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News Gary Bowser (Team-Xecuter) Pleads Guilty to Criminal Charges

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Team-Xecuter’s Gary Bowser Pleads Guilty to Criminal Charges * TorrentFreak

Gary Bowser has pleaded guilty to his role in the Team-Xecuter conspiracy which marketed and sold Nintendo hacks.
torrentfreak.com torrentfreak.com
Last year the feds indicted three alleged members of the hacking group Team-Xecuter, which marketed and sold various Nintendo hacks. One of the defendants, Canadian Gary Bowser, initially denied the allegations but has since changed his mind. In a plea agreement, Bowser admits his role in the conspiracy. In addition, Bowser also agrees to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in restitution.
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The plea agreement with the U.S. Government sheds more light on how Team-Xecuter operated.
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“Defendant, GARY BOWSER, aka ‘GaryOPA,’ knowingly and willfully participated in a cybercriminal enterprise that hacked leading gaming consoles and that developed, manufactured, marketed, and sold a variety of circumvention devices that allowed the enterprise’s customers to play pirated versions of copyrighted video games, commonly referred to as ‘ROMs’,”
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“The enterprise generated at least tens of millions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of its circumvention devices,” the agreement reads, adding that this directly harmed Nintendo and other parties.
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In addition to the guilty plea on two counts, Bowser also voluntarily agreed to pay $4.5 million in restitution to Nintendo. He also agreed to help locate any remaining Team-Xecuter assets.
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Ill assume, that as many case "intention" is what put things as black or white, so having someone on the record agree that Team X product were designed for piracy and just "promoted as homebrew" is the falling of them
 
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I'm not sure if this is good.

It sounds like this team, merely found exploits for Home brew, and they weren't even selling any Tom's or anything. This could be a landmark case and it could be a massive blow to the home brew community. Yikes.

Really, I truly believe that if you own a piece of technology, you should be able to put whatever software you want, so long as it doesn't lead to piracy. This could be huge for consumer rights.
 
Lozjam said:
I'm not sure if this is good.

It sounds like this team, merely found exploits for Home brew, and they weren't even selling any Tom's or anything. This could be a landmark case and it could be a massive blow to the home brew community. Yikes.

Really, I truly believe that if you own a piece of technology, you should be able to put whatever software you want, so long as it doesn't lead to piracy. This could be huge for consumer rights.
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did you even read the article?

mens rea, Intention is everything, they are not innocent, if the guy was charged and pledge guilty, it admitted the group operated with the intention of produce piracy, and used the homebrew just as cover to pseudo justify it and made massive profits
 
Lozjam said:
I'm not sure if this is good.

It sounds like this team, merely found exploits for Home brew, and they weren't even selling any Tom's or anything. This could be a landmark case and it could be a massive blow to the home brew community. Yikes.

Really, I truly believe that if you own a piece of technology, you should be able to put whatever software you want, so long as it doesn't lead to piracy. This could be huge for consumer rights.
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Team Xecutor were scumbags who stole code from actual homebrew developers for their products. There's a reason they're being arrested and the homebrew hackers are not: it's because they were always in it for the piracy because that's what made them money.
 
Doug Bowser Jr said:
SO LONG GARY BOWSER
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rrnt3aol.jpg


He was gay, Gary Koopa?
 
Lozjam said:
I'm not sure if this is good.

It sounds like this team, merely found exploits for Home brew, and they weren't even selling any Tom's or anything. This could be a landmark case and it could be a massive blow to the home brew community. Yikes.

Really, I truly believe that if you own a piece of technology, you should be able to put whatever software you want, so long as it doesn't lead to piracy. This could be huge for consumer rights.
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Team Xecutor sell their cfw. They even use Nintendo code in it. The one the emulate cartridge iirc.
 
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I worry about potential ramifications of this case. What they did was illegal, and what homebrew devs did isn't, but that can change. It's like the GTA reverse engineering project; there seems to be some concern that it wasn't done in a clean room environment and it reuses Rockstar's code (I have no idea if that's true or not). The worry is that if they lose their case then there's the potential it puts other reverse engineering projects on shakier ground. It might change the precedent. Not a lawyer though, so maybe it's concern about nothing.
 
FYI, in case it's not clear in the article. They were selling access to custom firmware that could allow piracy. Not a modchip or physical tool, actual software.

Needless to say, this is an exceptionally terrible idea, and it's not surprising Nintendo went after them for it.
Something similar happened during the 3DS era, there were flashcarts that had the same "feature" of bricking your console if you were using a bootleg version of the cart. Back when getting one was the closest option in terms of "softmodding" (You could only run pirated games on these, at that.) the system.
 
Phantoon said:
I worry about potential ramifications of this case. What they did was illegal, and what homebrew devs did isn't, but that can change. It's like the GTA reverse engineering project; there seems to be some concern that it wasn't done in a clean room environment and it reuses Rockstar's code (I have no idea if that's true or not). The worry is that if they lose their case then there's the potential it puts other reverse engineering projects on shakier ground. It might change the precedent. Not a lawyer though, so maybe it's concern about nothing.
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it wont cause this is not about homebrew, its about explicit use for piracy.

But tbh, if it do were to happen, to have consequences, the community brought that on themselves. For years its been discussed how HB was used by A LOT of people as veil to just run piracy but most in the circles just decided to look the other way cause <insert your personal reason to do so>. As such, those that abuse the grey areas boundaries till they break, area the ones that turn gray into either Black or White.

So if people cant handle the risk, then better not try to find out what could happen
 
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garf02 said:
it wont cause this is not about homebrew, its about explicit use for piracy.

But tbh, if it do were to happen, to have consequences, the community brought that on themselves. For years its been discussed how HB was used by A LOT of people as veil to just run piracy but most in the circles just decided to look the other way cause <insert your personal reason to do so>. As such, those that abuse the grey areas boundaries till they break, area the ones that turn gray into either Black or White.

So if people cant handle the risk, then better not try to find out what could happen
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This, honestly.

The homebrew community has a serious problem of doing everything short of an actual ROM loader in a way where anyone could put one together with two lines of code, then claiming they aren't enabling piracy at all, so they should be left alone.

And this is awful, because this not only, well, enables piracy, but also sort of taints homebrew as this piracy adjacent thing forever. Not to mention, it also steals the spotlight from legitimately cool homebrew apps, too.

It's not great.
 
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Lozjam said:
I'm not sure if this is good.

It sounds like this team, merely found exploits for Home brew, and they weren't even selling any Tom's or anything. This could be a landmark case and it could be a massive blow to the home brew community. Yikes.

Really, I truly believe that if you own a piece of technology, you should be able to put whatever software you want, so long as it doesn't lead to piracy. This could be huge for consumer rights.
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Nah, they didn't do anything for Homebrew. They stole code from the actual Homebrew devs in order to enable piracy.
 
Lozjam said:
Ah well..... So long bowser.
Well deserved then.
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SciresM banned anyone who so much as implied they ran Team Xecuter's software from his Discord years before they were arrested, and for good reason. The only reason to use SX OS over Atmosphere was strong piracy support.

Ironically, this persisted despite the fact that SX OS is paid software and Atmosphere isn't.
 
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Now we wait till somebody does something stupid and get charged for emulation piracy.
 
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