So long as there’s no extra suffix after, it shouldn’t be so bad. So if you have youtu.be/?v=[video_ID] it’s fine, but if there’s a &si= or &pp= or &anything=, then that’s most likely tracking and should be removed.

? is the start of the suffixes, & denotes a change in suffix. Every video has a v= suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn’t needed.

Lmfao, this community has automatically removed the si= suffix in my second link. But it didn’t remove the pp= suffix…

Edit: Fixed, finally. It kept trying to convert my links all over the place. They’re not meant to be links, just a clear description of the syntax.

Any ROM works great without Google Play Services. If anything, having MicroG installed makes things work less - I have a banking app that works fine on my old phone, without Google, but won’t work on my new phone because of a CPS Profile mismatch.

MicroG is a house of cards that is very difficult to get stacked correctly. Most apps work fine without it. For those that don’t, use something else, or just a web browser. Hell, you probably shouldn’t be using so many apps anyway, given that you really can’t be certain what they do when they’re closed source.

I still have one that isn’t paywalled (gratis) but I don’t think it’s had any new games in a while. I hardly ever play on it though and haven’t kept up much.

When accessed by BleepingComputer, however, the link returned a 404 (Not Found), and according to several others who tried to access the URL, no content ever existed at the location from the beginning.

This really doesn’t mean anything, it’s not unheard of for malicious actors to not set up their C&C servers until later on. This has actually been exploited by law enforcement in other cases also, they simply registered the domain themselves and took control away ahead of the attacker.

There’s a risk with setting up the C&C that it could be traced back to the attackers. By not setting it up until it’s needed you avoid that risk until it becomes necessary.

I don’t think he quite did that, actually. From memory he ran a few “shops”, but these didn’t really sell anything and were just download portals to install pirated games directly from the internet (rather than downloading to a PC first and then copying to an SD card or installing over USB). However, I think he did take donations for early access to new titles, which would have been hard to get elsewhere at first.

Yeah I read this article on another post, I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

From what I remember, he was running a few “shops”. These don’t actually sell games, but they can be accessed by a piece of homebrew software on the switch, and then you connect to the “shop” to download games directly to the device - this was done instead of manually copying install files to the SD card, installing, and then deleting the original files to save space; or instead of installing over USB. The shops were much easier, not least because removing the SD card to copy games from a PC required a reboot, and rebooting an OG hacked Switch could be kind of a pain.

I think the “sales” he did were actually just donations that got you early access to titles that weren’t widely available yet. However, it’s generally when you start taking money for these things that the shit hits the fan and the hammer comes down.

He didn’t just use the product he paid for in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody, he sold pirated Nintendo Switch games. This is literally at the start of the article.

It then becomes very easy to say he took revenue from Nintendo (the “they wouldn’t have bought it if it cost money” argument doesn’t apply), but above all selling pirated material is a shitty thing to do.