I don't believe this shit.
And anyway, to those who bought these clones or having their 3DS bricked, you get what you paid for.
The R4 "team" has always been shitty and selling shitty products. R4 ain't making money as they used to be in the past.
They are just spreading false rumors and lying on forums.
And if the Gateway team really does it on purpose, then serves you right !
Gateway put a code in their launcher.dat which roughly works like this:
Code:
if(<low 4bits u32 output from random-number-generator are zero> && <checksum over arm9 code is invalid>)
brick();
The random-number-generator uses the console date for initialization. That's why all the bricks occured after a certain date. The second part checks whether the launcher.dat file itself is legit. Any modification makes the checksum fail and therefore bricks the console.
Apparently, the code works like this. It can be patched tho, but fixing 3DSes affected by the glitch will be very hard, as apparently it destroys more than just the NAND.
The code has been found by Normatt, neimod and yellow8 apparently. However, the code can be patch, as apparently Normatt has patched the code before releasing the region free patch.
I am an owner of gateway myself, so I am not pointing fingers at them. It must be frustrating for them because other teams are using their launchers and not profiting from it.
Believe it or not, there was another team that used to do it. The DSTT team!
Lots or clones used their firmware so to put a stop to it, they put a code to destroy the fake carts if their firmware was used on it. It didn't brick the DS tho.
All in all, I would be fine if it started bricking the cloned carts, however the console itself... A bit too far.
EDIT: This brick-code does not only brick the firmware on the NAND but also reprograms the eMMC-controller of the NAND in such a way that both 3DS and computer will think that the NAND is only 0 Bytes. This is extremely difficult to fix and you cannot fix it with a simple USB-cardreader.
^If this is true, than not even soldering fixes it. Basically, your 3DS is as good as
dead.