deadryn.

You might've been hearing about Yuzu, the switch emulator, coming under fire. As part of the settlement, citra, basically the only 3DS emulator, was taken down with it. The github is gone, and I'm sure the website will be gone soon too.

https://github.com/citra-emu/citra
https://citra-emu.org/

This is serious. You were worried about the precedent, it's already happening. Nintendo will have this case to draw on for future litigation against any emulator it wants (see first comment, it was settled out of court; a quick search will yield many articles, take your pick). This effectively took down two emulators with just bullying alone (not rom sites like in the past); this still sets a bad precedent in my book.

I really want to drive this home: citra was the only playable 3DS emulator. 3DS emulation is currently dead, until someone picks it back up. The discord was nuked today, there is currently no organized community. Yuzu was not the only switch emulator, but there is no other 3DS emulator.

Edit: The final post on the citra discord:

Please don't pester the Yuzu/citra devs, this isn't their fault and their lives are probably ruined owing 2 million dollars in damages to a company worth 66 billion

For a long time I didn't really understand what the word "Mandate" meant in British Palestinian Mandate and then recently I encountered it again while reading about Cameroon and there being a "French Cameroon Mandate" and "British Cameroon Mandate" and so I got curious and looked into it. Apparently after WWI all the old German colonies and territories were relinquished to the League of Nations, who decided that some territories could self-govern while others were too "uncivilized" to self-govern and needed to be "guided" and stewarded by a "large developed nation" (which just so happened to always be one of the empires that won WWI). The "mandates" weren't technically colonies that belonged to the empire "caretaking" them... but they functionally were just colonies won in war.

In theory, they were supposed to be building the mandates towards the ability to self-sufficiently independent, but instead they actively intertwined the economies of the mandates with their "caretaker" empire as much as possible. After WWII, the UN grandfathered in the mandates as "trust territories" and was like, no really you guys, you need to build these colonies up to being independent nations you can't keep them. And, eventually, they did all become independent nations... but their economies had been deeply intertwined with their own "caretakers" and so neocolonialism continued after colonialism had ended.

IDK. Just thinking about this puts some sorts of things into perspective for me. It gives some insight into the mentality and ideology used to justify colonialism and how, again, clearly nobody genuinely believed what they were saying. They weren't setting up these mandates to be self-sufficient at all. They set them up to be inherently dependent without needing to be forced via the military to comply. It was simply a transition from military occupation to economic coercion. The countries they produced from these efforts even speak the languages of their "caretakers" as official languages. Yeah it's "totally not Colonialism" that Cameroon is a Francophone nation even though France was never her "colonizer" but her "caretaker."

The goal was to "civilize" the "uncivilized" mandate territories, so they could flourish without being a colony. And "civilizing" the people of Cameroon meant making them speak French? Dress like French people? Eat French foods? It says something about what is meant by "civilized."

Do you have a tumblr? Do you have five tumblrs? Do you want tumblr to sell the work you posted there to OpenAI and Midjourney and not pay you? Are the answers "yes", "yes" and "no"? Okay. Log in now, click "Account" on the left hand side, then click on each of your blogs individually, click "Blog Settings" on the right, and scroll down to "Visibility". You will find the above checkbox. It defaults to off, you must turn it on.

This box is reportedly also visible in the mobile apps, but I don't know how to find it there.

What?

This morning, 404 Media posted an expose based on internal documents showing that Tumblr is about to announce a deal to sell "user data" to "AI" companies specifically including OpenAI and Midjourney. (That post requires 404 media registration, but if you're in the Venn diagram of people who think plagiarism is bad but piracy is good, there's a gist here.) The 404 post claims that on "Wednesday" Tumblr will be adding an opt-out box for "AI" resale, but it is Tuesday and I find the above checkbox on all my blogs this second. One person I talked to said the checkbox was already checked on some of their blogs, which suggests the checkbox has been there a while but did not mention "AI" until sometime recently.

404's leaked documents include executive claims that if they give "content" to an "AI" company and then someone opts out after their data is sold, then Tumblr will inform prior recipients you have opted out and "advocate" that your data they sold them be redacted. So that's… good, I guess, but unfortunately 404 raises the possibility the data dump has maybe already happened and this "advocacy" is all you're going to get at this point. An internal post by a whistleblower claims "the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI" (what does that mean? has that "dump" already been sent?) included nonpublic data such as private posts on public blogs. I am unhappy.