AnyOldName3 @ AnyOldName3 @lemmy.world

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So for a developer to release a game on the Game Boy without Nintendo knowing, they would have to commit copyright infringement.

That'd be trademark infringement, not copyright infringement.

They used this same tactic on the Switch. They claim the prod keys, which are needed for Switch emulators, are copyrighted.

That's not quite the same thing, and still isn't because the keys are copyrighted. There's Digital Rights Management software running on the Switch, and part of what it does is decrypt encrypted parts of games with the keys. Originally, Nintendo managed to keep the keys secret, but eventually people managed to extract them. The next line of defence is that under the DMCA (or equivalent law in countries with a trade deal with the US), it's illegal to attempt to circumvent DRM, and as the keys are capable of doing that, they themselves might count as a DRM circumvention device, which would be illegal to own or share. It's a legal grey area whether or not they'd really count - lots of companies claim that it's illegal to have these so-called illegal numbers, but Wikipedia are confident enough that that's not what the law really says that their Illegal Number page lists a bunch of them.

This gets even more complicated when it's specifically about emulators, as the DMCA (or equivalent) have a specific carve-out for interoperability, saying you're allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it's specifically for the goal of making computer software work with computer hardware it wasn't originally intended to. For the relevant parts of the DMCA that aren't related to DRM, there's case law confirming that it's okay. However, no emulator developers have ever actually been sued for making an emulator for a system with any DRM (e.g. the thing with Switch emulators several months ago was settled out of court, and the threat was to sue them for things like illegally sharing games between developers, when they could have each bought their own copy, so weren't protected by the carve-out). That means that this is a grey area, too.

If Nintendo wanted to shut down an emulator based on its use of their keys, they'd not only have to set a precedent that the keys really did count as a DRM circumvention device, but also that the interoperability carve-out didn't apply to DRM circumvention devices. It would be a big, expensive case, and as there are well-funded organisations that rely on the precedent not being set against them in both directions, both sides would get interested third parties funding their legal fees. No one wants that, so Nintendo stick to claiming emulators are illegal on their website, not in court documents, and only go after emulator developers who've provably done a second illegal thing they can be punished for.

100% a trademark violation, and there's nothing like an interoperability carveout for trademarks that could be used to defend it.

A quick search says steel, tungsten and bismuth or composites including those metals are the typical replacements. Steel is cheap, and the other two are dense but more expensive.

This isn't really the same kind of bug. Those bugs made instructions emit the wrong answer, which is obviously really bad, and they're really rare. The bugs in the article make instructions take different amounts of time depending on what else the CPU has done recently, which isn't something anyone would notice except that by asking the kernel to do something and measuring the time to execute affected instructions, an attacker that only had usermode access could learn secrets that should only be available to the kernel.

The thread's about the law being akin to the law of a police state. A state is a police state if it enforces unjust laws that criminalise reasonable acts.

I imagine getting a notification on their phone reminding them if they've not brushed their teeth by a set time might help forgetful people to remember to brush their teeth, and if it's via Home Assistant, which is self-hosted, entirely local, and open-source, there's no downside other than having to set it up in the first place.

I didn't read it as the OP expressing their own opinion, but instead sharing what the majority of voters in their area think.

The $5 Windows keys have never been legitimate - either they're just people selling keys they've generated with a keygen or bought with a stolen credit card, or it's students reselling free keys they've got from Dreamspark or a sysadmin selling keys from their employer's enterprise licence, which, in Microsoft's eyes, are all piracy. An OEM copy of Windows 11 Pro is about €150 and can't be transferred to a different motherboard, and a retail copy which can be transferred is about €300. A one-time purchase copy of Office is about €120 (it's also available as a subscription). These machines either have at least €270 of software on them, or €0 worth of pirated software on them.

It can't be legitimate because licences for the bundled software cost more than the machines are being sold for. Also, the hardware included isn't officially Windows 11 compatible, so selling it with Windows 11 installed is misleading the customer into thinking they're buying something much more recent than they really are. For a decent number of people buying these, they're likely to own something just as new already, and could get a free upgrade to Windows 11 by doing the same configuration tweaks as the sellers did.

Plenty of people think they're already getting more than they need and anyone who says otherwise is just pretending to be ill to get a free ride at the taxpayers' expense, and could just get a job if they wanted. The right wing press pushes this narrative and people fall for it.

Thermal paper is generally not recyclable, which is another downside.

Someone might have thought it was so obvious that it didn't need stating and would just ruin the joke. Alternatively, someone who was somehow unaware of the song and assumed that would be the case for nearly everyone else might have overconfidently decided it was a stretch without looking at the first line of the song.

The tories cut funding from the department that decides whether asylum seekers have their claims granted or denied, so there's a big backlog of people who can't legally get a job to support themselves and can't legally be deported, and feeding and housing them is expensive. The right wing press blames this not on the fact that they're all in legal limbo until the backlog is dealt with, and not on the fact that decades of foreign policy mean that there are lots of people in danger unless they flee who have English as their only extra language, so would only be able to get a job after asylum was granted if they were in the UK, but instead on the myth that the government is required by things like the Human Rights Act to provide people a life of luxury if they come here and people are coming from safe places for a free multi-year holiday. Because humans are not rational, people believe the myth, and if the myth were true, it would obviously be a good idea to stop providing luxury hotel accommodation at great expense to the taxpayer.

Turning the dehumidifier on ten minutes early means there aren't ten to twenty minutes where the shower's running with no dehumidification where condensation is able to settle on all the walls unimpeded, and the extra condensation takes a couple of extra hours to dry out again. Regardless of whether my family try to turn off the dehumidifier prematurely (and I only mentioned that as why I'd originally set a hygrometer up to graph the humidity in the bathroom, not as an ongoing problem), if that happens several times a day when someone showers, that's more than enough dampness for black mold to form.

I've got a textured PEI bed and when I've printed TPU, the adhesion has been perfect, i.e. good enough that the part wasn't going to go anywhere unless I wanted it to, but still easy enough to remove when the print was done and the bed had cooled. I guess it could vary from filament brand to brand, so it's possibly worth trying the same brand as I used, which was cheap Geeetech stuff. It's £8 a roll, and I've used their cheap PLA for ages. I wouldn't recommend their ABS+, though, as it seems to break down at the lowest temperature that gives reasonable layer adhesion.

So you think the reason a hygrometer can't detect humidity ten minutes before it exists in order to start cooling the dehumidifier's compressor to the temperature it needs to be to start working is human error?

I was going to share a graph from when I put a DHT20 hygrometer in my bathroom to prove to my family that the humidity was the cause of the mould and they should stop turning the dehumidifier off when its built-in hygrometer said it should be running, but unfortunately, it was long enough ago that Home Assistant decided I no longer need my one-every-ten-seconds readings and now only shows hourly readings, which aren't enough to prove my point here. You'll just have to take my word for it that when I did this test, I was surprised to find that although the humidity at the other end of the room started rising quickly after the shower was turned on, it peaked fifteen or twenty minutes after it was turned off again because diffusion without something like a fan or a draught moving the air around can be really slow.

My bathroom's a weird shape as it's long and thin and has a weirdly high ceiling at one end, so it's not going to have typical airflow, but it is a real bathroom that really exists, and I did have data in the past showing it dried out faster if I manually turned the dehumidifier to maximum (so it would run even if its hygrometer said not to) ten minutes before turning the shower on than if I did it immediately before turning the shower on. Whether I'm going to shower in ten minutes is something I can know but a hygrometer can't. This isn't even really related to whether the dehumifier is smart as mine isn't and I can operate its switch as easily as I could operate a smart switch, and my shower isn't electric, so there isn't a switch I need to operate before using it that could be made to do two jobs

Again, I’m not sure what components were used in the older model, but given the age I’d be very surprised if the electronics it uses would be more expensive to manufacture than the newer one.

That's fundamentally where you're going wrong, then. 1980s electronics (for a dehumidifier, it wouldn't even be electronics, it'd be electromechanical) are often much more expensive than modern approaches, and even when they're cheaper, it's typically not by much. Over time, it's got cheaper and cheaper to precisely make small things, but the costs of materials haven't meaningfully gone down, so the 1980s approach costs about the same as it did back then, whereas digital electronics have plummeted in cost. Now, anything where the best approach was electromechanical rather than electronic is almost certainly cheaper to do digitally.

Take toasters for example, most toasters don’t have a timer at all. They have a little piece of metal almost touching a contact. When you turn the toaster on, that metal heats up and it bends until it touches that contact, ding toast is done.

Another great example of being out of date. Fifteen years ago, cheap toasters almost always used a bimetallic strip and the dial controlled the position of the contact it touched so it would have to bend more or less before it disconnected. In nearly every modern toaster, however, you'll either have something like a 555 timer and the dial will control a variable capacitor that changes the frequency of an oscillator to make it count slower or faster, or it'll have a dedicated toaster control chip like the BCT5512 and the dial will control a potentiometer that a capacitor drains through. Mouser list the PT8A2511PE toaster controller for £0.111 in bulk, but the cheapest bimetallic switch they carry (which is too basic for a toaster because it's got a fixed switching temperature) is the F13A17005L360100, which is £1.93 in bulk, more than seventeen times the price. (I suspect they used to have cheaper ones back when toasters still used them, and they've been discontinued now toaster manufacturers have stopped ordering them.)

But it’s cheaper and simpler to just do it the old way, and for many applications, that’s fine.

A lot of the time, the old way is more complicated and more expensive. Technology doesn't just let us do things we couldn't before, it also lets us do existing things in new, better ways, and being cheap is one of the most in-demand things. It's lower tech to hire ten labourers with shovels for a week to dig a hole, but it's much cheaper and faster to hire one labourer with a digger to dig it in an hour.

Hell, I’m certain there are dehumidifiers on the market that don’t have any kind of humidity sensor at all. Even simpler…

Having no sensor at all is certainly the cheapest way to do it, but we were talking about ones that do have a sensor, and whether, once you've opted to have a sensor, there's any major cost to making the device smart. If you're aiming so low-end that you don't even have a sensor, then you're clearly not concerned about the marketing benefit of extra features, so wouldn't bother making it smart.

The cheapest hygrometers these days only have a digital output, and a wire and a potentiometer aren't going to be able to query an i2c bus to ask the hygrometer what it's measured without the help of a microcontroller (and the microcontroller might be cheaper than the potentiometer anyway depending on the specific model of each - have you actually looked at the 2025 prices of things before making assertions about what they cost?). The analogue component of a hygrometer that actually does the measurement gives fairly small changes to the resistance/capacitance (depending on the kind of hygrometer), so the results need amplifying. If you're measuring on the same chip, you can get away with a simpler amplifier and digitally compensate for any nonlinearity, whereas to get a strong enough signal to make it to the rest of an analogue circuit without much degradation, you'd need an amplifier that ends up being more complicated than doing everything digitally.

You're missing my point. It's likely that the cheapest way to design and build a dehumidifier these days will already include a microcontroller interpreting results from a digital hygrometer because these components are cheap and easier to work with than purely electronic/electromechanical designs with no microcontroller. The cost of switching from a non-WiFi/Bluetooth/Zigbee microcontroller to one with one or more of these networks is negligible, and once you've got it, it's not meaningfully more expensive to pay a software engineer to expose the on/off switch and hygrometer readings via that network and have the marketing people write Smart! Now with WiFi! than it is to skip it and pay the marketing people to come up with some other nonsense to put on the box. If you care about security as little as the average IoT vendor does, then it's nearly free to turn a dumb device into a smart one, so if it makes a handful of extra people buy the device, manufacturers will make things smart. For a dehumidifier, there are reasons why a handful of people will prefer a smart one, so smart dehumidifiers get made.