media sucks. Reporting on reporting sucks. News aggregators suck.

AI may suck, but it’s definitely not alone in being shitty. We’re all clearly very good at tool-less, artisanal misinformation.

This may be a regional concern. Google has very outdated information where I am, too. You definitely don’t want to default to Google Maps to know if something is open here unless you want to show up to a closed business, and for learning where a place is so you can go look it up on their site they are all mostly interchangeable.

I mean… Organic sorta works, although apparently there’s a new fork and some drama around it? If you’re less hardcore DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.

But yeah, if you’re already in a 19:10 display you generally won’t want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It’s probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.

Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We’re in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.