#nso text | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

veganism · 3 months

Text

The genocide is also experimentation on living beings

Israel is currently testing new weapons in Gaza, some of which will soon be sold globally as "battle-tested," according to Antony Loewenstein, an author who has written a widely acclaimed book on the issue.

For years, the Israeli defense sector has used Palestine as a laboratory for new weapons and surveillance tech, he told Anadolu, adding that this is also the case in the current ongoing war on Gaza.

One of the main reasons why "many nations, democracies and dictatorships support Israeli occupation" of Palestine is because it allows them to buy these "battle-tested" weapons, asserted Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.

Another aspect of Israel's war on Gaza has been the use of artificial intelligence technology, he said.

According to Loewenstein, AI has been one of the key targeting tools used by the Israeli military in its deadly campaign of airstrikes, leading to mass killings of Palestinians-now over 28,500-and damage on an unprecedented scale.

The current war on Gaza is "inarguably one of the most consequential and bloody," he said.

He described Israel's use of AI against Palestinians as "automated murder," stressing that this model "will be studied and copied by other nation-states" and Tel Aviv will sell them these technologies as tried and tested weapons.

In the last 50 years, Israel has exported hi-tech surveillance tools to at least 130 countries around the world.

To maintain its illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and blockade of the Gaza Strip, Israel has developed a range of tools and technologies that have made it the world's leading exporter of spyware and digital forensics tools.

But analysts say the intelligence failure during the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks casts doubts over Tel Avis's technological capabilities.

Israel's reliance on technology "is an illusion of safety, while imprisoning 2.3 million people under endless occupation," said Loewenstein, who is Jewish and holds Australian and German nationalities.

He described Israel's response in Gaza as "apocalyptic," stressing that the killings of Palestinian civilians, including children and women, is "on a scale of indiscriminate slaughter."

- 'BLOOD MONEY'

Loewenstein, who is also a journalist, said Israel has honed its weapons and technology expertise over decades as an occupying power, acting with increasing impunity in the Palestinian territories.

This led a small country like Israel to become one of the top 10 arms dealers in the world, he said, adding that Israeli arms sales in 2021 were "the highest on record, surging 55% over the previous two years to $11.3 billion."

In his book, Loewenstein explores thoroughly Israel's ties with autocracies and regimes engaged in mass displacement campaigns, and governments slinking their way into phones.

The Israeli NSO Group sold its well-known Pegasus software to numerous governments, a spyware tool for phones that gives access to the entire content, including conversations, text messages, emails and photos even when the device is switched off.

Israeli drones were first tested over Gaza, the besieged enclave that Loewenstein referred to as "the perfect laboratory for Israeli ingenuity in domination."

Surveillance technology developed in Israel has also been sold to the US in the form of watch towers now used on the border with Mexico.

The EU's border agency Frontex is known to have used Israeli drone technology to monitor refugees.

Loewenstein explains in his book that the EU has partnered with leading Israeli defense companies to use its drones, "and of course years of experience in Palestine is a key selling point."

"So again, one sees how there are so many examples of nations that are wanting to copy what Israel is doing in their own area in their own country on their own border," he said.

These technologies and "are sold by Israel as battle-tested," he said.

In other words, he contends that Palestinians essentially have become "guinea pigs," and despite some nations and the UN publicly criticizing the Israeli occupation, in reality "they're desperate for this technology for themselves for their own countries."

"And that's how in fact, the Palestine laboratory has been so successful for Israel for so long," he said.

In his exhaustive probe into Israel's dealings with arms sales around the world, he noted that the country has monetized the occupation of Palestine, by selling weapons, spyware tools and technologies to repressive regimes such as Rwanda during the genocide in 1994 and to Myanmar during its genocide against the Muslim Rohingya people in 2017.

"This to me is blood money. I mean, there's no other way to see that and again, as someone Jewish, who has spent many, many years reporting on this conflict, both within Israel and Palestine but also elsewhere, it's deeply shameful that Israel is making huge amounts of money from the misery of others," he said.

"This is not a legacy that I can be proud of."

- 'NO NATION ACTUALLY HOLDING ISRAEL TO ACCOUNT'

Profiting from misery is to some extent the nature of what capitalism has always been about, but Israel does this with a great deal of impunity, "because Israel does what it wants," said Loewenstein.

"There is no accountability, there is no transparency, there is no nation actually holding Israel to account," he added.

Israel's regime is shielded from any political backlash for years to come because nations are reliant on Israeli weapons and spyware, said the author.

Israel may not be the only player employing surveillance technology that leads to human rights violations, but it still plays a dominant role, which is why Loewenstein insists that it deserves singular attention.

Israel's foreign policy has always been "amoral and opportunistic," he said, calling on all nations to take a stand and hold Israel accountable, and acknowledge that the world is buying what Israel is selling.

#free palestine #animal rights #govegan #animalrights #free gaza #gaza strip #gaza genocide #palestine #veganism #animals

129 notes · View notes

knucklestheechidna7777777 · 3 months

Text

uhhhh so nso anniversary. i skipped playing roblox with her to make this u better like it

also posted on reddit (🤓) under u/sigimanu in the r/needystreameroverload subreddit

no text ver + line art only because i think it looks wayyy better without color and i haven’t done line art in ages so. i like how it looks ok

#needy streamer overload #kangel #nso #nso kangel #nso ame #ame chan #omgkawaiiangel #needy girl overdose #digital art #needy streamer overdose #artists on tumblr #art #my art #my artwork #original art #manu art tag

33 notes · View notes

neogandw · 2 months

Text

Page 3 of 6. You can read the rest here.

This was the emotional page of the whole thing since its the lowest point of despair the Inkling girl hits, I put a whole lot of effort in making her as sad as I could while also making Peach the most welcoming that I could muster.

The usage of colors was very important for this page, methinks. For one: I can and have drawn things with both colored outlines and even without outlines and all (I mostly do the later for backgrounds, since I find that having the black outlines help the characters stand out in front of them no matter how much detail I put into the background), but for the whole comic I deliberatedly chose to make the outlining process to be entirely black. This is because I wanted the panels featuring peach's warm smile feature the colored outlines to make her even warmer than usual.

The trick of coloring also extended to the backgrounds. If you notice at her lowest point the backgrounds are dark and they become more and more lighter the closer it is to revealing Peach into the story, at which point it uses bright and warm coloring. The usage of blues did help set a feeling of relief at the tail end too.

I didn't initially plan on having the zapfish inside of the light bulb, it was just a thing that came to me when I was coloring the panel.

The implication of the cellphone is that Orange saw her profile through the SplatNet app on NSO, as a nod to how this whole comic was inspired to begin with. I did faithfully recreate the app as much as I could (its not editted, its redrawn) but there's slight differences: for one you wouldn't be able to see her rank (it shows as a badge on the name plate, so it would be too small) and I didn't bother adding the weapon stats or the game mode shown on anarchy battles to leave it ambiguous (normally you'd see the type of battle, such as splat zones or clam blitz).

One thing I wanted to do with the comic was to challenge myself to see if I could tell the tale with as little text as possible (I limited myself to UI jokes), so I hope that Orange yelling "101" does get across that she wants lessons on the charger. That was the hardest thing to convey.

If you're curious about the arrows around Peach when she gets glomped on the 101 panel, that's the marker the inklings leave to the point they're super jumping to.

I honestly love drawing in the Paper Mario style, even though I normally don't get much a chance to. So calling peach a saint through the depiction of the Overthere was fun to do.

Also, she's got Parakoopa wings on.

#Splatoon #Smash Bros #Super Mario Bros #Mario #Princess Peach #Nintendo #SSBU #independent artist #commission

7 notes · View notes

bwunnishit · 6 months

Text

#needy streamer overload #needy girl overdose #needy streamer overdose #nso #ame #nso ame #ame chan #ame needy streamer overload #nso text #text #is anything i do even real?#or am i just crazy #~ : ୨୧ :~ broadcasting now #~ : ୨୧ :~ broadcasting now!

366 notes · View notes

luigiblood · 9 months

Text

Some thoughts about Nintendo Switch Online retro games since last time

This is essentially going to be not much of a post but I guess I could talk about a few things about its future since with all the updates that we got since last time.

We'll talk about UI code, Pokémon, NES, Fire Emblem and N64.

UI code upgrade

Literally the next day since my last post about it, on March 16th, Nintendo added new NES, SNES and GB titles. Under the hood, they did do a massive change to the user interface programming, bringing pretty much every NSO app to the latest user interface codebase that GB and GBA NSO had.

That said it brings absolutely no visible changes, NERD has just made sure to bring everything up-to-date. This is just more stable and probably easier to program and manage UI code.

Pokémon Stadium 1 & 2

On April 12th, Nintendo released Pokémon Stadium to NSO + Expansion Pack, and with no Transfer Pak support.

Of course, what did I even expect since there's no old mainline Pokémon titles yet (if ever?).

My opinion about Pokémon on NSO is that it will get stuck to only spinoffs. My worst case realistic scenario (aside from no rerelease) is Pokémon Company selling the old gens at $15 piecemeal (yes, $5 more than on 3DS Virtual Console).

Personally I expect Pokémon Company to be very strict about Pokémon management, and those games are highly abusable with glitches, honestly and are kind of region locked, too to some extent especially between japanese and international players, but they still bothered to rerelease them and supporting them with a way to transfer your Pokémons out of the games. It's also abusable if you supported the Transfer Pak in Pokémon Stadium titles since they also work like extra boxes for your Pokémons and those support save states, which was explicitly removed out of the 3DS Virtual Console release...

They did also release Pokémon Stadium 2 this week, also without Transfer Pak support.

I did look at the emulator really quick and did find that they added new functions for Lua script hacking for the games, and it does kinda look like they rebuilt the entire thing from a new version at least.

I'll speak more about N64 emulation later.

Mystery Tower

Fast forwarding a bit, on June 6th, Nintendo added more NES, SNES and GB titles. One of them was Mystery Tower by Namco.

This bothered me, because I knew what this game was, but the title did absolutely not sound right. Turns out this title is actually brand new, they had this title in their collection, the original title was "BABEL" which is interesting since this means it is a first case of title change hacks on NSO. That said I did eventually find out that Japan also had a title change to "The Tower of Babel", which was also done in collections, but also the Wii U Virtual Console release!

Anyway please try this puzzle game, just keep in mind the direction and how you can turn around stuff based on how you face it.

Fire Emblem

On June 23rd, Nintendo released Fire Emblem for the GBA NSO app. But Japan also had Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, the actual first GBA Fire Emblem title, as we only started to get these games since the second GBA title.

I'll refer to them as FE6 (The Binding Blade) and FE7 (Fire Emblem) from now on.

This update was interesting for a couple reasons.

It just so happens that the japanese version of FE7 can link to FE6's completed save files to unlock a couple things in the game.

So now, when you go into multiplayer, after the first player selects FE7, the second player is allowed to select either FE7, or FE6 for "Link Cleared Save Data" (official english text). Another player can simply share their save files to another player.

This also means that the GBA app now has the ability to load different games for each player depending on the choice of the first player who serves as the host.

(This screenshot is me messing around with the functionality.)

However this is not the only noteworthy thing to happen, because it wouldn't feel fair for a single player to not being able to transfer their own FE6 saves to FE7. Well, they did actually implement a hack for single player too!

They actually reimplemented the linking process inside the emulator just to avoid emulating a second GBA for it, and it would seamlessly transfer the save data just fine.

If you're wondering about what it unlocks, a quick read made me figure out that it skips Lyn's story, and add new scenes to the epilogue and other small additions as well. Those new epilogue scenes are available in the US version by default, but not in the EU versions for some reason. They can also be accessed in the JP version without a save transfer by finishing the game 9 to 11 times (what the heck).

This functionality working as it is really cool, honestly, and it makes a process less painful to do like it was back then, and it did make me feel confident in the transfer of data between games like with Golden Sun & Golden Sun: The Lost Age or the Zelda Oracle games... speaking of...

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons

Those two games ended up randomly coming at the end of July this year. They are known for being two parts of a fuller story if you link each of them from whatever order you start them with.

And that's where my disappointment came in to remind me of the terrible reality that is Nintendo Switch Online.

It is doable for two players to share their save files to each other through multiplayer, but if you wanna do the games yourself on your own in single player, you'll have to input the password you get from the other game.

That is kinda sad considering it's the first player who selects the save file from the other player, it could have been very easy to setup in a way that's easy to use without needing to implement any specific user interface, but that didn't quite happen.

I hope they'll bother for Golden Sun considering the tiers of password this game can have with Golden Sun: The Lost Age, but I am starting to think if the game does offer a way to transfer without needing any additional work, they wouldn't do it. In the case of Fire Emblem, this way of save transfer was the only way to do it.

I did not mention much about this, but Oracle of Ages/Seasons are also known for having exclusive content if you play those games on a Game Boy Advance. After looking into it though, it does not seem like we're missing much, but it's kinda sad that they're not really in their most definitive way to play them.

Pokémon Trading Card Game

Two weeks after those last two games, Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Stadium 2 were released.

The cool thing about this game, is that they emulated the infrared communications.

At least, Card Pop does work, for sure, which does require emulation of the IR communcation... or does it?

Upon a quick inspection of the emulator code, I found out that the emulator does indeed patch the game ROM's functions, and thanks to the disassembled Pokémon Trading Card Game offering me a lot of information, I found out that they absolutely don't emulate the IR communications at all and outright replace the IR functions to point to a invalid 0xDD opcode (opcodes are small commands that CPU executes)... which probably points to a function in the emulator to specifically manage this. Ain't that funny? In any case though, they do at least let all IR communications work just fine, and that's what matters.

(For the nerds who wants to look this up, the emulator keeps SHA1 hashes of the ROM you can easily search for, then points to a struct of 100 bytes original to compare, 100 bytes to patch, address, size, and something else I don't get.)

I ended up looking this up as someone pointed me to this video:

youtube

It turns out in the original game, one of the cards, the Phantom Venusaur, is impossible to obtain due to a mistake in the calculations of the odds, on which this video explains very well in detail.

This is the reason that motivated me to look at how the emulator might patch the game, and see if they fixed this issue: They did not fix this problem, I see no patch for any of the relevant code for this.

So, NERD, if you're reading this, look at 06:5D92, you can definitely fix this in one way or another.

N64 emulation

So... the Pokémon Stadium 2 release at least updated the emulator in some way, because they added new functions for the Lua scripting for N64 game hacks, and some of the UI engine stuff got shuffled around.

Then I tried some of the games, to see if some things got fixed:

F-Zero X did NOT get its framerate drop fixed.

Goldeneye's Dam level has texture tiling fixed. Interesting.

Since I noticed this last thing, it was pointed to Graslu00 who knows the game in and out and already compared the emulation of the game on NSO and Xbox... to a disappointing degree.

Here's his thread about the fixes... or rather the lack of: https://twitter.com/Graslu00/status/1688994099477528576

The update did also some additional fixes to Pokémon Stadium 1, though I don't really know much about it other than it relates to rendering and soft reset in some way.

Unfortunately the N64 emulator is still not up to snuff, but I think the most annoying thing is still the controls. The default controls suck, let us change them in the emulator, per game! Offer also better stick emulation!

It still pains me to rely on the Switch OS remap feature, it's not good for this, it messes too much with some of the macros, it sucks!

It annoys me when I see the text "Change Control Method" in the emulator files too, you guys clearly thought about it! Why isn't it a feature after months with nothing?

Future releases

There's still a couple N64 games left that were explicitly announced for 2023, such as 1080° Snowboarding, Excitebike 64 and Mario Party 3.

That said Japan also had plans for release of Harvest Moon 64 (which I see no reason why we can't get it now that Harvest Moon SNES got released since), but also Goldeneye 007, on which Japan has it on the highest age rating (CERO Z).

Considering how the plans are going and how lazy everything is (sorry devs, I'm sure you guys know already, but most of the results of this just don't impress me and don't fill me with confidence aside from GB/GBA somehow), I just think N64 NSO will randomly get a 18+ rating and put every N64 game under parental control bullshit out of nowhere with no warning for Japan.

Also, where's the alternate languages for NES and SNES games?

#nintendo switch online

20 notes · View notes