this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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One of the problems with Yuzu (to nintendo) was that it contained the encryption keys pulled off nintendo switches. By removing commit history you actually can permanently remove this part of the code. There might be a more clever way to do this. Thats my best guess.
Although a good guess, this looks more like the work of someone who's in way over their head and barely knows how to use git. Probably just downloaded the repo as a zip instead of cloning it through git. At least that's the vibe I get from their commit history and other repos.
So basically, this person did the right thing on accident.
FWIW, this can actually be a valid strategy, purely because a DMCA takedown will affect forks but not reuploads. Basically, if a DMCA takedown nukes a project, it also nukes any forked projects. But if you downloaded the .zip and reuploaded it, you won’t be affected by the DMCA takedown because it’s not considered a fork of the original project.
It’s a dumb workaround, but it oddly may have helped save a lot of the code simply because offline backups can’t get touched by DMCA or a nuked project.
I downloaded and set up Yuza the day before all this went down, and it did not include encryption keys. And trust me, I looked.
Nope, Yuzu was never distributed with keys. It could use keys that were provided by a user, but you had to add those yourself. Yuzu’s setup page even had (outdated) instructions on how to dump keys from your own Switch.
Just like how PlayStation emulators aren’t ever distributed with the BIOS, because sharing the BIOS is considered piracy.
Except, if someone had the repo cloned before the purge, they would retain all of the information, wouldn't they?
Even if there were keys, you could scrub the history instead of deleting it outright