Hacking A plea for peace

[thesund0g]

Everyone, please, take a deep breath and count to ten. Things are getting out of hand here. I know I'm only privy to a small fraction of what has been going on lately with the Wii scene, since I'm not a dev, but what I have witnessed as of late here has really left a sour feeling in my stomach.

I bought my Wii a year and a half ago for one reason, and only one reason: the bright, vibrant homebrew scene. If I wanted to just play copied games, I would have bought a 360 -- the library of games is better, hands down. But the drama that has gradually unfolded since the first USB loaders (remember the Waninkoko vs. Marcan thing?) has reached a new height. This is an arms war that is getting out of hand very, very quickly.

Choosing to not support a particular IOS or patch for genuine compatibility/stability reasons (it actually broke your app or caused real, preventable bricks), or choosing not to implement a DIP module is perfectly fine in my book. You write an app, you get to decide what you support. But taking active measures against what one views as piracy seems more like trying to force your own views and morals on other users. No, they don't have to use your app, but you don't have to go out of your way to thwart them, either. I'm not referring to any specific app as I know there has been an awful lot of confusion on the matter -- who is actively fighting piracy-enabling methods, and who is choosing to simply not add support for them is still pretty much up in the air as far as the average user's knowledge goes. I think there has even been something of a "let's let 'em think we're adding protections when we really aren't" going on, which only makes things more confusing.

If you're against piracy, that's fine with me. But know that no application or IOS made today or tomorrow is going to do anything more to support piracy than what has already been done. That line was crossed long, long ago (at least as far as the scene is concerned) with the first cIOSes and modchips. There is a multitude of "complete softmod kits" available on bittorrent, rapidshare, etc. that will continue to allow every Wii made (at least to date) to support some kind of piracy. This isn't going to go away, ever, regardless of how much you encourage/discourage a particular behavior.

Even if you aren't forcing your views on the end user or actively thwarting that which you disagree with, please understand what the net result is: a general feeling of bitterness in the end user, which propagates throughout the scene in flamewars, paranoia and general discontent. There have been some great technical advancements in the past few months that have been far overshadowed by this kind of drama. Regardless of what side you sit on, we all need to do what we can to keep the scene together and avoid this whole damned mentality of "us versus them." You have to ask yourself what you're really accomplishing, whose hearts you are going to win over and whether you're really making the scene a better place with your attitude, your opinions, and your feelings.

That's all.

 

[wiiuser2]

spot on......

 

[marcan_troll]

No, they don't have to use your app, but you don't have to go out of your way to thwart them, either.

This has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with broken, crappy, harmful piracy software that affects us. The reason why we go out of our way to avoid any patched software is because it breaks more often than not, and because one of the reasons why we've bricked 0 wiis so far is because we're paranoid about the system's state in the installer and refuse to run if anything is wrong.

And it's clearly necessary, because the pirates keep trying harder and harder to piss us off. We recently had a nice crop of "unexplainable" bugs filed on our tracker, random crashes and installer failures and black screens and whatnot. They went away after reinstalling an apparently clean IOS. As it turns out, the humongous retards behind darkcorp decided it would be cool to trick our software into running on their broken IOSes, which turned out to be the cause of these invalid bug reports. And thus, wasting our time.

Anyone who attempts to force piracy-patched firmware on unsuspecting homebrew app developers (i.e. anyone who patches any standard IOS) automatically loses the right to file bug reports and, as far as I'm concerned, every guarantee of stability or brick-safety. And since the people behind these patches insist on proliferating them to users who don't have a clue what they're doing and don't understand the consequences of their actions, all we can do is try to discourage it and protect ourselves against the ensuing broken chaos by trying to detect it and informing the user instead of going with it and ending up crashing (or worse).

If you want to pirate, do whatever the fuck you want with IOS2xy, but the moment you install a failpack you stop being just a pirate and start being a nuisance to legitimate homebrew.

 

[luminalace]

I don't think anything is new! The war with waninkoko vs the rest has been raging for ages!

I for one will never pick sides...I respect Marcan, Wanin, Team Twizzers etc regardless of how they feel about each other!

 

[ChokeD]

It's that bad ?? really ?? bad enough for someone who isn't even involved to right a mission statement ?? Yeah, there are going to be those drama driven discussions because lets face it, some people have no life but the development of the homebrew scene or they just see it as a hobby and people are passionate about the hobby they involve themselves with. But, as everything in this world does, the scene will go on and evolve into 2,3,4, different types of education and research and just plain fun and yes, pirating. There isn't an activity left in the world, including gaming, where people have not "cheated" in some way shape or fashion. So let it be written, cause it has been done. People argue, mistakes are made, people get over it with time, if not, they whither away in despair and anguish.

This subject you discuss, in my opinion, is really not all that and can be solved by not bickering and arguing about they made it this way, because he didn't like it or the like of that. People have a tendency to blow things way out of proportion as you have, in a sense, with this topic, not in a bad way mind you, just a prerequisite to talking about it even more than it was already being discussed in other threads.

Much respect to ya though, I know you meant well.

 

[thesund0g]

Why not take the less-politicized route by insisting on a syscheck report with every bug report, and subsequently throwing out everyone who is using unsupported patches? Wouldn't that be easier by far, and save a lot of people (yourselves included!) from a lot of headaches?

I'm sorry that I don't have the same perspective as a developer, but this seems a bit backwards:

Anyone who attempts to force piracy-patched firmware on unsuspecting homebrew app developers (i.e. anyone who patches any standard IOS) automatically loses the right to file bug reports...

So apart from flawed bug reports, how is the end-user forcing firmware on the developer? Doesn't it usually work the other way around? It feels more like the developer is forcing firmware on the end-user.

By the way, you missed the point of my post. I want see peace here, but you replied rather aggressively. That's exactly what I was trying to say wasn't needed in the scene.

 

[mauifrog]

Darkcorp does not seem to cause any issue with hackmii 0.8, it does not use any of the cios to install, and the HBC runs just fine on cIOS58.

 

[thesund0g]

It's that bad ?? really ?? bad enough for someone who isn't even involved to right a mission statement ??

I'm thinking Chris Crocker, "LEAVE THE WII SCENE ALONE, JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!"

I'm just sick of all the infighting going on here. I suppose it's more interesting than the "halp I bricxzored my Wii!" norm though, it just seems awfully counterproductive. If I can get one person to quit being a dick about either side of the issue, my work here is done.

 

[ChokeD]

It's that bad ?? really ?? bad enough for someone who isn't even involved to right a mission statement ??

I'm thinking Chris Crocker, "LEAVE THE WII SCENE ALONE, JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!"

I'm just sick of all the infighting going on here. I suppose it's more interesting than the "halp I bricxzored my Wii!" norm though, it just seems awfully counterproductive. If I can get one person to quit being a dick about either side of the issue, my work here is done.

Noted, but this is really in the wrong section of the forums, I was thinking more like Jerry McGuire

 

[marcan_troll]

Why not take the less-politicized route by insisting on a syscheck report with every bug report, and subsequently throwing out everyone who is using unsupported patches? Wouldn't that be easier by far, and save a lot of people (yourselves included!) from a lot of headaches?
Our installer does a system check, and this is exactly how we throw out invalid bug reports. Except the darkcorp guys explicitly, knowingly, and deliberately altered their technique to fool this check into reporting their patched junk as vanilla. This change affects nothing other than our checks and was done with the explicit goal of defeating them (even though those checks are in there for a reason, namely, because we don't test, use, or support anything other than Nintendo IOSes). Thus we wasted quite some time puzzling over these reports until we recently learned this.

So apart from flawed bug reports, how is the end-user forcing firmware on the developer? Doesn't it usually work the other way around? It feels more like the developer is forcing firmware on the end-user.
When an app loads an IOS that is normally preinstalled on a Wii, it expects that IOS to be one of Nintendo's versions. This is no different from failpacks causing issues with games, except people will automatically blame the failpack if a game crashes, while they will automatically blame a hombrew app if it crashes, instead of thinking it might be caused by the same failpack.

By the way, you missed the point of my post. I want see peace here, but you replied rather aggressively. That's exactly what I was trying to say wasn't needed in the scene.

I'm not particularly fond of gbatemp, as most people know, so on the rare occasion I come around here, it's generally to rant. My username should make this pretty clear. If you want more peaceful discussion, I suggest IRC or HackMii comments.

QUOTE(mauifrog @ Aug 16 2010, 07:54 AM)

Darkcorp does not seem to cause any issue with hackmii 0.8, it does not use any of the cios to install, and the HBC runs just fine on cIOS58.

Except when it does and we get bug reports.

 

[luminalace]

I'm not particularly fond of gbatemp, as most people know, so on the rare occasion I come around here, it's generally to rant. My username should make this pretty clear. If you want more peaceful discussion, I suggest IRC or HackMii comments.

I suspect that this is because most tempers common applications used by the hbc (apart from Emu's, Neo Gamma, Wiimc) are CiosX installers and dare I say it..DarkCorp!

 

[Jacobeian]

Well, this is not new and this probably will never end as long as people with different level of understandings (and also different ages) will share discussions on forums.


The truth is that you could repeat it again & again, explaining that you don't give a shit about people who pirates games as long as they don't bother you, arguing that the check for modified IOS is there for a good reason and that this reason is the program can crash if the IOS is not *exactly* as expected, you will still have people who can't understand that and prefer to see this as a war of "good hackers" against "bad pirates". Maybe because it's easier to think that way for simple minds

The funniest is that most people here admit they don't have the knowledge of Marcan, Bushing, etc ... but in discussions, they always have to show how they know better what is happening, etc... and at the end come with failed logic like "meh, I have darkcorp installed and never bricked any Wii, so it means this is safe".

That's said, I admit marcantroll has quite agressive stance everytime he talks with people who don't have the same level of knowledge than him, but others from the team are very kind

 

[bwillb]

meh never saw the point in darkcorp, and well aware of issues with custom firmware upgraders and downgraders... as long as you don't break cIOS 2xx,wad installation, or usb backup loading ( I HATE discs. so antiquated. I don't even watch DVDs anymore, strictly netflix instant)... I don't care what you do

I think some people need to just remove WiiBrew from their bookmarks and move on if they are upset.

 

[gisel213]

Funny how Marcan and Co bash Wan and others on the piracy side fine they have a stance okay... But SNEEK runs off there hard work mini
aka bootmii and you don't hear them bashin Crediar why??? Just like the HBC runs thousands of roms which some are VC games on WiiShop
and SNEEK runs Original or Pirated wii games from the disc channel along with pirated wiiware games from a HDD or SdCard now isn't this
piracy???? and no cios was needed???

All from there ultimate brick protection app??? oh snap it enables piracy even easier than dop mii,tbr,cios236 or 249,uloader,usbloadergx,
configusbloader, neogamma and others....

They wan't to remove apps fine it's their wiibrew site basically... But take a look in the mirror 1st ninty doesn't care what your stance on
piracy is you are making their system do things they did not intend to do so... that's why they block your exploit's don't blame it on piracy

 

[buffdog]

They wan't to remove apps fine it's their wiibrew site basically... But take a look in the mirror 1st ninty doesn't care what your stance on
piracy is you are making their system do things they did not intend to do so... that's why they block your exploit's don't blame it on piracy

nail on head yeh

 

[sorgelig]

C'est la vie - as French people say

Although TT doing hard underground work, most attentions are given to developers doing USB and other loaders.
To remind who rules the game, TT had to make big noise.
Applause to TT. You succeed

I'm sure, after such unpopular move from TT, other homebrew hub will appear where developers won't affraid that some day their work will be vanished in a day.
... and that will add more oil into the flame between TT and the rest community.

For me: if application is not compatible with SNEEK then it go to trash can, like HBC 1.0.8 went...
I want to be safe at 99.99% given me by SNEEK.
Although TT opened door to homebrew, they won't give 100% safety. Why? Because they more concern of shadow of piracy than real safety.
And if you will give ultimate safe solution and it will work fine they won't make noises to lure their ego

"Users should be kept on short thread" - general rule of software developers

 

[wes11ph]

is this issue still alive?
can you all stop talking about this.
this will not help on the scene.

 

[s3phir0th115]

No, they don't have to use your app, but you don't have to go out of your way to thwart them, either.

This has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with broken, crappy, harmful piracy software that affects us. The reason why we go out of our way to avoid any patched software is because it breaks more often than not, and because one of the reasons why we've bricked 0 wiis so far is because we're paranoid about the system's state in the installer and refuse to run if anything is wrong.

And it's clearly necessary, because the pirates keep trying harder and harder to piss us off. We recently had a nice crop of "unexplainable" bugs filed on our tracker, random crashes and installer failures and black screens and whatnot. They went away after reinstalling an apparently clean IOS. As it turns out, the humongous retards behind darkcorp decided it would be cool to trick our software into running on their broken IOSes, which turned out to be the cause of these invalid bug reports. And thus, wasting our time.

Anyone who attempts to force piracy-patched firmware on unsuspecting homebrew app developers (i.e. anyone who patches any standard IOS) automatically loses the right to file bug reports and, as far as I'm concerned, every guarantee of stability or brick-safety. And since the people behind these patches insist on proliferating them to users who don't have a clue what they're doing and don't understand the consequences of their actions, all we can do is try to discourage it and protect ourselves against the ensuing broken chaos by trying to detect it and informing the user instead of going with it and ending up crashing (or worse).

If you want to pirate, do whatever the fuck you want with IOS2xy, but the moment you install a failpack you stop being just a pirate and start being a nuisance to legitimate homebrew.

The reasoning you guys do that was explained to me, and I understand it for the most part.

However, as a Darkcorp user, I can say that the only reason I'd want it to avoid HBC/hackmii installer detection at least is because I like having darkcorp but also have a correctly oriented homebrew channel. (I don't mind the installer using a clean IOS61 though. It's mainly the ability to use IOS58 on the new HBC without losing disc channel loading capabilities for the select few games that use it that I like it for.) Though granted that's almost entirely obsolete with forwarder channels and autoboot mods.

Of course, being a responsible user, any bug reports I file would be under a clean IOS if desired. I know not everyone would be that polite though, as you've pointed out.

I think a lot of the issue is how you guys choose to have the programs react to running under pathed IOSes. I'm pretty sure that if some of it wasn't as invasive (the HBC being upside down), that the ones making the patches wouldn't feel invaded upon and thus wouldn't invest effort in avoiding detection. I think a win win situation could be made out of this. Still have a means of denying support, but keeping it usable. Like... maybe the background could be changed to say that there isn't support since it detects it's being run on a patched IOS. That way it'd be usable, unlike having it all upside down. You'd get your goal of making it clear that it's not supported, and the patchers would get thier goal of usability.

 

[ChokeD]

is this issue still alive?
can you all stop talking about this.
this will not help on the scene.

That's what I'm saying, who gives a crap, we're thankful to everyone on both sides, if you don't want to follow TT then there are other apps that can do the same thing HBC does and if you want to follow them then install HBC v8. Whatever you all do get on with your lives. geezz

 

[luckwii]

( I HATE discs. so antiquated. I don't even watch DVDs anymore, strictly netflix instant)... I don't care what you do

I think this is the scariest part of this post. I haven't touched the DVD player in about a year. An overwhelming "old" feeling came over me with this statement. Wasn't long ago IMO that the DVD was the next new thing. Now it seems the PC may become the central nervous system replacing phones, TV, radio, and any other entertainment/communications.

Anyway, things change fast. I think the dev "war" going on makes sense if there is one. IMO, the CIOS and homebrew are fastly becoming more relevant than the original manufacturers system and software. That is strange too in that then chicken is starting to come before the egg. Homebrew and custom IOS are out of the reach of a lot of people now because it takes a degree of intelligence to install, maintain, and use. But that is even changing as the revs come along. The easier it gets, the more people will use it.

That kind of leaves a market or "arms race" to be number one in the custom scene. Even if no profit is made, there is still a big overall market at stake. So I can see where this slight back and forth between the devs can take place. I don't think it is a big deal at this point seeing as how it could be a lot worse.