Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Blocks Homebrew Installation
ElementC writes "Sometime yesterday Nintendo uploaded the latest Wii system update. This update quietly patches a few bugs that allowed the installation of both homebrew and warez apps. Currently installed apps such as the Homebrew Channel and the video DVD library, DVDX, are reportedly not affected. Those not installing this update are blocked out of the Wii Shop channel and in the future may be blocked out of certain games. Team Twiizers cracked the last update within about eight hours. They're already on the case. Readers familiar with the architecture of the Wii will find the list of currently discovered changes interesting."
Oh, yes, that's exactly what I would hope they would do. A hacking team that had Sony's PSP fixes continuosly outfoxed ahead of time would completely change the game and perhaps encourage manufacturers to let us tinker.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That's pretty much what happened. We've been sitting on more exploits for ages, and it took us two hours to make one work after the update. Expect public release in, oh, a day or so.
We're several steps ahead. Their code is too buggy.
Is format shifting a form of piracy? I bought a whole ton of nintendo and super nintendo games and I still own them. If I could rip the roms from them what is wrong with using the homebrew to play those roms via an emulator?
what on earth are you talking about? so some locksmith who spend 2 years to design a lock that a thief cracks in 2 minutes means that the thief spent 2 years and 8 hours to crack the lock? i'm sorry, but your logic is severely wanting.
crackers don't take credit for the new features that hardware vendors add to firmware updates (if there are any), they're merely credited for bypassing the security/DRM/defective-by-design (pick your favorite) mechanisms the vendor added to prevent users from running homebrew. in the case of PSP, most firmware updates don't add any real value to the PSP. they're merely released to break the forward-compatibility of old/cracked firmwares so that users would have to update to OFW to play newly released games. that's why many people simply continue to run CFW based off of an older firmware version.
if vendors didn't intentionally cripple their devices in firmware then hackers wouldn't have to crack the firmware to enable homebrew development on these platforms. both the vendor and the homebrew developers' time and resources could be better spent on improving the platform rather than participating in this fruitless arms race. and often it's homebrew developers that add more value to a system through CFW than the official firmware updates that just cripple the system.
for instance, the M33 CFW for the PSP allowed early adopters who purchased the PSP-1000 (which Sony has apparently turned their backs on) to actually use VoIP (Furikup) on their PSP--a feature that the Sony update only gave to the PSP-2000. and Furikup actually has more robust features than the Skype add-on of Sony's OFW.
what's silly is someone who obviously has no clue about how homebrew works, or what it is, commenting about homebrew development and the efforts of the hackers who make it possible.