Pirate site blocking is a common practice in dozens of countries around the world, and the Netherlands and Germany are no exceptions.

The neighboring countries rely on court-ordered blocking decisions, with a twist; ISPs in both countries voluntarily agreed to honor orders against other providers. At the start of this year, this applied to two Nintendo-related pirate sites.

Dutch Dynamic ‘NXBrew’ Blocking Order

In the Netherlands, the Rotterdam District Court granted a blocking order requested by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. Last week, the court ordered local ISP Delta Fiber to block access to NXBrew.net, a popular platform that reportedly links to more than 12,000 pirated Nintendo Switch games.

This is the first site blocking order against a gaming-related site in the Netherlands.

The order includes a dynamic blocking provision, requiring Delta Fiber to also block future domains, subdomains, proxies, and mirrors. This means if NXBrew shifts to new domains to evade the blockades, BREIN can add them without returning to court. For now, however, only the .net domain is targeted.

NXBrew

Delta Fiber made an appearance in the Dutch court, but it offered no substantive defense. The court subsequently granted BREIN’s requests in full, adding NXBrew to the national blocklist.

Nintendo was not directly involved in the legal proceeding; instead, its rights were represented by BREIN, which is the primary driver behind Dutch blocking requests.

ISPs and Google Cooperate

While Delta Fiber was the only targeted ISP, other major Dutch Internet providers have agreed to follow suit under the site-blocking covenant that was signed in October 2021.

In addition to broadening the ISP blockades, the covenant also requires BREIN to complete a step-by-step plan before taking legal action. This includes trying to contact the site operators or urging the respective hosting companies to take action. A blocking order should be used as the last resort.

In addition to notifying all ISPs, BREIN says that it also sent Google a copy of the ruling requesting removal of NXBrew links from its search results. While not part of the covenant, the search engine is known to voluntarily comply with ISP blocking orders, even when the company itself is not named. That further increases the scope of the injunction.

German Court Blocks NSWPedia

The Dutch order is not the only Nintendo-linked blocking action this year. On January 27, Cologne Regional Court in Germany ruled that NSWPedia, another piracy site, must be blocked by German ISPs.

German ISPs also agreed to cooperate through the CUII (Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet) framework, which coordinates blocking efforts between rightsholders and ISPs. Under this system, one court order triggers voluntary blocks across participating providers, similar to the Dutch scheme.

NSWPedia was classified as a “structurally copyright-infringing website.” Through a representative random sample, the court determined that between 94.4% and 99.8% of the content was infringing.

NSWPedia

CUII’s implementation order doesn’t mention the rightsholder and the underlying court order was not immediately available. However, we expect that Nintendo (or their affiliate) is the complainant.

Transparency Concerns

While both systems rely on judicial oversight, transparency remains a concern for some, especially when ISPs don’t substantially push back in court proceedings.

Transparency is particularly limited in Germany, where there is no official public blocklist. This lack of openness led a German developer named Lina to create CUIILliste.de, an unofficial monitoring site that has exposed several blocking errors.

In the Netherlands, some ISPs offer more transparency. This includes Delta Fiber, which provides a list of all blocked domain names. The list, which includes piracy and Russian propaganda blocks, is currently a few hundred entries long and publicly accessible on the company’s website.

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A copy of the CUII blocking implementation statement on NSWPedia, referencing the Cologne court order, is available here (pdf). TorrentFreak has seen a copy of the NXBrew ruling issued by the Rotterdam Court, but it has not been published publicly yet.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Portable C Compiler (pcc) is a multi-target C compiler, supporting the C99 standard with additions from later revisions. It is small and simple in its design, and as of today around 16 targets are available that will generate code (to some extent).

The compiler is based on the original Portable C Compiler by S. C. Johnson, written in the late 70's, even though lot of the code has been altered to support more modern standard.

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After Qualcomm’s purchase of Arduino it has left many wondering what market its new Uno Q board is trying to target. Taking the ongoing RAM-pocalypse as inspiration, [Bringus Studios] made a tongue-in-cheek video about using one of these SoC/MCU hybrid Arduino boards for running Linux and gaming on it. Naturally, with the lack of ARM-native Steam games, this meant using the FEX x86-to-ARM translator in addition to Steam’s Proton translation layer where no native Linux game exists, making for an excellent stress test of the SoC side of this board.

We covered this new ‘Arduino’ board previously, which features both a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC and a Cortex-M33 MCU. Since it uses the Uno form factor, all SoC I/O goes via the single USB-C connector, meaning that a USB-C docking station is pretty much required to use the SoC, though there’s at least 16 GB of eMMC to install the OS on. A Debian-based OS image even comes preinstalled, which is convenient.

With a mere 2 GB of LPDDR4 it’s not the ideal board to run desktop Linux on, but if you’re persistent and patient enough it will work, and you can even play 3D video games as though it’s Qualcomm’s take on Raspberry Pi SBCs. After some intense gaming the SoC package gets really quite toasty, so adding a heatsink is probably needed if you want to peg its cores and GPU to 100% for extended periods of time.

As for dodging the RAM-pocalypse with one of these $44 boards, it’s about the same price as the 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5, but the 2 GB RPi 5 – even with the recent second price bump – is probably a better deal for this purpose. Especially since you can skip the whole docking station, but losing the eMMC is a rawer deal, and the dedicated MCU could be arguably nice for more dedicated purposes. Still, desktop performance is a hard ‘meh’ on the Uno Q, even if you’re very generous.

Despite FEX being a pain to set up, it seems to work well, which is promising for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR glasses, which are incidentally Qualcomm Snapdragon-based.

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Planners backed it, campaigners blasted it, and officials sided with emissions fears

Edinburgh councillors have torpedoed plans for a massive "green" AI datacenter, voting it down despite city planners recommending approval.…

À peine trois semaines après la sortie du jeu de combat 2XKO, Riot a décidé de licencier 80 de ses employés : « Le jeu a résonné auprès d'un public passionné, mais cet élan global ne suffira pas pour maintenir la taille de notre équipe de développement sur le long terme » a déclaré le producteur exécutif Tom Cannon. Je sais que cette industrie est carnassière et que Riot n'est pas exactement réputé pour être une entreprise où des employés arborant des T-shirts « J'aime ma boîte » entameraient spontanément des petites rondes de joie autour d'une statue grandeur nature de leur PDG, mais trois semaines, bon sang de bonsoir ? Vous pourriez au moins faire semblant de donner une chance aux gens la prochaine fois. ER. 

Une semaine après sa sortie, le très chouette jeu d'alpinisme Cairn vient de franchir la barre des 300 000 téléchargements. C'est sans doute un grand moment de célébration pour le studio montpelliérain The Game Bakers, et une bonne occasion pour moi de leur suggérer un DLC intitulé « Extension du dolmen de la lutte ». ER. 

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