Game File reporter, Stephen Totilo, has discovered a new Nintendo-filed legal document—the Japanese multinational video game company's North American office is ready to do battle (in court) with Tropic Haze. The latter's Yuzu Switch Emulator is the focus of Nintendo's legal case—initiated on February 26, at the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island. Totilo's social media summary of goings-on stated: "Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu, saying their tech illegally circumvents Nintendo's software encryption and facilitates piracy. Seeks damages for alleged violations and a shutdown of the emulator." The Dolphin Emulator—a Gamecube and Wii emulation platform—was removed from Valve's Steam store last year, following the sending of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown order, but its development team was not pursued in US courts. The House of Mario is reportedly fiercely protective of its intellectual properties and technologies—gaining a hard-nosed reputation for engaging in plenty of legal action over decades past.

Nintendo's federal-level lawsuit alleges that Tropic Haze's Yuzu Switch Emulator played a large part in widespread illegal distribution of a 2023 flagship game title. They believe that "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" was pirated over one million times in a time period prior to its official launch on Switch consoles, while Yuzu's Patreon funding almost doubled within the same cycle. Nintendo stated (through filed documentation): "With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing unlawful copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo or to any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers making and selling games for the Nintendo Switch...In effect, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others' copyrighted works." They argue that Yuzu is capable of circumventing the Switch console's many layers of encryption—Tropic Haze's software, in their opinion, is "primarily designed" to break Switch software protections.

According to a report published by Bleeping Computer last week and research conducted by the Doctor Web team, nefarious online organizations are distributing Windows 10 ISO files laced with extremely dangerous clipper malware variants. Microsoft ceased direct sales of licenses for its last gen operating system earlier this year, and a select bunch of folks are resorting to grabbing copies (for free) from pirate sources. The Doctor Web alert states: "(we) discovered a malicious clipper program in a number of unofficial Windows 10 builds that cybercriminals have been distributing via a torrent tracker. Dubbed Trojan.Clipper.231, this trojan app substitutes crypto wallet addresses in the clipboard with addresses provided by attackers. As of this moment, malicious actors have managed to steal cryptocurrency in an amount equivalent to about $19,000 (USD)."

It continues: "At the end of May 2023, a customer contacted Doctor Web with their suspicion that their Windows 10 computer was infected. The analysis our specialists carried out confirmed the presence of trojan applications in the system. These were Trojan.Clipper.231 stealer malware as well as the Trojan.MulDrop22.7578 dropper and Trojan.Inject4.57873 injector, which were used to launch the clipper. Doctor Web's virus laboratory successfully localized all these threats and neutralized them." It seems that hackers are hiding cryptocurrency hijackers within Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) partitions, thus evading detection by antivirus software(s).

Over the last weekend there's been quite some misinformation doing the rounds, stating that a license agreement you agreed to before upgrading to Windows 10, allows Microsoft to remotely disable pirated software (eg: games, apps). This may have caused fence-sitters on the Windows 10 upgrade to decide to stay on older platforms, and for some to even revert to their older Windows 7 installations. It turns out, that the situation has been grossly misread.

Microsoft Services EULA is the one which states that Microsoft may "prevent you from accessing the Services, playing counterfeit games, or using unauthorized hardware peripheral devices," however, this is not the license that governs your Windows installation. It only pertains to "Microsoft Services" (Windows Store content, Xbox Live, live tiles, etc.) The license governing Windows is the MSLT (Microsoft Software License Terms), and so there won't be a case of Microsoft reaching out to disable pirated software from running on Windows.

Anno 2070's Draconian DRM: Guru3D's Graphics Card Review Killed Off (UPDATED)

Hilbert Hagedoorn of well-known PC tech review site guru3d.com recently bought a copy of Ubisoft's Anno 2070 and wanted to use it in one of his graphics card reviews. However, he became badly unstuck. This game comes on the Steam platform and the store page states: "3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS 3 machine activation limit". Unfortunately for Guru3D, they found out exactly what this means, which resulted in just one performance graph, an aborted review, an unplayable game - and bad publicity for Ubisoft once again. They have published an article about their experience, pledging not to use their titles again because of this DRM.