But dependency on Internet is a service situation we choose to buy into when we buy the console product. That is not an unexpected situation, unlike a surprise stoppage when a user thinks a game is legit. Anyone who does not like Internet dependency should not be buying the consoles period. Games are not required for life, so I do not have sympathy for anyone who buys into that system and then complains about the base model. Plenty of games outside the console world do not have that limitation.

Yes, agreed. But Nintendo does not know which is which, so they ding both accounts and then, per TFA, restore one after further evidence. How is that wrong?

They are not bricking. They are cutting off network access to their own servers. That is a service not a taking of product.

Many corporations try to do the right thing. They are collections of people not alien entities. This thread is not so much defending them as asking "What should their response be?" Someone is stealing from them. And that ultimately steals from individual artists and engineers who make our games. How should that be prevented? What is appropriate response? In this case, I think Nintendo found an elegant solution that does not brick the device or block the games from being played. That actually seems pretty forgiving. They only remove access to the thing they own, not the thing the player owns. Isn't that worth celebrating, that a corporation is taking a kinder path? And if not, how could the response be improved?

I liked that Nintendo did NOT block playing the game. In that, they did not steal a player's property. They could have bricked the device essentially. Instead, they closed off the access to *their* property until the matter gets resolved. That strikes me as a good compromise.

Lock out service they own while leaving our games playable seems like the least harm path to me ⦠it presumes a user's games are the user's and only messes with the part of the relationship a player has with Nintendo.

There's still the code review when experienced devs show them what's wrong. They may not be as good developers but they may become even better reviewers than past generations. Writing and editing are distinct skills/jobs in literature. We may see them diverge in programming also.

When two copies of the same game are running at the same time, that's proof of guilt. You may have been unknowingly complicit, but you are still guilty of participation in a crime. The temporary lockout seems to me to be equivalent to arrest on probable cause. If you can show legitimacy, they restore your account.

We would not have to have so much anti-phishing training if your theory were true. Ethical people are extremely susceptible to lies. I wish I could cite the research, but I have read papers finding that people were far better at anticipating actions they themselves would contemplate doing than ones outside their own ethical framework. Even highly empathetic people had trouble anticipating unless they had been burned by someone's lack of ethics in the past. There was a consistent response, "I never thought they would go so far." The summary was that a skilled security guard is also a skilled thief . . . either former thief or incentivized to be guard. And lying was same anticipation model as theft as they overlapped in social engineering.

Agree with the above. It captures the nuance I was trying to highlight.

The number of Russian defectors who have said they really thought Nazis had taken over Ukraine is an easy example of just how twisted ethical people can become when disinformation campaigns really get going.
We are in a whole new information landscape these last five years than in the previous entire history of humanity. The tools needed to spread false messages direct to individuals with few institutional checks are far stronger than ever before. I'm not willing to sell most people short in this environment. It requires effort to untangle each individual, and, unfortunately, that effort is far below the effort needed to entangle.

For many you're correct, but that's only about 75% of Trump's support. The disinformation campaign has bent more than a few who are just discovering how wrong they were.

There's "wanting to change it" and "having enough spare bandwidth to do the politics needed to change it". Even just staying well educated enough to know which candidates most match your values once every two years is a significant undertaking. If you aren't keeping up with the news on a daily-to-weekly basis all year long, you don't have context for most of the issues a given candidate can affect. People end up voting all one party because of national issues, ignoring state and local issues where other party candidates might well be better fit.

It's irrational, but it is exactly the point of this research: the complexity of the analysis crosses a point where shortcutting the analysis becomes rational.

Agreed. The statement was about finding someone desirable because someone else has picked them, not about acting on that desire.

The summary went on to say that the developer is working on a new mechanism that doesn't use JavaScript to help such users. Work in progress.