Bushing wrote an open letter to Nintendo on his site (linked above) stating: As part of our efforts to understand how the Wii works, we believe we have found a security issue that could allow pirated Wii games to be played on an unmodified Wii console.
I would like to speak to an engineer about this — please have one contact me at bushing (at) gmail.com.
P.S. Sorry for posting this publicly — I tried emailing you three times and never received a response. I am trying to follow the model set forth in http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/policy.html, so your timely response would be appreciated.
In related news, according to an interview with Marcan posted on the Spanish site ElOtroLado, a Custom Firmware for the Wii is currently in the works.
Victories are inevitable in the technology war between platform holder and hacker/pirate. No matter how clever the former are the latter will always catch up.
This has always been so. Once a system is cracked the floodgates open as the word spreads on the interweb.
Now the Nintendo Wii is cracked, supposedly so it can become an open platform for homebrew. But what it means is that the pirates will exploit the same loophole so they can steal people’s work instead of paying for it. So the Wii will become even less worthwhile for third party publishers.
“The Twilight Hack is currently the only safe, public way to run homebrew on an unmodded Wii. The Twilight Hack is achieved by playing a hacked game save for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess which executes a homebrew elf file, boot.elf, on an external SD card. Examples of such homebrew elf files can be found on the Homebrew apps page.”
This is a sad event for every game profe... More »
It has just been confirmed, that Microsoft is currently working with Divx, Inc. to bring the popular Divx MPEG-4 video format to the Xbox 360. However, Microsoft also said that this Divx project for Xbox 360 is currently not in their high priority list. Right now, an unmodded Xbox 360 can only support video formats such as : WMV, HD WMV, H.264 and non Divx MPEG-4.
Kevin Hell, Divx, Inc.’s CEO said that Microsoft has more restrictions and requirements surrounding any software that runs on it’s Xbox 360 than Sony with it’s Playstation 3, so the Xbox 360 Divx project is on a lot slower pace compared to it’s Playstation 3 brother.
Hell also said that with the latest 2.00 firmware update, the Divx video format support has already been partially implemented on Playstation 3, and the full Divx support will come with the next Playstation 3 firmware update. However on Xbox 360, the release date for the Divx support is still unknown.
Earlier this week, Nintendo and Hong Kong authorities broke up a major piracy operation for the Wii and Nintendo DS platforms. I had not heard much recently in China since the initial, serious, piracy hacks on Microsoft's Xbox 360.
Frank Yu answered my call with a note on the state of next generation piracy in China (slightly edited):
I know the pirates and the modders in China. They are able to chip the Japanese Wii but the US Wii has more protection (Editor's Note and, presumably not hacked because of the availability of the Japanese Wii). For games like Paper Mario, that needed a firmware update on the Internet which even modded Wii's could get. On the new Metroid, the Internet update does not seem to work for modded Wiis this time...(no doubt) a solution is being created.
Yes, the Xbox 360 hardware is totally broken for pirated games...however, if you leave your mod chip active MS will detect it and shut you out of Xbox Live. I have hea... More »
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