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Nintendo issues DMCA takedown notice against over 8,500 Yuzu emulator repositories

4 May 2024 at 07:11

The notice was filed on developer platform GitHub, which Nintendo claimed housed repositories that β€œoffer and provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on [it]” which β€œillegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.”

GitHub said it contacted the owners of the repositories to provide an β€œopportunity to make changes” before taking down the repositories, in addition to providing legal resources and information on how to file counter notices.

↫ Sophie McEvoy at GamesIndustry.biz

The legal troubles around Yuzu are a little nebulous to deal with, as there’s a lot of chatter online that Yuzu contains, or at least used, code from leaked Switch SDKs. If that is indeed true – I haven’t seen any definitive proof yet – then it makes Nintendo’s aggressiveness a lot more understandable, even for someone like me who believes emulation should be 100% legal and accessible.

US Senate passes TikTok ban bill

24 April 2024 at 13:41

A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok β€”Β or else face a US ban of the platform β€” is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure.

It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday.

↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge

I hope the EU follows.

Nina Jankowicz Forms New Group to Defend Disinformation Research

The group intends to fight what its leader, Nina Jankowicz, and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and their allies to undermine researchers who study disinformation.

Β© Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Nina Jankowicz of the American Sunlight Project, a new advocacy group in Washington, D.C., that aims to push back against disinformation online.

EU’s new tech laws are working; small mobile browsers gain market share

10 April 2024 at 17:40

Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies.

The early results come after the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a β€œchoice screen.”

↫ Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee

I can’t believe this is even remotely surprising. A lot of especially Apple fans and people from outside of the European Union complained left, right, and centre about the choice screen and how it was ugly, unnecessary, and would just confuse users. These are interesting claims, considering the fact that setting up a modern smartphone such as the iPhone takes the user through 40-50 setup screens chockful of confusing choices to make, so adding one more surely wouldn’t make a difference.

Of course giving users the option to choose a different default browser would lead to an increase in browsers other than Safari (iOS) or Chrome (Android) being set as the default. I’m pretty sure quite a few users learned, through the choice screen, for the first time, that there even are different browsers to choose from, and that some of those might offer features and benefits they didn’t even know they could enjoy. That’s the whole point of this endeavour: informing users that they have a choice, something Apple, Google, and others would rather you either do not have, or at least not know about.

It’s far too early to tell if these spikes are a one-off thing, or if the rise in browsers other than Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android is more structural. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the latter, and even if the numbers remain in the single digits or low double digits, it will still lead to an increase in competition, and a more vibrant mobile browser market.

Good news, regardless.

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