I didn't think we used nintendo relay stations as a middle man. I do know they updated streetpass a year or so ago, and that broke a lot of the older ways of setting up a homepass:
https://www.reddit.com/r/3DS/commen...getting_streetpasses/?st=iyh72d7f&sh=89f1f5a6
Relay stations are just wifi routers that hold and push particular files, which homepass duplicates the process of. I'm not sure why any of the official stuff would affect homepass. I may be wrong though, I only know enough to get myself in trouble lol.
We did, thus why we documented all the relays in the wild that are still on the spreadsheet. The way it worked is that the 3DS looked for specific SSIDs (attwifi being one of them), and when it found one of them without security on the network, it connected to the Relay server at Nintendo and told the server the MAC address of the wireless access point and which SSID it used to connect. The server then spat back the last 6 system's StreetPass data that talked to it with that pair of credentials, wipes the oldest one, and pulls the data from your system. So us setting up HomePass, we were just cloning the SSID and MAC of known relays out in the wild, and agreeing on a bunch of other pairs of SSID/MAC that we would all use to exchange data with each other through Nintendo's server. So the same MAC, but one with attwifi as the SSID and one with the NZone@McD SSID would each count as a different relay, and pull different data from the server. Our router holds no data about the transaction, and routers don't generally have enough storage for things like this. All the HomePass software did was cucle through SSID and MAC combinations, it did nothing to data stored on our devices. The 3DS established the connection to Nintendo's central relay server through our router, and that server shut down. The server held the data. Heck, the StreetPass Weekend events where you could streetpass people from around the world just was them letting the relay server return random results from the entire database, instead of just the last 6 matching the pair of attributes for the relay you used to connect.
So the server was the single point of failure, and when they shut it down, they ended global relay service. There were no regional relay servers, all 3DS systems in the world connected to the same server through anything they recognized as a relay.
The complication with setting up a new server is the 3DS firmware is coded to use a specific server domain and hostname, and verifies it against an SSL certificate. That means we can't do a simple DNS redirect in our routers to point to another server of our own creation, because the 3DS will ask for the SSL certificate, and if it isn't issued to Nintendo by the proper certificate authority, it refuses the connection. We cannot get a certificate for our own server from that authority that claims to be issued to Nintendo, as that is the whole point of such certificates, to verify a site is who it claims to be. The authorities do identity verification before issuing a certificate, that is their entire job. They also revoke compromised certificates, and other operations relating to certificates and verification.
Thus the only possible solution for that is to use CFW to replace the certificate the 3DS checks for with one we can get, and redirect it to a different server for StreetPass Relay that uses that certificate, or modify the 3DS to not do the certificate check at all. Then someone still has to set up a server that properly stores and exchanges valid StreetPass data, or find out how to forge data the system accepts as valid. I don't think anyone has completed such a project yet, but data may have been captured over the years to reverse-engineer it.
Until those issues are worked out, relays are dead.
StreetPass relay stations were located at Nintendo Zones.
Had they not shut down the StreetPass relay service, it would now only officially (not counting homepass) work in NYC in the US.
Nintendo Zone was actually a subfunction of a Relay. It allowed access to a special web site for the 3DS. They shut that down in the American region years ago. StreetPass Relays don't require Nintendo Zone. Nintendo Zone required a relay, and unlocked based on SSID used and having no password on the network.
So the big project now is figuring out how StreetPass data is structured for each game that uses it, and making a program to communicate with a 3DS so that it will exchange data, or a program to generate a fake StreetPass entry to send to the system so it will read as valid. The latter would let anyone make a StreetPass event with any data they want for any game they want, to unlock anything they need on their system. Of course, save editors could also do that without involving StreetPass, but the plaza would lose out on a lot of functionality without a StreetPass emulator, or a full relay server replacement being set up.
I guess the question for anyone wanting to set up a replacement relay is how much bandwidth per month it would consume if all of us on Homepass started using it.
