@Cyber_Akuma "Breaking the encryption with the intention of illegal acts such as piracy is illegal, and making a backup of your own data is explicitly a right granted by US copyright law. "

Reproduction of copyrighted materials has always been gray, but allowed to slide under USCA, however, encryption breaking is unlawful under DMCA explicitly. "Intent" is not part of the bargain. Perhaps it should be, but is not. That's why disc playback software (not even copying) of PS1 games is OK, but PS2 games is illegal. PS1 discs are unencrypted, PS2 discs are encrypted (badly), so encryption breaking software is required to read them.

"Moreover, nobody here said anything about even playing ROMs, "

Sorry, clarification required: I didn't mean game ROMs, I mean the system ROM.

Local backups, I can fully appreciate the desire for that, I share it. It's absurd that that is lacking considering Nintendo itself offered it in the last 3 systems. OTOH, what has allowing local backups enabled? Save cheating. Which was inevitable. Switch should have a means of saving backups locally. They're doing the cloud thing due to save scumming in Splatoon being a disaster on WiiU, however the simple solution to that was to store online character data server-side, and offline doesn't matter. Yes, that's their stupidity. But the moment that got out, what's the first thing that happened? Splatoon save hacks. That goes back to: If the hackers have faith in humanity, they're even larger fools that I considered them 3 posts ago I don't deny the utility the save backups would have, but you also can't deny the very reason that allowing them through hacks was a very poor, self-serving, for benefit or adulation, objective from those that enabled it.

"And again, if such devices exist, LIST them. It's easy to claim something exists, far harder to prove it."

From smartphones to tablets (excluding Apple), to laptops, to obscure devices like the GPD Win2 plenty of general purpose computing devices with the same or better feature set exist. Do some cost more? Sure. Hacking to save money isn't quite the vaunted ideal as preserving art though.

"Also, art is art, allowed to possess or not is irrelevant, many of those would be lost forever if not preserved. "

This, frankly starts crossing waaaay past the line of defending justifiable reasons. "What's yours is mine for the good of mankind" doesn't fly. You can't defend property rights in one sentence by establishing your right to modify your hardware, and then throw away property rights in another sentence by establishing "It's mine to liberate whether it's mine or not because I've decided it's best for everyone because it's art!" We're well into moral relativism based on your own interests rather than any firmly fixed defense of rights now. If your Switch is yours to do as you please, Nintendo's art is theirs to deny as they please. If you can tell them how their art is to be distributed, Nintendo can surely tell you how to use your Switch. Property rights don't change depending on how special you deem the property. You're either for or against rights of property ownership, not different policies based on your classification of the property. Most of the rest of what we're debating, I can appreciate the shades of difference of point of views we're debating, but this one flies boldy into a pure theft territory.

"Many of these components are NOT available for consumers, and even then, at a significant markup."

All the components are available. Not the shells, you'd have to build your own shell of course. But the Tegras, memory modules, gyros, rumble packs, fans, etc, etc. are available (maybe not the exact demensions of parts) but the point is a skilled individual could build the same feature set. Not at the same price point, but we're hacking for education, value, features, and homebrew, not for money, and leveraging the savings of someone's closed platform, right?

" At the end of it all, it's your property, your property that you have the RIGHT in every single sense of the word to do whatever you want with."

Unless you decide my Switch is art, then it must be liberated for the benefit of Earth and I have no right to deny it.

"Open source" Open source is one big recognition back patting club. I've spent enough time in that world (not the hacking side) to know all too well the ol' boys club it is. Yes, they're gaining recognition, demonstrating skill sets, opening job opportunities, academic opportunities, and rarely miss a chance to climb. Nobody's pretending they're not receiving a benefit from it, even if it's a meritocratic one.

As for the knife/lockpick example, indeed, however when a knife company sells knives, they do so knowing there may be 1% of that purchase group at risk of stabbing someone, and 99% of the purchase group using them for utility/defense. Same for lockpicks. (My example had me knowingly, but innocently distributing them (free!) near a halfway house....) However when these groups post their hacks, let's not pretend they're not very well aware of what ballpark percentages of interested parties intend piracy/cheating. They're not giving it to someone "to" cheat/pirate, but if they tell you they don't expect a very large percentage of users will use it to cheat/pirate, they're lying to you. Imagine if the knife manufacturer, or to raise the controversey, gun manufacturer knew a good half, or even a quarter of the people buying were planning murder? They'd be in a whole other mess than the 0.01% of customers they have that currently do.

Every tool will have outliers that abuse it for wrong uses. Everyone with every product or tool knows that. But there's a responsibility when you know a significant part of people buying/downloading your product/tool intends nefarious purpose, to not generate that opportunity. If the hackers in these news articles had any sense of that, they would not be promoting their work. Which comes back to they either don't know, don't care, or feels the end justifies the means, not unlike the art paragraph where the theft of another's property is justified because the benefit of it is deemed greater.