I’m gonna say if the OS of a public administration can run while not being updated that’s the OS’s fault and not fit for purpose.
Nothing keeping you from changing that if you manage the distro. But still.
Now that I’m done with my popcorn, I thought the video was fairly even handed.
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.
Just going from the first couple of replies I’m going to go get the popcorn started to count how many people respond without watching the video first.
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?
What, you think any of the stuff he said is expected by his base?
It was never about the stuff he said, it was about how you didn’t have an answer to it he couldn’t counter, so you lose and they win.
What you lose and they win about was never the issue, and there is no consequence to it beyond perhaps the opportunity of another argument they may have a harder time winning, but they know how to win arguments against you, so they’re not particularly worried.
Well, yeah, but so are plenty of other gross things and you don’t see me out there raiding coastal villages just because we’ve spent longer taking things from each other by force than enforcing some peaceful, democratic social contract.
To be clear, I’m not disagreeing, we have tribalism baked into us. It just happens to suck and we should strive to break past our built-in biases.
OK, so the difference is a nationalist is a supremacist and a patriot is not.
So I’m back to my original statement, then. Patriotism sucks. Call it what you want, but allegiance to specifically a nation, nation-state or whatever construct you’re assigning special status is bad and I actively oppose it.
I’m not arguing in bad faith, I’m disagreeing. But you made it seem like we don’t actually disagree and like you had a distinction that made patriotism not match the thing I’m saying is bad, so I want to understand if that’s the case. It doesn’t seem to be the case. You think patriotism is not a problem and think my negative characterization is of nationalism instead.
Let me be clear, it is not.
The patriotism you’re talking about? The lovey-dovey “improve your country and learn from others” patriotism? It sucks. That’s what I’m saying here.
I’m also saying it’s just whitewashed nationalism and that your distinction between supremacist nationalism and patriotic nationalism is superficial at best an non-existent at worst. Sure, not all nationalists or patriots are equally toxic, but that doesn’t mean the concept of patriotism is salvageable into something positive.
You owe no allegiance to your nation, beyond what ties you culturally to the groups of people that live within it. Just like you don’t owe allegiance to your hometown beyond the same concerns. Or, you know, to the planet.
You wanting to improve any one of those scales of human organization isn’t any better or worse than the other, and the mere fact of implying any special relevance to one of them is a brand of nationalism I just don’t find justified. It’s a bit like religion. It can be well-intentioned and genuine, but in the long view of history it is undeniably an irrational, toxic force at the core of many atrocities. I will respect it and your right to participate in it, because the alternative is worse, but I won’t take part in it and I don’t think it’s a good thing.
Things, yeah. National symbology, not as much.
I’ll say that I agree with you, though. Americans do way creepier stuff. The first time I attended a US sporting event it felt exactly like being trapped in some ritual for a religion I don’t understand. They may as well have been ripping off some poor guy’s still beating heart before lowering him into lava and watching it spontaneously burst into flame, for all I cared. I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself for the entire duration of the thing.
I’ve never been to school there, either. I imagine watching a bunch of children recite their daily indoctrinations must be creepy AF. I’m not sure if it actually happens, though. It’s never in American movies.
OK, so it’s just nationalism, then.
I have a real problem trying to wrap my head around where you’re drawing that line. Is the problem that “patriots” honestly believe they’re making things better? Because it seems to me that the difference that leaves between a nationalist and a patriot is whether you agree with them.
From the side of the victors it’s easy to see slightly morally flawed patriots where, had things gone the other way, people would see nationalist zealots.
I’m also surprised at you bringing up left and right divides. There are plenty of violent nationalists across the spectrum. I mean, it’s definitely true that traditional leftists were internationalists (hell, left-wing movements organized in “internationals” and that’s also the name of their anthem). So historically yeah, right wingers are more patriotic/nationalistic, but there’s no shortage of left wing nationalists, either.
I don’t know, man, I struggle to share your very US-centric view, but also to see how anywhere in there is a distinction between those two terms. If patriots are just nationalists you like then you start to sound a lot like one.
The etymology of the term is certainly much older than the nation-state, but also entirely disconnected from modern meanings (or ironic/facetious, which I do appreciate). There is just no original, clean, virtuous instance of “patriot” dislodged from the nationalist undertones. It simply has never existed.
The mistake you’re making is assuming that US revolutionaries weren’t nationalists or were praiseworthy or fundamentally different than British colonists. We’re going to disagree on that one. I mean, never mind that they didn’t invent the term or that their whitewashing of it was self-serving. Even if your timeline of events was true, I despise their patriotism as much as anybody else’s. US revolutionaries weren’t some ideal version of a patriot, they were nationalist independentists who happened to borrow some French revolutionary ideas about the liberal democratic state-nation organization slightly earlier than their previous administration did (and perhaps due to the first draft nature of the thing, slightly worse, too).
I won’t judge them by modern standards, but I also absolutely, entirely refuse to sacralize them or idealize them. They were what they were, and they are absolutely not the thing that’s going to give patriotism a good name.
Well, then what fatherland is the patriot beholden to?
Cause that’s what the word means.
I get it, particularly in countries where the nation state has overlapped more or less perfectly for a long time it’s hard to shed the emotional attachment, but there’s no need for it.
See, the reason I go from small to international is precisely that the nation state takes care of itself. The world has agreed that it’s the natural resting place of sovereignty and every other scale of governance or administration os derived from it. I don’t like that much. I don’t resent it, but I also don’t give it immediate precedence over any other scale of government.
A patriot may care for whatever arbitrary definition the XVIIIth century put on their identity and be well meaning enough about it. I’m not a patriot. The historical borders of what some consider a nation today have no particular relevance, beyond the fact that they happen to drive some level of administration. If anything, it’s the level where the most people decide to infringe on each other’s business just because they feel they have a right to ownership over that national identity. I have no particular interest in whitewashing any of that into some supposedly healthy version of patriotism that has very rarely existed in any way.
That’d be great if it didn’t disagree with all available evidence. For all of history patriots have been either cannon fodder or abusive tyrants. On a long enough trajectory, almost inevitably nationalists and eventually imperialists.
One could argue that, much like some flavors of political utopia, internationalism has the advantage of never having been implemented in any practical sense, so they have less of a challenge proving their positive impact, but I’ll take it anyway.
Regardless, I find that “making their country better” should be a distant second to “making the world better”, and perhaps a close third behind “making the crap you have on hand and the lives of those immediately around you better”.
Look, I am not a globalist anarchist. I believe in well structured, effective democratic governments. Maybe I was the right age to look at the EU and think that those don’t have to be held to the absurd liberal idea of the nation-state,and that wherever a collective of humans have a common interest there should be governance structured to work with other layers of organization to improve things and enforce rights within that sphere. There is nothing magical about the nation-state layer of government that makes it more spiritually attuned to identity or the needs of the people. It’s all administrative stuff as far as I’m concerned.
Yeah, well, that depends on who gained independence from whom and whether you think you’re independent now. Also on whether you’d be indepedendent from any guys who’d like to be independent from the now guys if they were to be independent.
See, political independence for a group requires that you align with the idea the group has of itself. I don’t know that I have that overlap with any particular political delineation, so I may need an organization a touch more nuanced than an independent, sovereign nation-state.
Also, gonna need some citation on the lack of creepy vibe, as mentioned above.
The Youtube version will give you a transcript.
Monkey’s paw curling at its finest.