Category Archives: News

Source: Hacker News

Source: OSNews

The Wii homebrew community has been dealt a pretty serious blow, as developers of The Homebrew Channel for the Wii have discovered that not only does an important library most Wii homebrew software rely on use code stolen straight from Nintendo, that same library also uses code taken from an open source real-time operating system without giving proper attribution.

Most Wii homebrew software is built atop a library called libogc. This library apparently contains code stolen from Nintendo’s SDK as well as from games using this SDK, decompiled and cleaned. This has been known for a while, but it was believed that large, important parts of libogc were at least original, but that, too, turns out to be untrue. Recently it has been discovered that libogc’s threading/OS implementation has been stolen from RTEMS, an open source real-time operating system.

The developers of libogc have indicated that they do not care, intend to do nothing about it, and deleted any issues reporting the stolen code. What’s wild about the code stolen from RTEMS is that it’s an open source operating system with a nice, permissive license; there was no need to steal the code at all, and all it would take to address it is proper attribution.

As such, the fail0verflow group, which develops The Homebrew Channel for the Wii, has ceased all development on The Homebrew Channel, and archived the code repository.

The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement, and it’s all thanks to shagkur (who did the stealing) and the rest of the team (who enabled it and did nothing when it was discovered). Together, the developers deceived everyone into believing their work was original.

Please demand that the leaders and major contributors to console or other proprietary device SDKs and toolkits that you use and work with do things legally, and do not tolerate this kind of behavior.

↫ The Homebrew Channel GitHub page

Considering Nintendo is on a crusade to shutdown emulators, stuff like this is really not helping anyone trying to argue that consoles should be open devices, that emulators play an important role in preservation, and that people have a right to play the games they own on a device other than the console it’s intended for.

I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this development.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Engadget

Google has been paying Samsung tons of cash every month to pre-install the AI app Gemini on its smartphones, according to a report by Bloomberg. This information comes to us as part of a pre-existing antitrust case against Google.

Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s VP of platforms and device partnerships, testified in federal court that it began paying Samsung for this service back in January. The pair of companies have a contract that’s set to run at least two years.

Fitzgerald told Judge Amit Metha, who is overseeing the case, that Google provides Samsung with both fixed monthly payments and a percentage of revenue earned from advertisers within the Gemini app. The monetary figures are unknown, but DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist called it an "enormous sum of money in a fixed monthly payment."

This antitrust case started with an accusation that Google had been illegally abusing a monopoly over the search engine industry. Part of the testimony surrounding that case involved Google paying Apple, Samsung and other companies to ensure it was the default search engine on its devices.

Judge Mehta agreed and found that this practice constitutes a violation of antitrust law. He’s currently hearing additional testimony to decide what measures Google must take to remedy the illegal behavior, which is where this Gemini reveal comes from.

Testimony from another case involving Epic Games indicated that Google handed over $8 billion from 2020 to 2023 to ensure that Google Search, the Play Store and Google Assistant were used by default on Samsung mobile devices. A California federal judge later ruled that the company must lift restrictions that prevent rival marketplaces and billing systems. Google is in the process of appealing that ruling.

As an aside, if Google is hellbent on handing out Scrooge McDuck-sized bags of money to increase adoption rates of its generative AI app, why not give the regular people who have to actually use the bloatware some of that cash? Just saying.

Source: Engadget

Anbernic, a popular retro handheld maker, has announced that its suspending shipments of its devices from China to the US because of tariffs. The company, which makes a variety of emulation-focused consoles and has appeared in Engadget's "Best gaming handhelds" list, is still selling devices it's already shipped to the US while supplies last.

"Due to changes in U.S. tariff policies, we will be suspending all orders shipping from China to the United States starting today," Anbernic writes. "We strongly recommend prioritizing products shipped from our U.S. warehouse, which are currently not affected by import duties and can be purchased with confidence." 

Anbernic has long offered the option to choose which warehouse your device is shipped from as a way to avoid additional customs fees or a model being out of stock in specific region. Because of this policy change, though, US customers will no longer be able to order directly from China and could miss out on the company's future hardware launches.

The decision to stop shipping to the US is understandable given the current chaos around tariffs. President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs on April 9, but increased the tariffs companies would pay to import goods from China. Specific exemptions were carved out for certain electronics, but then the Trump administration later clarified that electronics would get their own separate semiconductor tariffs at some point, too. 

All of this flip-flopping over trade policies was also paired with the removal of the "de minimis exemption" which allows packages shipped to the US under $800 to be duty-free, a key ingredient in cheap Amazon-alternatives like Temu and the budget products Anbernic sells. Given how messy the current approach to trade is, it's possible Anbernic might be able to ship to the US again in the future. For now, though, not everyone is able to eat the costs of tariffs like Nintendo is.

Source: OSNews

I love the Kate Text editor. I use it for pretty much all the programming projects I do. Kate has been around for long time now, about 20 years! At least earliest blog post for it I could find was written in 2004.

I wanted to go over my workflow with it, why I like it so much and hopefully get more people to try it out.

↫ Akseli Lahtinen

Programmers and developers tend to be very set in their ways and have their preferred workflows – which profession doesn’t, honestly – and since there’s such a wide variety of developer and programming tools out there, it feels like every single developer’s workflow and setup is entirely unique. Akseli Lahtinen, KDE developer and allround awesome person, details his setup using Kate, the venerable and feature-rich text editor from the KDE project.

As someone who can’t program, I can’t really compare his workflow to my own, but what I found interesting while reading his post is that there’s quite a bit of overlap between my previous work as a translator and his work as a developer. While the contents of each individual view inside his Kate window are obviously different, the setup of windows and tools I had when translating looked very similar.

This shouldn’t be surprising to me – after all, both translating and developing requires multiple work surfaces, language plugins, formatting tools, tons of keyboard shortcuts, and a whole load of browser tabs, PDF files, and other documents to find just the right translation or the perfect term, as well as a ton of background to make sure you understand the topic you’re translating about. Y’all have no idea how much I know about the deepest complex inner-workings and processes of some of the largest organisations in the world, just because I needed to study them and had access to their internal documentation and software.

I also read and studied way too many complex contracts, European law, and technical studies into medicine and healthcare treatments, and I guess developers and programmers do the same thing – just focusing on different subjects. What’s the best way to do this thing in the programming language I’m using? How does this library I want to integrate work? What are the API endpoints for this service I want to use?

It’s really not that different from translating, and that never really dawned on me until now.

Source: Slashdot

While college applicants are often required to write a personal essay for their applications, political scientist/author/academic Yascha Mounk argues that's "a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests." The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they've faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground. There are many tangible, "objective" reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can't sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a "college consultant" who "works with" the applicant to "improve" that essay. Even if rich parents don't cheat in those ways, their class position gives rich kids a huge advantage in the exercise... [W]riting a good admissions essay is to a large extent an exercise in demonstrating one's good taste — and the ability to do so has always depended on being fluent in the unspoken norms of an elite community... Many on the left oppose standardized tests on the grounds that they have a class bias, and that hiring a tutor can make you perform better at them. But studies on the subject consistently suggest that the class bias of personal essays is far stronger than the class bias of standardized tests.... But the thing I truly hate about the college essay is not that it is part of a system that keeps deserving kids out of top colleges while rewarding privileged kids who (to add insult to injury) get to flatter themselves that they have been selected for showcasing such superior personality in their 750-word statements composed by their college consultant or ghostwritten by ChatGPT... [W]hat I truly hate about the college essay is the way in which it shapes the lives of high school students and encourages the whole elite stratum of society — including some of its most affluent, privileged and sheltered members — to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered... [I]t is the bizarre spectacle of those kids from comparatively privileged backgrounds being effectively coerced by the admissions system to self-exoticize as products of great hardship which I find to be truly unseemly... And this is why I suspect that the seemingly innocuous institution of the college essay is more deeply damaging — to the high school experience, to the self-conception of millions of Americans, and even to the country's ability to sustain a trusted elite — than it appears... [I]t drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites. The college essay is absurd and unfair and — ironically — unforgivably cringe. It's time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: The Register

Because vulnerability management has nothing to do with national security, right?

Updated  US government funding for the world's CVE program – the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws – ends Wednesday.…