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Wii Update 4.2 Tries (and Fails) To Block Homebrew
marcansoft writes "On September 28, Nintendo released a Wii update, titled 4.2. This update was targeted squarely at homebrew, performing sweeping changes throughout the system. It hardly achieved that goal, though, because just two days later a new version of the HackMii installer was released that brings full homebrew capabilities back to all Wii consoles, including unmodified consoles running 4.2. However, as part of their attempt to annoy homebrew users, Nintendo updated the lowest level updateable component of the Wii software stack: boot2 (part of the system bootloader chain). Homebrew users have been using BootMii to patch boot2 in order to gain low level system access and recovery functions (running Linux natively, fixing bricks, etc). The update hasn't hindered this, as users can simply reinstall BootMii after updating (it is compatible with the update). But there's a much bigger problem: Nintendo's boot2 update code is buggy."
Read on for more details.
"Boot2 had never been updated in retail consoles until now. During BootMii's development, its authors noticed that Nintendo's code had critical bugs and could sometimes permanently brick a console by writing incorrect or unchecked data to flash memory, so they decided to write their own, much safer flashing code. Now, Nintendo has pushed a boot2 update to all Wii users, and the results are what was expected: users are reporting bricks after installing 4.2 on unmodified consoles. Nintendo is currently attempting to censor posts and remove references to homebrew. It is worth noting that the new boot2 does not attempt to block anything or offer any additional protection or functionality. Its sole purpose is to simply replace current versions which may or may not have been modified with BootMii. Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo is not believed to have any method to repair this kind of brick at a factory, short of replacing the entire motherboard."
You have buy a machine, not a license. If you want to open it, and mod it on any way you want. Is just a tiny mountain of chips and transistors. You could break it in pieces and use it to fix your refrigerator. Any law that let the creator of the machine perpetuate this locking trough anti-user changes sould get a fine, and any law that help then do that, sould be reverted, and the legislators of these laws be kicked in the ass with a boot.
-Woof woof woof!
It costs them a lot of money to try and stop modding etc, when they will fail every time.
Waste of time, money and reputation.
Never happened. True story.
Hello,
Some of you have reported problems with your Wii console after updating to the Wii System Menu 4.2. The symptoms most people are describing usually occur when the Wii has been modified. However, some of you also mention your system has never been modified.
We'd like to help get your system working properly again. If you're experiencing problems with your Wii console after downloading Wii System Menu 4.2, and you believe your system has not been modified, please give us a call. If we find that you have a normal system and the update caused your system to not work, we'll repair it at no charge.
Please call our Customer Service Department at your earliest convenience, 1-800-255-3700. We are open 6 AM to 7 PM, Pacific Time, 7 days a week.
Thank you,
NOA_Tech_Jane
Please stop making me cry.
Sincerely,
Your loyal non-modding customer.
P.S. Please spend all this time and effort addressing the cheating hackers plaguing the Mario Kart Network instead.
I'm not aware of it even being used for piracy. I have the Homebrew Channel installed and it's great fun to play a few things on, plus occasionally turn the Wii into a media player.
IIRC it can be used to play out-of-region games. Which is a GOOD thing.
What exactly do they have to gain here?
The Refrigeration Industrial Artists' Association has decided that you will need to pay an "iFrigement use fee" if you put any food item with an energy content of more than 1000 kCal in your fridge. Your fridge comes with a Healthy Home Edition license - I'm afraid you need to upgrade your kCal licenses for your level of consumption.
Just DONT accept the 4.2 update when the Wii asks if you would like to upgrade. Simple as that. Unlike the XBox 360 / PS3 they have no way to "force" you to take the update.
Wii forces you to update as well through some (first party) games. Mario Kart or Wii Fit for instance won't run if you don't install the updates included on their discs. So if you don't stay up to date, you will lock yourself out of an increasing number of games for the platform.
It's not just that either - I go on holiday to various places around the planet. Sometimes I go into a music or games shop whilst I'm there and buy one or two things to take home.
Why should I not be able to play them when I get home?
And yes, some games (the original Katamari Damacy, for instance) are not released in some markets and as a result are hard to get hold of, even if you've soft-modded the console to play other regions.
It often seems to me that the benefits of a global economy are reaped by companies by employing labour and sourcing materials where they like, but they try their damnedest to stop consumers doing the same.
I'll fess up. I've got a SD card in my Wii with old NES games, and I run Homebrew Channel and FCE Ultra on my Wii.
Mind you, I own most of the games (SMB games, Mega Man games, TMNT2, etc) on NES cartridges. I do have an old NES, but I just can't be arsed to drag the thing out, wire it up to my TV and spend 10 minutes wiggling cartridges until they work. And I couldn't be arsed to buy games I already own on Virtual Console so I can play them again. Even though they're only $5/game, it's a principle thing.
But not everyone has a closet full of old video game equipment to use as lame justification. And Nintendo is probably losing a good bit of money because of kids telling their friends how to exploit the Wii and install FCE Ultra so that they don't have to buy the Virtual Console games. So, I kinda understand the whole anti-homebrew thing from that direction...
Regional tastes have nothing to do with it.
American sugar producers lobbied and got a protectionist tariff on sugar that increased the cost significantly which made it cheaper for all the soft drink companies to switch to corn syrup. Elsewhere in the world sugar is cheap enough that it can be used with out driving up the cost of the product prohibitively.
My sister went to Korea some years ago and the coke there also was made with sugar. It's pretty much only in the US that corn syrup is used. Heck, in South America they use sugarcane as feed stock for the ethanol plants to produce fuel for cars.
How about some anti-cheat measures? Playing online Mario Kart is still fun, but it is less fun when there's some griefer with infinite red shells.
You tell me how they do that. Not software - the ROM bits have no recovery functionality. Hardware? Massive props for you if you can find any kind of JTAG or similar port on the board, because quite a few people have wasted lots of time trying and failing to do so. As far as we can tell, they preflash the NAND chips before soldering, and I'm not aware of anyone who hasn't just had their motherboard replaced after this kind of unrecoverable brick.
Here's a pinout diagram of the Hollywood with everything that's definitely not a recovery port marked. Let me know if you find any flashing/recovery functionality on the remaining pins ;)
You can flash chips without removing them from the board if the board designer was thinking intelligently. In my company's HW dev labs they re-flash bricked system boards all the time
Those boards weren't designed to prevent modding. No, I bet Nintendo has to replace the whole circuit board containing the flash chip due to their own paranoia.
Oh, it's going to work fine for [b]most[/b] people, but the bricking rate is still going to be much higher than normal. The boot2 flashing code isn't completely borked (I've successfully used it to flash early versions of BootMii 10-20 times), but the fact of the matter is sometimes it'll botch. I'd expect a sizable number of bricks, much higher than for "normal" system updates.
FWIW, 4.2 is reported to completely kill modchip region-free functionality. If they've done what I think they've done (started to check the region on the TMD, which is cryptographically signed), region-free via modchip is dead and won't be coming back.
The only real advantages to region locking are for the producer of the product. They can put up different price points for different markets and prevent consumers from tapping into a different market (region).
Depends on how you look at it. If the manufacturer can't price discriminate between different market segments, they will price the product beyond the reach of a lot of people who might want it. In that case, region locking can actually help the (poorer) consumer, since they will be able to purchase a product that otherwise would have been too expensive for them. Meanwhile the manufacturer avoids the risk of arbitrage.
At least, that is how it's supposed to work in theory. In reality region locking is used for a lot more than price discrimination, and it's just pointless and annoying when the product isn't even sold in multiple regions.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I had a modded Wii and I was prolifically downloading Wii games for free from all kinds of pirate sites at Nintendo's expense. It all changed as soon as this patch came out, it suddenly turned me from being a dirty pirate to a legitimate customer! My pockets which had previously been devoid of anything other than pocket lint are now somehow filled with cash that just materialized out of thin air. I use that money to buy games legitimately, giving the company the profits it deserves. Their share prices have quadrupled in the past 3 hours. The company is worth more than Microsoft now. Hot Japanese anime girls are waiting to blow all of the company executives who came up with this wonderful anti-piracy patch that fixed everything.
This is what they've been waiting to hear... let's lie a little bit so they can feel good about wasting millions of dollars on this patch.
Their system doesn't appear to be designed to accept external driving of the flash. The Hollywood boots and tries to talk to it as soon as you power it on. External NAND flashers need to overdrive the Wii's outputs very hard to properly do their jobs. As far as we can tell, the control outputs to the NAND Flash do not have tristate capability (they always drive hard high or low, even when the system is uninitialized or idle). The NAND power rail is also the 3.3V Hollywood power rail, so it is impossible to power the NAND Flash without powering up the Hollywood.
Nope, pretty sure that's not how they do it.
I don't know about their hardware engineers, but my opinion of their software engineers has been steadily decreasing. Call me a dickhead if they want, but they fail at almost everything they do as far as system programming. Their system architecture is archaic and they've locked themselves out of many of the features and improvements that their compatitors are able to add. They tried twice to stop a certain savegame exploit and failed disastrously - yes, there were critical bugs in the anti-exploti code, as small as it is. I've disassembled a lot of their code and the list of WTFs would span hundreds of pages. Their "secure" IOS security is dismal. They implemented a homebrew crypto layer and completely screwed up the very core of RSA verification, resulting in the very first exploit to run homebrew. They appear to have never heard of things called "code reviews". They're using a scheme of forking IOS for each minor addition that makes it very difficult to maintain security fixes in the future, nevermind that older games will never get new features or improvements. Then there's the hugely botched boot2 update that this article is all about, and which they clearly didn't test well enough (I mean, come on, we can find it with a handful of Wiis and some minor testing and they can't?). They have to resort to stupid hacks like copying SD channels to NAND to play them because they never even attempted to develop an even slightly sane storage layer for IOS - access to everything goes through different APIs. The division of functionality between ARM and PPC code is chaotic: the USB stack is in IOS, the Bluetooth USB device driver is in the PPC but the Keyboard/mouse drivers are in IOS, the Bluetooth stack is in the PPC while the TCP/IP stack is in IOS, half of the SD driver is in IOS and the other half in the PPC, the NAND filesystem driver is in IOS but the FAT filesystem driver for SD is in the PPC, etc. The WiFi drivers are notoriously unreliable (Broadcom is probably to blame for that). They left in DVD-Video mode code and functionality that is what enables softmods - and when we tried to report it to them them before Wii piracy via homebrew existed, they harassed us and refused to let us speak with an engineer! Softmods, predictably, came later, when other people discovered that code.
As for their hardware engineers, they at least have horrible power management inside the Hollywood to blame for the WC24 heat issues causing GPU failures. The software guys also helped, though, by making IOS have a busy-wait idle thread. IOS uses 100% of the Starlet CPU during idle mode, while the fans are off and the system is slowly getting cooked.
Again, feel free to look for a flashing mechanism too, but our experiences and attempts, evidence from people who send in their Wiis for repair, and our generally bad opinion of Nintendo's engineers all point towards there not being one.
They just reauthorize those games online on your new console (via the serial numbers). When the system is totally bricked you lose your saves. They only notice homebrew or warez when they get "bricked" consoles that display an error message (which indicates System Menu operation), which they can usually fix by reinstalling stuff with their rescue mode DVDs and a small "flag" tool inserted into a memory card slot to put the menu into recovery mode.
And again, I'm saying we've looked for JTAG all over the place and can't find it. The Wii has a gazillion test points, yet none of them seem like candidates for JTAG. There's a set of 8 cutely arranged testpoints going straight to Hollywood, but those turned out to be a debug GPIO port (I've used it to drive an LCD display and the like). Everything else is spread around the board, and we've gone and mapped almost all of the Hollywood ball-out with no success. About the only thing I'd imagine they could have pulled off to throw us off would be to spread the JTAG testpoints around the board using traces buried into the inner layers, but I doubt they're that smart.