This is what started it all, from Brakken’s post over at tehskeen.com:
Marcan, one of the members of Team Twiizers has discovered if a device present in the GameCube memory card port identifies itself with an unique ID that it will turn the Wii into recovery mode therefor allowing a user to run a recovery disc or even their own code.
I’ve talked with Marcan and he’s being very closed about the device and would not go into detail about it’s purpose, other then the fact that it lets you fix certain very specific cases of bricking. He wouldn’t reveal any other details and I was told to wait until it’s officially announced.
This ignited a quick reply from Marcan over at hackmii.com which boiled down to this:
Apparently tehskeen took a month-old video, coupled it with a paragraph of reality and a paragraph of rampant speculation and nonsense, and made it into a news story. This is undoubtedly going to spread around as these things do, so I’m going to stop it dead in its tracks.
Finally it ended up at Engadget where they first interpret the whole thing as a way to run backups, and then later updated the story. In a way this is funny, because I truly think it can be used to run backups, infact, it can be used to run pretty much anything you desire to code. To quote Marcan again:
To clarify, this won’t actually fix anything. It just lets you fix it, using homebrew tools and/or newer retail games, depending on what exactly you need to fix.
The way I interpret this running any unsigned code will work, which means anything is possible. Some of you might think this can already be done via the ZTP exploit so what’s the big deal? Well, I suspect the difference is that this way you don’t have to worry about any nintendo updates blocking the code, as it seems to be done in a stage before the Wii menu is fully loaded. This should make it theoretically possible with an interactive “modchip style menu” like the GC modchips qoob and viper provides, simply a menu accessible at boot with various settings. If you read the youtube comments of the video, marcan42, who also posted the video, writes:
It’s in the system menu (right in the startup part, before it tries to load any data).
We might end up selling them ;)
Where’s the market for a recovery dongle which only works in some obscure cases and the user has to write their own software? I think the downplay of the whole thing is to prevent others with commercial interest from exploring this route.
This takes me to another dear topic which is not related specifically to Marcan; the whole black/white hat schizophrenia (in the split personality sense) flourishing in the hacking community where some people appear in public as nice homebrew folks with strict ethical rules of conduct, lashing out at anyone mentioning backups, and then acting quite the opposite when addressing the close circle of friends (eg. via IRC or private forums) while researching new console exploits. In my humble opinion, be proud of who you are and stand up for it.
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