TL;DR: it's in a gray area, but nobody with power actually cares (at least for now), so it's effectively fine.
As I understand it, Lego is aware of the project (there's been a significant increase in interest in Lego Island in the past few years, with attempts to obtain the original source code) and simply does not care. It's an ancient IP and can't realistically compete with anything new, at least not in a way that would significantly affect Lego's revenue. This is not unlike the way several other companies have acted when their respective older games have been given the same treatment; if a fan project is not actively causing problems (reputational, financial, etc.), most companies will just leave it alone. For companies that actually seem to care about public opinion (as opposed to, say, Nintendo), I think it's fair to assume that the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project, however legally justified it might be, far outweigh any possible benefits.
> the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project
Just last month LEGO shut down Masks of Power, the Bionicle fan game. They were really close to a release and LEGO had allegedly met the team and given them permission in the past.
I'm increasingly convinced that fan projects should be developed quietly and announced right on release, so they at least exist somewhere on the internet if they get shut down immediately after.
I don't see where you've read that they accepted donations. Every article and Reddit post I find says they didn't? It was indeed releasing on Steam for free, but I don't know if they had contacted LEGO before doing so.
Also, this wasn't the only Bionicle game that LEGO had endorsed, Quest for Mata Nui too, which makes this even more of a heel-turn. They won't have to shut down that one, though: the team went silent and then the main dev passed away.
I did, actually, because on my phone it's in a burger menu hidden below the Internet Archive banner; thanks for pointing that out.
I see the project itself didn't accept donations but they pointed visitors at each dev's personal donation page, with no guarantee that it would go towards the project. I can see legal thinking that's bullshit, although I'd be surprised if most of those hadn't already been setup by the time LEGO originally gave them the ok.
Specifically, I would assume the calculus is about "how much damage does this do by existing" versus "how much risk is there that we attempt to shut it down and sue and set a precedent by losing", and because for most projects the first value is tiny and the second value is potentially enormous, companies leave them alone.
When either value changes drastically in scale (e.g. a project does something making it very cut and dry which side of legal precedent it falls on, or to massively increase the damage to The Brand(tm)), that's when you get worried.
Nintendo and Lego are on the same level when it comes to sue people for trademark violations. There are several cease-and-desist orders against YouTubers for calling no-name bricks legos.
This is how I feel when I hear or see people use the word “maths”, but I simply accept the cultural differences in language.
Though I don’t think throwing an “s” on a word to make it plural, even if technically incorrect, is on the same level as “basgetti”. Adding an “s” to words to make them plural, is generally a good rule, there are just some exceptions, and not that many people are deep enough into Lego to know it’s one of those exceptions.
From my experience they also have quality as a moat. No budget manufacturers seems to be getting the tolerances Lego is getting. There could be producers that are getting there though, but I don't know them.
Note that companies usually ignore fan projects like this and don't mention them at all. If they would mention and tolerate them, it weakens their intellectual property in a future lawsuit.
Once fan projects get too much traction, companies have to cease and desist them because that's the way intellectual properties work in the law. It usually has nothing to do with whether it was a cool project or not, it's just that there's way too much money at stake when not defending your IP.
Amusingly I actually have Video of Atari's Lead of Marketing playing OpenRCT2 on Stream, giving away RCT2 Keys to promote RCT World. To this day, Atari has left us alone though, so yeah it's pretty much not worth it to them to try anything.
If I recall correctly, somebody found out that the original creator of the game, Chris Sawyer, despises the OpenRCT2 project -- but he can't do anything about it, because the rights belong to Atari.
I can tell you from firsthand experience that people - including people I have personally worked with at large organizations - have absolutely heard of Wiz. Yes, it is a relatively new player, but the people there have been putting out high quality research for years and have also demonstrated a very compelling approach to securing cloud environments. They get a lot of praise, and they've earned it.
Second, I have no idea what you're doing to get Wix results from a search for Wiz. When I search for Wiz, I get a whole bunch of results about Wiz, including links to discussion threads where random people (i.e., not high-rep HN users) also talk about how much they like the product.
Finally, something to consider: would Google actually pay $32B for a company that "nobody has heard of" and doesn't provide any value? Probably not. I would hope not.
I was annoyed by having to write the same boilerplate code over and over again to handle "failures" that would never actually occur, so I took matters into my own hands and came up with what I think is a pretty elegant (if slightly complicated) solution. As it turns out, the architecture of this solution can be applied to other issues!
I am a college sophomore studying cybersecurity with several years of practical experience in software reverse engineering, malware analysis and the automation of binary analysis tasks. I am also familiar with computer forensics tools such as Volatility. Some of my past projects include reverse engineering, fixing and updating legacy scanner drivers [1] as well as writing deobfuscators to handle software in various languages. While I was in high school, I uncovered and reported vulnerabilities in various ed-tech software packages.
I am looking for an internship in the cybersecurity field, ideally in a role that involves software reverse engineering. I'm open to other roles as well, including penetration testing work. If you think we'd be a good match, please do reach out!
I am a college sophomore studying cybersecurity with several years of practical experience in software reverse engineering, malware analysis and the automation of binary analysis tasks. I am also familiar with computer forensics tools such as Volatility. Some of my past projects include reverse engineering, fixing and updating legacy scanner drivers [1] as well as writing deobfuscators to handle software in various languages. While I was in high school, I uncovered and reported vulnerabilities in various ed-tech software packages.
I am looking for an internship in the cybersecurity field, ideally in a role that involves software reverse engineering. I'm open to other roles as well, including penetration testing work. If you think we'd be a good match, please do reach out!
The way the scanner deals with dust is by complaining that there's dust :-) (It doesn't have a special dust error, AFAIK, but it does do some checks that will end up failing if too much dust has accumulated.)
The way to avoid dust accumulation is to keep it covered when it's not being used. That works nicely and is a reasonable thing to do anyway.
The custom drivers will be released soon :-) If you're not in the Pakon Facebook group, I recommend requesting to join it, since there's a lot of useful information there.
>I think it's still nightmare because Windows require driver signature verification by default
I've taken care of that already :) My custom drivers are properly signed and basically ready to release once I tidy up some loose ends.
I'm not entirely sure if this really needs to run at the kernel level. In the future I might investigate converting it to a user-mode driver, but for now I think a signed kernel-mode driver will suffice.
I had help, but yes. I think it's worth the cost to give people peace of mind that they won't have to disable some of the most important security features available to them in order to use a scanner.
As I understand it, Lego is aware of the project (there's been a significant increase in interest in Lego Island in the past few years, with attempts to obtain the original source code) and simply does not care. It's an ancient IP and can't realistically compete with anything new, at least not in a way that would significantly affect Lego's revenue. This is not unlike the way several other companies have acted when their respective older games have been given the same treatment; if a fan project is not actively causing problems (reputational, financial, etc.), most companies will just leave it alone. For companies that actually seem to care about public opinion (as opposed to, say, Nintendo), I think it's fair to assume that the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project, however legally justified it might be, far outweigh any possible benefits.