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Enthusiasts have Turned the Nintendo Switch into a Functional Linux Tablet (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A couple of weeks ago, the fail0verflow hacking collective showed a still image on Twitter of a Nintendo Switch booting Linux. They're one of a small handful of hacker teams who are teasing exploits of the Nvidia Tegra hardware inside the Switch. But now fail0verflow has video of a full-on Linux distro running on the hacked Switch, complete with touchscreen support, a fully operational web browser, and even a GPU-powered demo application. On Twitter, fail0verflow claims the bug they're exploiting to sidestep the Switch's security can't be patched on currently released hardware, and doesn't require a modchip. But as for now there aren't any details on how to do this yourself at home.
According to earlier reports, they can’t patch it. The problem is in the SoC itself, meaning they’d need to a new hardware revision in order to issue a “patch”. Any existing Switches are, and will forever be, exploitable by this tactic.
Laws are pretty picky about destroying property. That would be a bad thing.
The main options would be:
1. Release a "New Switch" that all future games require. This would shut out a huge number of legitimate existing purchasers who have no interest in the hacking though, and Nintendo probably wouldn't want to institute a voluntary recall program. That'd be a mess.
2. Release firmwares and games that don't necessarily prevent this, but detect/undo/refuse to run on modified systems. This would be a cat and mouse game, much as it was on the Wii with various attempts to remove Homebrew channel.
3. Do little to nothing, knowing that the number of people who actually do this are going to be small.
It'll mostly depend on the difficulty and danger of doing it. The 3DS mods are pretty tricky for a lot of the average users, and while it's easier and safer now for most of the system's life it took very specific firmware versions and a lot of tricky steps to do to enable piracy. Wii was fairly easy on the whole bit still took a few steps. On the other hand, Dreamcast piracy just took a cheap burned disc and was a much bigger problem. We'll just have to see how it goes.