Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lord Shonus]

Emulators have been widely available for decades. The only ones that have gotten in legal trouble were those that contained copyrighted code themselves, and Sony LOST when they took Bleem! to court. As long as you aren't actually distributing copyrighted code, or aiding in the distribution, you're untouchable. Which is why you can easily obtain them from the Google Play store.

[wierd]

Emulators themselves dont violate copyright. Yes. Thry violate Apple's EULA for thier appstore.

Big and important difference.

[Lord Shonus]

Correct, but this is an Apple policy, not a matter of "we'd get sued". Other walled gardens are fine with them, and do not fear being sued.

[LordBaal]

It's just their excuse and part of apple long time tradition of "it's for your own good, don't ask too many questions" attitude toward clients.

[Starver]

Oh darnit, I just wrote a whole lot about my experiences of Apple (admitedly not much, recently), Android, other things from BeOS (referenced in a link to In The Beginning There Was The Command Line, written in 1999) through Blackberry, Palm and Raspberry and peppered with interesting linkable sources when, on returning to this tab from having picked up the URL of https://xkcd.com/1889/ (the sixth of eight such planned insertions) the browser obviously decided that I was rambling too much (I'm not sure I disagree!) and sent me back to the 'fresh and blank edit-new-post' page, not even able to go forward in history to the (several) post-Previews I made along the way.

You therefore escaped the fate of having to read it. (But, really, this is among the many flaws of a mobile browser, though Firefox is usually better than Chrome in this regard.)

As consolation prize, I shall just pass on from short-term memory that (according to the brief research I did during that aborted edit, though I took only the first few consistent figures I saw without further advanced checking) there are just under two million Apple Store apps (may not all be available to all extant versions of iOS) compared to just under three million on Google Play (ditto for Android versions). Which are interestingly large (and close!) figures. But given the potential lucrative nature (despite the hoops that both gatekeepers force devs to go through, for reasons both logical and arguable) and the huge numbers of people willing to at least try to be even small fish in a huge pond of many other far bigger fish, the ecosystem does therefore exist for them.

But billions of people are never going to have the 'app'titude or ability to successfully jump through those hoops (wait, that's not fish, that's dolphins... but I thought that in this edit I was going to avoid such runaway analogies!) and that suits the people behind the various Stores just fine because they're already raking it in quite nicely, I suppose, sat where they are as vendor and intermediary between the producing community and the consuming one.

(i.e., there's no real incentive to make things easier, and various (good?) reasons to keep things harder. Not in that vicinity of the development phase-space, anyway.)

[Naturegirl1999]

If someone makes a free app with no ads, how would Google/Apple make any money? There is no revenue to take a % of

[Lord Shonus]

At a bare minimum, it increases the popularity of the platform by giving the customer more options. There are also ways to monetize things like "x% of the people with App A have App B, so we can sell ads for App C to them".

[Verlemt]

So if someone had, say, securely compressed all my bitcoin wallets, what do you think I should try to do about it?

It hurts to look at it! Although I am not a fan of mining, but still.
By the way, I also have bitcoin. But I bought this through a cryptocurrency exchange. Hopefully the rate will rise soon and I will be able to make a good profit.

[Naturegirl1999]

So much money lost, I wonder if the resultant parts can be melted down and reused for something else? After the electronic bits are taken out and broken into their components, maybe the pieces can be used to make a larger machine? Are Bitcoin miners illegal in Malaysia? I’m not a welder, I don’t know whether the pieces can be recycled or not, theoretically melting everything would create an alloy of a sort, whether or not said alloy has a use has yet to be found

[wierd]

The issue was that the bitcoin miners were STEALING the electricity to do the mining. Not that the computers were themselves illegal.

Really, the Maylay govt should have just sold all those hawt GPUs on ebay. They would have made a killing.

[Starver]

Ho hum. Ninjaed. And (typical!) far more succinctly.

(I'd have extracted the innards, probably. The hard-drives would surely have needed to be forensically checked[1], anyway, attached to lab hardware. After which they could be securely wiped and donated. Anything not showing out though the backplane/vents could have been removed. Piped through a suitable reconditioner they could have help create countless 'free'/discounted computers for local schools or passed to individuals' kids as a backhander 'gift' if local politics isn't so squeaky clean. Assuming they heavily used GPU acceleration, the latter and/or eBay could be recipients of any they salvaged. The PSUs probably are the more visible and least extractable bits (pity, probably some good quality ones) but they don't have the really nice chunks of silicon in them. A mostly empty case squahes prettier (and less chance to resist rolling over and skittering away in front of the crushing wheel) with probably little difference by the casual observer of the aftermath. Well, who knows, but I'd probably even clue in the reporters as to my philanthropic repurposing - asking that they keep that quiet, and hold back on any fluff-piece about it - when the point is more the number of boxes found and put out of use.)


If I remember the article again (without revisiting), it seems the primary offence was stolen electricity, whether illegally tapped straight into the mains, by-passing any meter, 'borrowing' a neighbouring property's supply through the party-wall or squatting in an 'abandoned' building they don't own or legitimately pay the bills for. It's probably very similar to the way illicit dope is grown indoors in various ways that require grow-lamps and ways to shrug off most of the power cost/attention so long as it remains undetected.

From what I can see, only Algeria, Bolivia, Egypt, Morocco and Nepal have a full de jure ban on any involvement at all on cryptocurrency, though that leaves room in plenty of places to fall foul of other currency-handling regulations or perhaps an export of goods/services restriction if it's not even officially money. There are also, of course, money-laundering concerns (with various implementations or proposed changes to specifically include crypto into that), taxable income (ditto) and the like that may or may not recognise the movement of crypto as payment but should cover the 'real' (traditional fiat?) money that magically teleports the other way where so exchanged.

(IANAL. And as such I might thus be able to actually say that people abstracting electricity illegally are probably involved in other defrauding activities, at the very least, to support the mining effort and/or being supported by it. If you pay your electricity bill, as much as it comes due, then it's possible there's nothing else for you to worry about if you're also solidly not doing anything else that trips various other alarm bells by your accumulation/use of cryptowealth.)



[1] I wouldn't know enough about the setups to tell if there were any locally-accessible bitcoin wallets, actually, could have been shipped direct to the cloud and nothing 'tangible' left to reclaim, but knowledge of where/how the mining OS communicated its gains and recieved its instructions would at least be legally-useful information, in the right hands.)

[Lord Shonus]

The issue was that the bitcoin miners were STEALING the electricity to do the mining. Not that the computers were themselves illegal.

Really, the Maylay govt should have just sold all those hawt GPUs on ebay. They would have made a killing.

Apparently, those machines weren't GPU-based computers that can be repurposed, but single-purpose mining rigs that have no use for anything except killing the environment with Bitcoin.

[wierd]

That seems unlikely.  That would have to be custom silicon, and that's prohibitively expensive.

If they were FPGA chips, those have IMMEDIATE use in a number of industries, including automotive-- since they can be reprogrammed to be *ANY CHIP*.

See also "Global chip shortage"

[Lord Shonus]

They appear to have been ASIC systems. Which is like a FPGA, but non-reprogrammable.


This is a common form of bitcoin miner.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asic.asp

[LordBaal]

Heavens know I could have used some of those bits to have a decent pc again.... such a waste.