When Nintendo locks you off their online services, you get no refunds. No prorate for the subscription, no refunds on the digital games you can't play, nothing. They keep it all and you can't play it.

That came out a while back right here on Slashdot. Though if you have links that say otherwise, I would be happy to be proven wrong on these points.

Oh, it's not as risky as it sounds. The studios use "Hollywood Accounting" tricks to make it appear as if they are losing money when in fact they are raking it in. These gross numbers are just part of the smoke-and-mirrors.

I don't know what these tricks actually are, of course, as I am not in a position to know. But I have read that they are along the lines of: part of making this movie involves building a bunch of wooden props. So the studio contracts with a company to build those props. The company is entirely owned by the same people who own the studio, so the bulk of that money was actually just shuffled from one pocket into the other, with a paltry percentage of it spent on actually paying the employees. So now it looks like they just spent a few million on props, when really they only spent a hundred thousand or so.

So that whole 900M figure is the lie they tell, that everyone knows is a lie, but everyone accepts as the truth anyway.

I read that they use similar tricks to get out of royalty payments, after the fact, apparently. It has something to do with the different ways the royalty agreements are worded. Like, so long as they own the rights to the movie, they must pay royalties on whatever they make from views. But if they sell the rights, then they have to pay some royalties on the profits from that sale, and then that's it, the royalty payments are done, they don't transfer, the story is over. So they just sell the movie to a different company they also own, at a loss, and laugh all the way to the bank.

I don't really have evidence that these things are true, but it seems to be a "given" among those in the know that this and things like this are standard operating procedure in the movie industry.

I agree completely: vote with wallet.

But there is no reason to stop there. There is no harm at all in communicating with the company and sharing your grievances with them. Sometimes a company's interest in keeping its customers happy motivates response to such grievances (Ubuntu is the first company that comes to mind. They very quickly switched gears on important decisions when their user base complained.).

There is also no harm in engaging with the community of users to discuss the issues.

And, where applicable, it is entirely appropriate to push legislation to force companies to behave. Especially in a market dominated by huge multinational giants with a disproportionate amount of negotiating leverage.

They blocked a bunch of games that the user purchased digitally from Nintendo, and Nintendo knows for a fact this is true. Those games were not relevant to the duplicate license issue at all. Blocking access to THOSE games is way too heavy handed and not remotely a "good compromise."

None of your points counter mine.

1) The unique ID and encryption scheme also exist for SECURITY.

Yeah, so? We aren't talking about modders or the running of compromised code here. We are talking about a duplicated license, and what the right response is. Blocking just that game, as I proposed, is a much more reasonable response than denying a person access to all their digital purchases which Nintendo knows for a fact they purchased.

2) Online cheating ruins gaming for everybody.

We aren't talking about online cheating. That is utterly irrelevant.

3) You MUST block risky code.

In this case, there was no risky code. Nintendo did not detect anything of the sort. There was a duplicated license and, in this case, the punished user is the one who held the legit license. This point has no relevance at all.

4) There is no business if everybody just copies it.

My proposal of just block the copy (and not the entire account) resolves this completely, without over-punishing innocent users. Furthermore, there is precisely zero evidence that "everyone will just copy it." The evidence is exactly the opposite in fact: popular games make a fortune even if people can (and do) copy them. So your implied hypothesis that "everyone" will copy it is false and refuted by data.

5) Nintendo tried to create virtual game sharing

So what? This feature was not involved in this case and its existence has no bearing on the over-severity of this punishment, for unproven guilt.

Google is free to shutdown your whole life and delete everything permanently

Only for the unpaid online services. Paying customers get better support. In this case, we are talking about legit purchased hardware plus a legit purchased physical game cartridge. This is a complete apples-to-oranges false equivalence. And in any event, Google's penchant for shutting people out of their digital lives without fair trial is precisely why I don't use Google's free services, nor should anyone else for anything important.

Apple likely....

Your pure speculation bears no relevance on this issue.

Just because they do not (unless you are a falsely accused pedophile) does not mean it will not happen

Which does not make it ok. US law was written to prevent "guilty until proven innocent" behavior for very good reasons, and all of those reasons apply here too. The reasons you gave do not.

The punishment is way too severe, given that guilt has not been established. Especially since someone might not be able to provide the requested screenshots after the fact.

At most, Nintendo should block just that game, not the person's entire account.

The right of first sale is also important, and if this enforcement approach winds up making an end-run around that right, then that is a spirit-of-the-law violation (though I am not a lawyer and have no ideal how that would hold up legally).

So, I really don't care if Nintendo might be vulnerable to victimization from copyright infringement; this method of protecting themselves from it is far too heavy handed, and punishes their own legitimate customers far too much.

This practice of punish-until-proven-innocent also creates fear about buying used games. Its a totally legitimate and legal practice that Nintendo wants to discourage, because they want you to buy new copies at full price, where Nintendo gets all the money, instead of a used copy, where Nintendo gets none of the money.

So now, any time you buy a used copy, you risk the ban-hammer. Better buy a new copy instead. You know, like all honest people should.

You could break shopping out to yet-another device, but generally speaking you don't need to.

Services like paypal help you protect your credit card number. And also, even if you do get your credit card stolen, you can just dispute the charges and get the money back. If this happens a lot that's a problem of course, but the industry is built to tolerate this level of crime so long as it isn't excessive.

It helps if you do things like clear you cookies every time you close the browser, so session hijacking is a lot harder. But this is not very convenient. You could maybe do all your shopping on one browser that clears cookies and other web browsing on another.

No solution is perfect, it's all a matter of finding your right balance. But maximum vulnerability to hackers probably isn't it.

You load 16 tons, how do you feel? Too tired to work and too scared to steal.

I expect that colleges have seen a significant reduction in the number of students enrolling in Computer Science and Software Engineering programs, because AI has scared the students away.

Colleges want that enrollment money. They have already been watering down the curriculum year-after-year so that the difficulty would stop scaring potential students away (the fact that many of their graduates couldn't code themselves out of a brown paper bag notwithstanding). So now they are just continuing that process, looking at a way to promise "something relevant" to get students continuing to enroll.

So this statement is really just advertising. They are trying to align with what young people are thinking and expecting, so they can get the enrollment money from them. Whether it is true or not really doesn't matter. It's just marketing.

This is why people should practice "device segregation" if they can afford to do so.

It means you have one computer that you use for online banking, investing, and tax filing.

A separate computer is for gaming, shopping, and browsing online.

This way, even if you get hacked though the sorts of risky activities that involve installing a lot of software that runs locally, and roaming around the open internet, the hackers won't steal anything related to your nest egg. Or your social security number.

The good news here is you can do online banking, investing, and tax filing on a low-powered laptop, so it doesn't need to be pricy.

Does Amazon pay more than its competitors?

Between this and the mandatory RTO policy, I am having a hard time understanding how Amazon manages to retain top tier talent.

countdown to the irrelevance of humanity.

Who says humanity was ever relevant to anything? We are just a bunch of ugly bags of mostly water on a little micro-planet out in the backwaters of the galaxy.

So we can use computers to create art instead of creating it manually. Does that somehow rob us of an existential purpose that we previously had?

No. We are perhaps making human creators irrelevant as laborers (irrelevant, that is, to us), but that really isn't much of a change from a big-picture perspective. Maybe our economic models will change a bit. Maybe the rich/poor divide will worsen. For the most part, that's all just the same lyrics sung to a slightly different tune.

if they were actually mining bitcoins or something, then at least the environmental cost would have some sort of useful return.

Oh man, why didn't that post get +5 Funny?

So what? Apparently no one else thought to use this solution for this problem until Xe Iaso came along.

I, for one, think this is awesome, and I am happy she made it. Maybe there will be an arms race. Well, in that case, I am glad she is on our side.

My hat is off to you, Xe Iaso.