Near posted a thread on Twitter explaining how they were affected by a campaign of harassment organised against them on the Kiwi Farms forum. Subsequently, Hector Martin, an IT consultant and Linux hacker, posted a message about Near from a mutual friend

A linked document also focuses on the Kiwi Farms forum and the doxing and harassing of Near and their friends.

Near’s bsnes was the first Super Nintendo emulator with 100% compatibility, and higan is a multi-system emulator supporting 26 different devices including the NES, SNES, Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, Sega Master System and Genesis/Mega Drive, and PC Engine.

Near was a significant influence on indie games, and parts of the emulator created to keep Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer working in the final years of the famous physicist’s life were even borrowed from higan’s open-source code.