Hacking SEEPROM

[JoostinOnline]

It was probably intended to prevent the export of cheap korean games to other countries At the time they probably did not anticipate that the key would be found and incorporated into cios. When the korean wii was released it was very easy to load out of region games on any wii via modchip or loader, so they probably wanted to prevent the export of these games possibly. It is the only thing that makes any sense since the korean wii has the common key and can load any game from any region, but all other wii's can not load korean games. Possibly these games have some korean propaganda incorporated into them that the korean government did not want the rest of the world to see, who knows. It clearly has nothing to do with the piracy of korean games to korean wii's. Since korea is very restrictive of what media enters the country, perhaps Nintendo passed it off as an effective way of preventing western games from entering the country and influencing the political beliefs in an unwanted way. Certainly Nintendo would have known it would not work, but it may have been enough to convince the korean government to allow the wii into the country for sale.

What you say in the first part really rectifies the idea of anti-piracy measures. Of couse, all that you say is pure speculation and we can all speculate any idea about this, but honestly, nintendo built his console on thinking that it was secure. Maybe the crazy korean government required more for security measures that caused them to only release a wii conforming to that region a few years after it's initial launch, but that is entirely stupid to think that it took them multiple years just to work with the korean government when they already thought it was all secure.

The fact of it is that they know that the korean region has a higher piracy rate than any other national specific region. Nintendo knew this and they spent extra time and effort to go above and beyond to thwart the likelihood of hacking. Security through obfuscation was the goal in this instance.

No one can positively come through and say exactly the reasonings for the korean key and the korean IOS's, but what I present is the most logical reasoning that there is.

But the key doesn't prevent any piracy in Korea, nor does it make it any harder to hack. There is no way that it could have been used to make the Wii more secure. I see no logic behind your reasoning.

 

[mauifrog]

It was probably intended to prevent the export of cheap korean games to other countries At the time they probably did not anticipate that the key would be found and incorporated into cios. When the korean wii was released it was very easy to load out of region games on any wii via modchip or loader, so they probably wanted to prevent the export of these games possibly. It is the only thing that makes any sense since the korean wii has the common key and can load any game from any region, but all other wii's can not load korean games. Possibly these games have some korean propaganda incorporated into them that the korean government did not want the rest of the world to see, who knows. It clearly has nothing to do with the piracy of korean games to korean wii's. Since korea is very restrictive of what media enters the country, perhaps Nintendo passed it off as an effective way of preventing western games from entering the country and influencing the political beliefs in an unwanted way. Certainly Nintendo would have known it would not work, but it may have been enough to convince the korean government to allow the wii into the country for sale.

What you say in the first part really rectifies the idea of anti-piracy measures. Of couse, all that you say is pure speculation and we can all speculate any idea about this, but honestly, nintendo built his console on thinking that it was secure. Maybe the crazy korean government required more for security measures that caused them to only release a wii conforming to that region a few years after it's initial launch, but that is entirely stupid to think that it took them multiple years just to work with the korean government when they already thought it was all secure.

The fact of it is that they know that the korean region has a higher piracy rate than any other national specific region. Nintendo knew this and they spent extra time and effort to go above and beyond to thwart the likelihood of hacking. Security through obfuscation was the goal in this instance.

No one can positively come through and say exactly the reasonings for the korean key and the korean IOS's, but what I present is the most logical reasoning that there is.

Sure it is all speculation, but there was no attempt to prevent homebrew or piracy on 3.3k above and beyond what was done for 3.3u/e/j. The korean wii was hackable to second it hit the shelves in korea. All you needed to do was install a modchip, run the twilight hack and update from a 3.x u/e/j game disc, then install HBC and/or region change it. Surely Nintendo was well aware that it would be that simple. They did not even try to prevent it, and they could have prevented it simply by including stub ios of u/e/j ios slots preventing their install, which they did not do. There is no aspect of the korean wii or key that make piracy or homebrew more challenging. Hell when Nintendo updated to 4.3 and disable the ability of TBR on 4.3, they did not even bother to include ios15 with the 4.3k update, making 4.3k the only menu vulnerable to TBR. Possibly they have included ios15 in 4.3k now, but at its release they did not. So Nintendo is clearly more concerned about piracy and homebrew on u/e/j than they are for korea as they neglected to fix the issue.

edit- so it took 4 months to hack after release. Release in 4/2008, hacked in 8/2008 via beta1 TPH.
edit2- it was probably hackable on release via the pink fish disc. You could have used that to install ios16. Possibly you could have made a swap disc of the pink fish disc, simply replacing one of the useless wads with a HBC wad, then load the good pink fish and swap to the modified pink fish and reset the game, install HBC via wad. Pink Fish was out 1/2008.
edit3- possibly Nintendo knew that the korean wii was cheep and would be region changed and sold abroad. Perhaps they put the korean key in with the intention of allowing many many korean wiis to be region changed and exported, just to later release a system menu update disabling them beyond warranty repair requiring the purchase of a new wii. A good method to generate more sales.

 

[DeadlyFoez]

Well duh, as I said, we all know that it did not prevent piracy any bit, but at it's inception I'm sure N thought that it would make it even harder for piracy to happen. I'm sure that when they had it written up on the drawing board the Wii still had not been hacked yet and N went along with it, but then the wii got ripped wide open and it was too late for them to turn things around and really would have been no point to do it anyways.