star wars fan

Transcript: Vimm's Lair has been asked to remove many games from The Vault on behalf of Nintendo, Sega, Lego, and the ESA. While most of these games (and the hardware to play them) haven't been sold in decades, ultimately it's their prerogative so these games are now gone for good.

Two new requests arrived from opsecsecurity.com today. One on behalf of Sega Corporation requesting the removal of 188 games. The other is on behalf of the Entertainment Software Association requesting removal of 3114 games. The requested downloads have been removed.

There was (hopeful) speculation by Vimm's Lair users that these requests were made by copyright trolls, i.e., people sending in spoofed takedown requests to make a webmaster panic and/or remove a bunch of files, wasting everyone's time. As trolls do. Back in April of this year, Garry's Mod had a similar takedown request by Nintendo to remove 20 years of content in Garry's Mod that was based on Nintendo IPs [source: tomshardware.com]. Vimm reached out to Garry about the Vimm.net takedowns and confirmed that they were coming from the same people that had requested the very real takedowns for the Garry's Mod content.

From Vimm's May 25th, 2024 Vimm.net update on the first round of takedowns sent:

1. mm-nintendo.com is a fake domain that's not owned nor operated by Nintendo. Corporations contract out services all the time. That doesn't make them any less real. mm-nintendo.com is registered by MarkMonitor, a known brand protection company. The operator claims to represent Nintendo of America and Garry's Mod can attest they do.

In that same message board post, Vimm also proposed that these takedowns were very likely sourced by using an AI to find images of Nintendo IPs with which it then generated the takedown request since Nintendo uses opsecsecurity.com for their email, who offers "Protecting Online Brand Identity and Reputation" as one of their services. On opsecsecurity's page for this is listed such an AI tool:

Visual Artificial Intelligence (AI) to spot more forms of infringement. Infringements often manifest in online brand logos, trademarked text, and product imagery. Our platform uses Visual AI to focus on these visual aspects of branding and related media. By augmenting text-based detection, Visual AI is not restricted by channel, and also mitigates emerging threats. Visual AI organizes potential infringements by indicators found in the image for efficiency and enforcement at scale.

I'm adding this information because people were getting pissed at Twitter/Tiktok users for talking about Vimm's Lair—bringing traffic and publicity to the site—which has gotten archival and piracy sites or emulation tools taken down before. This may have contributed to it, but Nintendo and Sega were going to find these eventually anyway.

While it's deeply upsetting to see such a respected archival site as Vimm's get slapped by the Nintendo Hammer, we need to use this as a reminder that the internet is an ephemeral place; if you find something online that you enjoy, DOWNLOAD IT and make backups. The deleted Vimm's Lair files will live on within the servers of other ROM/ISO websites, but they will only survive if people save them, make copies, make backups of their copies, and continue to share these files. Do not rely solely on cloud services.

Humongous data breach just happened, with loads upon loads of sites being affected. Tumblr's among those. Also on the list is Wattpad for you fanfic people out there- among many, many other places.

There's a searchable list at the bottom of the article. Highly recommend scrolling or searching through, seeing what places you may be on that have been affected, and securing all your accounts. This thing's kind of big.

This is mostly old data braches, meaning from past incidents. This is still data, however we are talking data from god fucking knows how long ago within the past few years as well.

This is from an article by Brooke Wagner found here.

This is a database that researches have found

Davey Winder on Forbes here.

Does this mean you shouldn't be concerned? No, but you shouldn't panic.

There are ways to easily deal with things like this and I'm sure you've found this a 1000 times on articles but I'm putting it here.

Use a password manager! There's plenty of free ones available, however if you don't trust someone else, simply start storing notes on your desktop or in a notebook somewhere. And I'm horrible at this but it is safer to use different passwords on each side, I know as someone w memory issues this sucks, but it's the safer option. Even just a variation of the same one works.

Two-Factor Authentication is your best friend! Most services today actually offers this if they know what's good for them lmao. If a social media, app, game etc allows you to use it? Use it.

These are just two steps that honestly help a lot.

Now, keep in mind im no fucking IT genius, I am just a fucking stranger on the internet who don't know shit about shit. Which is even more reason for you to look into this yourself.

Here's what it looks like for my now-deleted DeviantArt login:

When I click on it, it shows me this notice above my username and password, informing me that it was not DeviantArt that was breached, but another website that the password manager knows had the same password. I'd still need to change my DeviantArt password!

This is why it's good to use a strong, unique password for every login. When Firefox suggests a "keysmash"-looking password for your next login, use it! It will be saved to the built-in password manager. The password manager can be password-protected too, if you have security concerns. Be sure to use a unique password!

This is the original:

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/

This affected only "AdBlock" and "AdBlock Plus" - because it was a bug in their extension. The uBlock dev diagnosed this on the 14th and AdBlock admitted to this being their fault in a Blog post on the 16th, so what the original post says was already known to be wrong by the time it was posted (17th).

Blatantly wrong info aside, saying "High CPU usage is an attempt to damage your property" is malicious argumentation. It is correct that everything will break eventually, and CPUs lifespans can be reduced by high temperatures, however the effect is not linear. At normal operating temperatures, a CPU will usually last much longer than it will ever be used. A CPU should not leave its normal operating temperature simply by being fully utilized (much less so by being utilized 20-60%, as was often observed here). If your CPU gets so hot that it leaves its normal operating rating and enters the range of notably reducing its lifespan, there is likely something wrong with your hardware setup. Bad cooling, Overclocking, whatever it may be. (additionally, computers will generally shut down when too high temperatures are detected to prevent damage). You may just as well be complaining about the 10ct in electricity costs per week from increased CPU usage.

If you are genuinely concerned about your CPU breaking, you should go into your BIOS and adjust its max Clock speed/Power consumption (Underclocking/Undervolting). Power consumption directly causes heat generation. The Power consumption of a CPU vs its Performance is not linear, the last few % of performance draw by far the most power, so you can actually save a decent amount of electricity without loosing much performance.