DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

A new week brings more new stories, and usually something interesting to write in the intro. I’m really struggling today, so I’m going to cheat and skip trying to think of something to say here and get straight to the news.

Facebook may be the place you get your funny cat pictures from, but it’s also the place where some get their illegally downloaded music from. And where there’s piracy, there’s an anti-piracy agency sniffing around to see if it can get in on the action. And that’s exactly what prolific Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN did last week when it targeted nine Facebook groups that have been accused of sharing copyrighted music. Facebook obliged without much resistance and closed down those groups immediately.

Copyright groups and their masters are notoriously slow when it comes to keeping up with the latest trends, and with most of their focus having been on websites, forums and torrent trackers, pirates have been quietly moving into social media for some time now. Now that copyright groups such as BREIN have finally caught up, it may signal the next round of copyright whack-a-mole, now involving social sites.

If the whack-a-mole game becomes too tedious, also expect copyright groups to try and hold sites like Facebook and Twitter responsible for all their woes, anything to actually not have to innovate and cater to their audience’s needs.

So while some copyright groups are busy trying take down half the Internet in order to protect their outdated business model, others are trying hard to strengthen laws in order to protect their outdated business model. Thus the DMCA was born in the late 90’s, when the Internet thing just started to scare the bejesus out of the movie studios and record labels. Since then, it’s various flaws have been exposed and none more so than the controversial anti-circumvention provision.

The DMCA has hindered security research and allowed malicious actors to hack devices unhindered

Companies have been abusing the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision to stifle innovation, reduce competition and even cover up negative coverage about the security flaws in their own products. It’s gotten so bad that security researchers, whose job is to find flaws before those with malicious intent find and utilize them for their own nefarious means, have been unable to do their job for fear of being prosecuted under the DMCA. Of course, black hat hackers don’t care about the law, and so they’ve been able to do their “job” unhindered in many cases. As I write in the news story, “this chilling effect may have contributed to an epidemic of hacking and malware attacks on devices ranging from smart light bulbs to security cameras, especially now with more and more devices now having public facing Internet connectability”.

The good news is that the government has finally wised up to the problem, and the FTC among others have lobbied the US Copyright Office to grant a new exemption to allow researchers to finally do their job, without the fear of being sued.

And it only took 20 years for this sensible change to occur!

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Remember Iceland’s Pirate Party and how they had become a political force to be reckoned with in the country, well Iceland held their election last week and while the Pirate Party did extremely well with 15% of the vote (compared to 29% received by the country’s largest political party), it wasn’t enough for them to form government, which would have truly been an extraordinary turn of events had it occurred.

Still, it was a very good effort and perhaps something to build on while in opposition.

This is the first picture we’ve ever uploaded for the Wii U, which ended productions this past week

Sad news for Wii U fans as reports suggests Nintendo has officially ended production for the console. There’s been a lot of talk about how the Switch is what the Wii U should have been, and there has just been as many people defending the Wii U for what it is – a console that was never going to be as popular as the Wii, but was a stepping stone in Nintendo’s eventual vision for the Switch.

But the bottom line is clear – the Wii U was not a commercial success for Nintendo, having only sold a bit more than 13.4 million units, and it’s been retired fairly early in relation to the typical console lifecycle (it’s only a year older than the PS4 and Xbox One, both of which have easily outsold the Wii U in the 3 years they’ve been on the market).

So it’s bye-bye to the Wii U (and the Wii brand, in fact), and hello to the Switch. Can’t wait!

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And it’s a bye-bye to all of you as we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading, see you next week!

Welcome to this almost all gaming edition of the WNR. I didn’t plan for it to happen, but sometimes that’s just what happens. Just like how moments after I had uploaded the Star Wars Rogue One trailer last week, the second trailer dropped, which I have since uploaded too (H.264 and HEVC versions as per usual).

Anyway, here are all the (gaming related) news stories for this week, two with a copyright flavour, and one kinda big one from a gaming point of view.

Denuvo is engaged in a game of “cat and mouse” with crackers

Denuvo, the gaming DRM that isn’t a DRM (it’s an anti-tampering solution, you see, to stop pirates from tampering with the game’s existing copy protection – kind of like a DRM for DRM), has been tough to break, even the most ardent pirate has to admit. But cracks (if you’ll pardon the pun) have started to appear in Denuvo’s reputation as being unbreakable, with some recent high profile cracks for games like ‘Inside’, ‘Doom’ and ‘Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’.

But according to Denuvo, the recent setbacks will only make the anti-tampering solution stronger in the future. While acknowledging the recent cracks, Denuvo says their crack team (pun again unintended) of  engineers are standing by to analyse how the crack occurred, and to patch and improve the protection solution. The company admits it will be a game of cat and mouse, but they’re confident they’ll win out in the end.

For game publishers, as long as Denuvo remain uncracked for the first months or so, then that’s usually long enough for most of the pirates to give up and buy the game, or to move on to another pirated game. For gamers though, DRM is DRM, even if you call it an anti-tampering solution, and it has all the usual problems that come with it (mandatory Internet connection even for single player games with no online content, beholden to the status of Denuvo’s DRM servers to ensure game can be played, performance issues due to extra resources used by Denuvo, etc…).

Not all game publishers feel that what Denuvo has to offer is in their own best interest and in the best interest of their customers though. Take game studio Flying Wild Hog, makers of ‘Shadow Warrior 2’. The game, which has received a “very positive” rating on Steam, has been released without any other DRM included (Steam kind of counts as a DRM). A user on Steam specifically asked why Denuvo wasn’t used, and the answer was pretty straight forward: DRM simply doesn’t work. Other developers from the studio chimed in as well, and all of them agreed that there’s just no point making a game worse by adding DRM. For them, it’s makes much more sense to not waste resources on DRM, and instead, focus on making the game better.

I know some of this is just a bit of good PR, but really, with so many good games on offer these days, it pays (literally) to befriend gamers, and many gamers simply don’t want DRM.

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Bad PR is what Samsung tried to do this week, which was to remove a parody video about its exploding Samsung Note7 phones. The videos shows a GTA V mod that turns the Note7 into a deadly weapon within the game, where the player can use it in lieu of grenades. Samsung tried to use a YouTube copyright take-down to get the video removed for some reason. The video is now back up after YouTube intervened in the matter. If it was a genuine mistake, and these happen all the time with copyright take-downs, then that’s fine. If it was Samsung PR’s attempt at damage control, then as expected, it backfired in the typical Streisand effect.

Moral of the story is, don’t use copyright take-downs to take down content that has nothing to do with copyright infringement.

The Nintendo Switch can be placed inside the dock to play games on your TV

Now onto this week’s big news: the Nintendo Switch. Previously known as the Nintendo NX, Nintendo finally provided the first bits of official information about their new console (including finally giving it a name), and things look very interesting. You’ll want to watch the video that I’ve included with my write-up on the new console, but suffice to say, it’s a pretty neat concept. It’s hard to describe in words (which is why you should watch the video), but basically, it’s a tablet first and foremost. There is also a modular controller called the Joy-Con, and that be disassembled into two separate pieces – these two pieces go on either side of the tablet to make it into a proper gaming table, or can be used by two different players for multiplayer on the go.

And I guess that last part is how Nintendo wants the Switch to stand apart from the other consoles, and to be fair, it may be something they have to get right in order to have any success. If they were just going to come out with another PS4/Xbox One look-a-like (but perhaps with slightly better graphics), it’s not going to win them any market share, not when the other two are already so dominant. But if they can get the novelty/fun/freshness factor right, and judging by the responses so far to the Switch, things are looking good, then the Switch may very well carve out its own market share (as a device that sits somewhere between your iPad and the PS4/XB1).

Or it can be played on the go by attaching the Joy-Con controllers

But it’s not just portable gaming that the Nintendo Switch will be offering – there’s dock like device that you can plug the tablet into, and the dock connects to your TV. With both Joy-Con controllers connected to the Joy-Con grip, it will act as the main controller for when you play on your TV. There’s also a separate available Pro controller that looks a lot more ergonomic than the Joy-Con-Grip thingy. No real information on how powerful the Switch will be, and whether the dock will give the Switch some extra graphical power to make the graphics prettier on your big screen TV (a Nintendo rep has already suggested the dock may be just a dock, providing power and TV output and nothing else), but Nintendo has never been about having the best graphics (well, not since the SNES vs Genesis days, and even that is debatable, even to this day).

There’s still a lot of information that Nintendo has chosen not to release about the Switch (including the very basic “does it have a touchscreen”), so keep a lookout for more information as we get closer to the March 2017 launch.

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That’s all we have for this week. Have a pleasant week ahead, and see you back here next Sunday!