Here's a nice post as well. Show this to any doomsayers who think that Team Twiizers will somehow try to stop pirates:
QUOTE said:@Cygoku:
Blocking piracy software is a slippery slope. There’s no trivial way of differentiating between warez apps and regular homebrew from HBC’s perspective. In fact, there is essentially no technical difference between HBC itself and a pirated VC title. The details are somewhat involved, but the main premise is that if you can run code, and you can extract the plaintext code and data of pirated games, you can run those too. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the difficulty of accomplishing that. Our objective is therefore to strike a balance between enabling homebrew with as many features as possible, and doing as little work as possible for the warez users. This is, for example, why we’re focusing on new Starlet functionality without IOS (e.g. USB2 on BootMii) instead of stuff like the IOS module toolkit and the new IOS USB2 module. The latter are interesting from a technical, hacking, and homebrew perspective, but it’s also doing work for the pirates which depend on IOS. The developers behind piracy tools tend not to be nearly as good at true reverse engineering and writing “new” stuff as the homebrew developers. The first DVD warez launcher had little new code, and it was just a combination of existing tools (IOS module toolkit and example, existing GameCube DI code, and existing PPC-side game launching code). The first VC/WiiWare installers came out after I added ES functionality to libogc (I regret doing that now). I’ll admit that WiiGator’s warez launcher surprised me - he does actually seem to know what he’s doing on the IOS side, at least moreso than Waninkoko.
And yes, it’s also that blocking piracy is just not our job. Using a single security system for several purposes is bad security design. We try to break “just enough” of the security to enable homebrew without piracy, but Nintendo really should have made the gap wider than it is now. PS3 Linux proves that homebrew without piracy is possible (although they restrict 3D access, but I suspect that’s to restrict unlicensed developers more than piracy). Even having some sort of way of getting homebrew on the Wii with full peripoheral access except for the NAND (and no IOS, which games require) would go a long way towards enabling homebrew without piracy on the Wii. We can’t do that; Nintendo has to (unfortunately, it doesn’t look very plausible given the current hardware design).