Public reaction consisted of OMG THERE’S GONNA BE EARTHQUAKES IT’S TERRIBLE WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE I GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE I GOTTA SAVE MYSELF AHHH HEEEEELP

So I decided to look into this and find out there’s not just one site providing this but tons of them, all equally terrible sites in their own right. Not just that but they’re all charging money for it, for something that probably some hobbyist coded in their free time and it’s spread like wild fire. And people are actually buying it. What are you, idiots?!?

In theory, this might sound like a good idea. It’s just sitting there, on the corner of your screen, not bugging anyone. That’s wrong. The fold is designed so that it’s always there moving, swaying with the wind, begging for you to kill your curiosity and check it out. It’s annoying, it’s distracting and it doesn’t go away.

Not only that, the whole thing seems to be made out of a bizarre combination of Flash and Javascript, which I’m sure is right up there with monkey ads on Never Do This Ever What Were You Even Thinking. Not to mention the bulk it adds to the page, or that every different implementation has different bugs like not preloading the ad, not handling the hover properly, stupidly huge hit area, and that people can make ads as cumbersome and intrusive as they want.

In the end, I don’t care how clever you are, an ad is an ad and I’m going to get rid of it any way I can and dislike your site that much more for it.

I was looking on YouTube for videos of the new Dr. Mario on WiiWare (since their trailer is pretty rubbish) and I’m immediately met with a video titled "How to get Virtual Consle and WiiWare titles for free". My immediate thought was that this was a fake (because if there’s nothing people love more is completely mistitling their videos in an attempt to get attention or fool you, while they laugh maniacilly from their evil lair and their e-wang increases with every click).

But no, this was the real deal. A public video showing you step by step how to install hacks and exploit bugs in order to get free stuff on your Wii. You know, piracy. Not that anyone seemed to care. But wait, what’s this? Oh no, Nintendo released an update that stops the hack from working and even goes as far as to delete all your hacked stuff! Immediately the Internet screamed and cried in rage. DAMMIT NINTENDO, HOW DARE YOU, STOPPING MY HACKS FROM WORKING! I’M SO OUTRAGED I’M GONNA POST ALL ABOUT IT IN THE COMMENTS! WHY THAT’S THE LAST TIME I UPDATE MY WII!

Just how shameless can people get? I don’t think even real criminals are this stupid. Commit the crime, admit it, tell everybody how to do the same and whine when stopped! All publically! Yes, you’re on your way to internet stardom here. I always hate the strong sense of freedom and safety that internet anonymity gives people to the point that they think they’re kings of the world. Until shit hits the fan and they crawl back to their LiveJournals, anyways.

First of all, you’re doing something illegal. There’s no way around that, Virtual Console and WiiWare games are commercial and cost money. Even the hacks are probably some grey area given you’re exploiting bugs in the hardware. Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with a billion reasons for why it isn’t, like that it lets people make and use free Homebrew Wii software. Of course, you’re forgetting the fact no matter how many good and legal uses it has, 99% of the people will not use them. See: Internet. As an example I couldn’t find one single source using the hack that didn’t involve pirating commercial games or using emulators to pirate even more commercial games.

Second, you’re being public about it. There used to be days where piracy was this big underground thing you only heard from some friend at school who knew people in the scene. These days, it’s a flea market. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t even remotely have an idea of how to get free stuff, and even if they don’t, they have all the shameless in the world to ask. With a million billion excuses on how it’s actually all legal and correct, of course. So you can’t exactly act surprised when Nintendo fixes the bug if you go around waving it in their face. And you can’t whine about it either because it’s their job, it’s their profit on the line. And here, once again, you’d come up with yet another excuse that Nintendo is this bigass company who has money to burn and piracy won’t even affect 1% of their sales. And again, that’s completely bull, considering that Virtual Console titles are old games sold for cheap that Nintendo went to the trouble of getting the rights to convert them to their console, and WiiWare games are mostly jobs done by independent companies out of their pockets who need every buck they can get.

Third, you are not anonymous. Sure, you’ve got yourself a competely baffling nickname, don’t disclose any of your personal details and you immediately think you’re Mr. Internet Tough Guy. Wrong. If computers weren’t tracable, the Internet wouldn’t work, because then information wouldn’t know where to go. Sure it’s just a bunch of numbers that is prone to change and nobody could do anything with them right? Wrong. Any IP can be tracable to its respective Internet Service Provider, and they can check the IP in their logs and match it to their customer for which they have all their billing information. Of course real criminals know how to get around this, but you’re not a real criminal, you’re probably just some kid living off his parents’ Internet without a care in the world. Of course that probably means no legal organization would bother to track you down for your petty crimes. Or would they?