Ok. I'll be the guinea pig...
I flashed to iXtreme yesterday and haven't been banned. I definitely think MS is detecting the "non-stealth" backups and ban xboxes accordingly. Mine are all "stealth" and thus was never banned using Xtreme 5.2.
Of course MS might have something up to its sleeve...
The whole competition is a joke nowadays. I can't beleive Ukraine made it second although being quite funny they shouldn't be taken seriously. In my opinion DJ Bobo should've won..
I have MS25 and I did it with the same card slayerspud recommends. Costs about 20 dollars (for me euros). Just google some tutorial and download Xtreme Boot Maker. It prepares a boot floppy for you and the flashing can begin.
I used to visit Maxconsole a lot when the ViperGC came out. All the news at the time were quite good and could be felt important. Nowadays I visit it for X360 stuff but I must admit it's a crappy site. All the "news" are porn for bluray, pointless youtube videos and girls "playing videogames"...
From what I've understood, the Wii doesn't have a standard connection for the DVD drive as opposed to the XBox 360's drive with SATA connecetor. Nintendo is known for their own propietary hardware. At the end of the day I see buying a modchip for Wii the best decision.
I think it's great that you can ask about things like that here and it isn't considered illegal as it's definitely not. It's like someone goes to a shooting range and he's taught how to use a gun but nobody forces him to shoot people with it.
If you have Samsung I suggest you to use Xtreme boot maker (Google for it). It patches the flashing tool (mtkflash) for your SATA-chipset and has all the needed tools for backing up, modifying the key and flashing the modified firmware. Of course you need the latest xtreme FW too.