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Team-Xecuter Accuses Nintendo of Censorship and Legal Scare TacticsErnesto Van der Sar, 11 Jun 10:11 PM Last month, Nintendo sued several stores tha

Team-Xecuter Accuses Nintendo of Censorship and Legal Scare Tactics Ernesto Van der Sar, 11 Jun 10:11 PM Last month, Nintendo sued several stores that sell hacks which allow pirated games to be played on its Switch console. These stores offer a range of products developed by Team-Xecuter, which the gaming company characterizes as a notorious piracy group. This is not the first time that Nintendo has taken action. In recent years the gaming giant has sent numerous takedown notices targeting the group and in the UK it acquired an injunction to have local ISPs block its sites. Until now, Team-Xecuter has never responded publicly but after the recent wave of lawsuits in the US, it's now verbally striking back at Nintendo. The group dissociates itself from the 'piracy' label and believes that along with their users, they have the right to tinker with Nintendo's products. "Of course we are not happy with this kind of censorship that is being enforced by legal injunctions that make us out to be something we are not: a copyright-infringing ring of software pirates," Team-Xecuter tells TorrentFreak. Nintendo is particularly worried about the new SX Core and SX Lite products. These work on all Switch classic and Lite consoles, while previous 'hacks' were limited to a subset of devices. In addition, the devices no longer have to be connected to a dongle or computer to boot the consoles into the custom SX OS firmware. With the lawsuits, Nintendo hoped to limit the availability of SX Core and SX Lite, but it couldn't prevent them from being shipped out to customers this week. While some may use the hacks to load and play pirated games, Team-Xecuter notes that their products have a wide variety of use cases. "Our products allow the end-user to make legitimate backups of their original cartridges that they can keep to themselves and play, but this is only a very tiny subset of what the SX products allow you to do. With SX you can expand your storage capacities of your console, run Linux, Android and a myriad of opensource applications, games, and utilities," they tell us. Nintendo sees things differently. After the company's efforts to get to Team-Xecuter directly, it sued several stores that sell these products. Team-Xecuter characterizes this move as legal 'scare tactics'. In addition, Team-Xecuter points out that its products also allow amateur programmers to test their games and software on the otherwise closed ecosystem. That spurs innovation and allows aspiring coders to develop their talent. "We believe many of these cases are based on legal scare tactics. But that is (sadly) enough to get a small vendor (often side-businesses ran by enthusiasts) who does not have the financial/legal capacity to fight such lawsuits in court to fold and stop their operations entirely." Scare tactics or not, the lawsuits appeared to give Nintendo some successes. Soon after they were filed, several stores shut down – or so it seemed. In a new filing this week, however, the game company told the court that several are available through new domains, still selling the same products. This suggests that not all store owners are easily scared and are perhaps more organized than it may appear, intentionally trying to evade Nintendo's legal claims. Team-Xecuter is not directly targeted in these lawsuits but it stands firmly behind its activities. The group believes that people are allowed to tinker with products they legally bought, pointing to the growing "right to repair" movement which stand up for the same ideals "We are firm believers of the right to repair legislation, a growing movement to counteract the monopolistic control over hardware which is the property of the consumer who paid for it in the first place," Team-Xecuter notes. Needless to say, the group will continue to develop its products. For now, there are still plenty of stores that offer them to the public at large, which includes tinkerers, developers, coders, and pirates. At the same time, Nintendo will try to score a victory in court. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. Removing "Annoying" Windows 10 Features is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says Andy Maxwell, 11 Jun 10:19 AM Since Windows was first released, people have been modifying variants of the world-famous operating system to better fit their individual requirements. Many of these tweaks can be carried out using tools provided within the software itself but the recently-released Ninjutsu OS aims to take Windows 10 modding to a whole new level. Released on May 7, Ninjutsu OS claims to take Windows 10 and transform it into a penetration testing powerhouse, adding huge numbers of tools (around 800) aimed at security experts, a few for regular users (qBitTorrent and Tor Browser, for example) while also removing features considered unwanted or unneeded in such an environment. Designed for Information Security Beginners "I created this project to help beginners and students in the field of information security. As you know it is very difficult for beginners to build Windows and install all the tools and install libraries for some of the programs that you need in the field of information security," Ninjutsu creator 'Hasan' informs TF. As the image below shows, Ninjutsu's appearance is striking and is likely to appeal to the target audience. From June 6, 2020, the project was hosted on Github but according to a DMCA complaint filed by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) on behalf of Microsoft, Ninjutsu OS violates Microsoft's copyrights. "BSA has determined that GitHub.com (specifically, content made available on GitHub through the link listed below) is providing access to copyrighted, nonpublic, proprietary information of our member Microsoft," the complaint reads. "The link leads to copyrighted material pertaining to Microsoft. Specifically, the copyrighted material in question can be found at the following link: https://github.com/ninjutsu-project/ninjutsu-project.github.io." Disabling Windows 10 Features is a License Breach, Claim States While that link to the project has now been taken down by Github (Hasan insists that the page "does not contain any violation of Microsoft's rights"), the complaint goes on to highlight several features of Ninjutsu OS that are claimed to be infringing. As advertised and specifically highlighted by BSA/Microsoft they are: – Customize Windows 10 with powerful tweak and optimize. – Protect your privacy by tweak and customize Windows 10. – Disable many of the annoying features built into Windows. – Unwanted Windows components removal. – Remove/Disable many Windows programs and services. According to the complaint, the above actions by Ninjutsu OS as mentioned on its Github page provide a "work around technical restrictions of the software", something which supposedly violates Microsoft's software license terms. "As such, we request that you please act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the specific pages/links described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of Microsoft content, via your company's network, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §512(d)," the DMCA complaint adds. At first view, some may conclude that Ninjutsu OS amounts to a heavily modified yet pirated version of Windows 10. However, a video explaining how the software works suggests that users will actually need their own license for a genuine copy of Windows 10 to get the modifications up and running properly. Ninjutsu's creator informs TF that's indeed the case. Other Tools Used to Tweak Windows 10, Developer says There may be workarounds, of course, but BSA/Microsoft's complaint appears to be centered around the unauthorized tweaking or wholesale removal/disabling of Windows 10 components, rather than copying its content. While there may be more going on here, at no point during the complaint does it provide details on which Microsoft content has been reproduced. Ninjutsu's developer informs us that the ability to tweak, disable or remove features in Windows 10 is carried out using two tools – Win10-Initial-Setup-Script and O&O ShutUp10, with the latter billing itself as a tool allowing users to "decide how Windows 10 should respect your privacy by deciding which unwanted functions should be deactivated." At the time of writing Ninjutsu's Patreon page is still functional but a link to download the tool using torrents via Yandex hosting is now down and displaying a 'Link Blocked' message. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. ©2020 TorrentFreak | Office 21338 PO Box 4336 Manchester, North West M61 0BW United Kingdom Web Version   Preferences   Forward   Unsubscribe     Powered by Mad Mimi®A GoDaddy® company