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Leaked Nintendo Documents show the company privately investigated homebrew developers, surveilled their home and intimidated them

KyoZz

Tag, you're it.

The measures are rather extreme and apparently include surveillance of the individual in question, as well as internal presentations and instructions on how to approach him.

SI_GenericNintendo_image800w.jpg



This comes courtesy of prominent Twitter Nintendo leaker Eclipse.
According to documents unearthed by Eclipse - which also include a Switch software development kit and console security documents, among other things - the company conducted surveillance on Neimod, a hacker who cracked the 3DS, in 2013.
Online Nintendo historian Forest of Illusion corroborates this with an internal document showing findings about Neimod's personal life including where he lived and his average work week.

Some of the documents from twitter:

2.jpg


In addition to the surveillance, Nintendo also created detailed plans on how to approach Neimod in order to get him to back down from hacking the 3DS.
In the documents, IRC chats involving Neimod are included, showing Nintendo covertly extracting information from Neimod and altering its response to the issue based on what he says.
The details of Nintendo's plan to approach Neimod are remarkably detailed, with multiple stages and potential outcomes mapped out in a flowchart.


Nintendo%20Flowchart%20Neimod.jpg


There's also a detailed plan in the Nintendo leak regarding exactly how Nintendo planned to approach Neimod, including timestamps. In these plans, a "contact team" would approach Neimod after he arrived home on a Monday.
The team would approach him in a "friendly, non-threatening, professional, and courteous manner", praising him for his "engineering/programming aptitude" and requesting that he "discontinue hacking of Nintendo systems/products".
If a resolution was not reached, Nintendo intended to "pursue a criminal referral" and show Neimod a draft complaint to "demonstrate severity and seriousness".


Source with more detail about Nintendo's history with hackers:
 
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-Arcadia-

Banned
To me, it’s just hilarious to see Nintendo trying to create their own dystopian government, with secret police visits and all. The maker of Mario and family friendly games. You can’t write this.

They’ve always been brutal, though. Look into them in the 80s. It might have ceded for a while, but they don’t screw around on business.
 

Hudo

Member
So all these super secret NCL documents are in poorly formatted English language Word documents, stored in folders with an mhtml file that contains the PGP key that unlocks them?

Never change, internet.
Was about to say this as well. It's a bit too convenient, lol.
 

Yoboman

Member
So all these super secret NCL documents are in poorly formatted English language Word documents, stored in folders with an mhtml file that contains the PGP key that unlocks them?

Never change, internet.
Youre overestimating the intelligence of people who think a hacker enforcement squad is a good idea
 
This is some sick shit. Protect your IP, sure, but stalking and intimidation?

Doesn't completely surprise me if true, though; Nintendo have always had a dark side going back to the 80s. I just assumed it was always through legal channels.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
So all these super secret NCL documents are in poorly formatted English language Word documents, stored in folders with an mhtml file that contains the PGP key that unlocks them?

Never change, internet.

Marcan kind of confirmed all this leak too, but sure... completely impossible eh ;)?
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Power to the Corps! /s
That's rather reductive.

What they did is perfectly legal and it's exactly what every corporation does when it comes to anything "loss prevention" related.

Now whether what P.I.s do should/shouldn't be legal is an entirely different question.. they certainly do shit I would consider unethical. I'm not in support of this, just saying it's predictable.
 

assurdum

Banned
Now I don't know how reliable is but different person claimed years ago Nintendo was always quite ambiguous with some "relationship" which involved even the Japanese mafia so it's not exactly shocking to hear such stuff
 
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Cravis

Member
Good God man. No wonder they never drop the prices on their first party titles. They can’t!!! This kinda surveillance and shake down doesn’t come cheap.
 
how much kinder can Nintendo get?

release the old games, only a few lunatics are seriously considering playing them today, but it hurts game history to have all this old historical software under a paywall, and only when publishers want to show them every 5 years or so...

same for Activision and Infocom text-adventures
 

Schnozberry

Member
Marcan kind of confirmed all this leak too, but sure... completely impossible eh ;)?

Not impossible, just seems rather improbably tidy.

He can't possibly confirm any of the documents as authentic. He did confirm Nintendo used private investigators and lawyers to threaten legal action against people it knew were hacking Nintendo hardware, which is very common and perfectly legal for corporations to do. Ethically it's on pretty shaky ground, but so is hacking. Do you actually find it strange that a company would attempt to track and influence the user communities that tinker with and potentially exploit their products?

Apple does this, and has done it, equally as ruthlessly for decades.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Not impossible, just seems rather improbably tidy.

He can't possibly confirm any of the documents as authentic. He did confirm Nintendo used private investigators and lawyers to threaten legal action against people it knew were hacking Nintendo hardware, which is very common and perfectly legal for corporations to do. Ethically it's on pretty shaky ground, but so is hacking. Do you actually find it strange that a company would attempt to track and influence the user communities that tinker with and potentially exploit their products?

Apple does this, and has done it, equally as ruthlessly for decades.

Whoa... white hat hacking on the same ground as intimidation tactics... I am 😶... really?

... and Apple being shady makes it ok?
 
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Schnozberry

Member
Whoa... white hat hacking on the same ground as intimidation tactics... I am 😶... really?

... and Apple being shady makes it ok?

What are you framing as intimidation? Getting a call from a lawyer telling you that they will sue you for copyright infringement if you persist in hacking their intellectual property? Gathering and confirming publicly available information about people? Offering to meet with them? Assuming all of this is true, I wouldn't have advised anyone to speak to Nintendo or anyone else about potentially criminal activity without their own lawyer present, but this doesn't exactly read like a Tom Clancy book.

Apple isn't shady either. Ethically this all exists in a very grey area. There are white hat hackers that only work in ways that benefit consumers, but the product of their hacking also leads to commercial exploitation. People actively sold cartridges and equipment used to pirate games for the 3DS, Switch, DS, Wii, etc. People jailbreak their iOS devices to get around Apple limitations, but others used the same technology to clone and resell stolen Apple devices (though I think that has been stopped at this point). It's very difficult to split the baby so to speak and only allow one to exist. Software and gaming companies are going to pursue any legal angle they can to prevent software piracy and prevent exploitation of their hardware.
 
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#Phonepunk#

Banned
their lawyers have to do something. they have to protect their IP. companies all over the world do this shit, is Nintendo supposed to not because they have a friendly image?

frankly, it's getting old hearing people complain about this shit. if you are doing a homebrew Nintendo thing, you know how they are by now. either have your shit locked up or STFU.

the guy who made Another Metroid 2 Remake finished the thing before dropping it. that's how you do it. a lot of these other people have years-long projects and are fundraising over it. that's.... that's not how you do it!

also LOL:

rEmtFlK.jpg

ilc1FGT.jpg
 
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#Phonepunk#

Banned
clearly Nintendo was totally wrong in trying to reach out to this very talented engineer and offer him some kind of financial agreement rather than go straight to criminal proceedings. they should have left him alone and let him continue hacking items that they currently were selling.

that's the funny thing about all this. they were probably trying to hire this guy, who was a super engineer with a high profile in the Nintendo hacking scene. yet these Tweets are painting the narrative that they are "intimidating" him. lol.

im not sure if anyone knows this, but in big business, if they get hacked, usually they like to work with the hackers, hire them on, or failing that, get some kind of knowledge out of them. it's kind of a common thing.
 
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Enjay

Banned
clearly Nintendo was totally wrong in trying to reach out to this very talented engineer and offer him some kind of financial agreement rather than go straight to criminal proceedings. they should have left him alone and let him continue hacking items that they currently were selling.

that's the funny thing about all this. they were probably trying to hire this guy, who was a super engineer with a high profile in the Nintendo hacking scene. yet these Tweets are painting the narrative that they are "intimidating" him. lol.

im not sure if anyone knows this, but in big business, if they get hacked, usually they like to work with the hackers, hire them on, or failing that, get some kind of knowledge out of them. it's kind of a common thing.
You watch too many Tom Hanks movies.
 
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