zektor said:
If they are adamant, they can find a way to hinder our fun. I would suspect that one of the things we would have to look forward to would be a behind the scenes "upgrade" that will limit the use of the USB ports. This can be done in software on a driver level. Probably create some sort of signing scheme to give USB port access. At least this is one of the things I would have done to protect my assets.
They did do this, but their house of cards tumbled with the twiizer attack. If they had encrypted the ram in Wii mode then there wouldn't have been a way in.
Because the keys are available to decrypt anything in an update, they can't add anything secret.
They fixed their mistake with the DSi and thats holding up well.
There are two things they could try to take control again:
1. encrypt the system menu with another scheme and make it seek out more things (unauthorised channels/IOS/boot2). While it would be possible to hack it, the time it would take would be much longer. They may be able to hide some checks in the code for the system menu being patched, which on a specific date could brick everybodies Wii or corrupt your wbfs partition/files.
2. change how IOS loading works so you can't run custom code on starlet at all. If they structured the update so it's all or nothing then that would make it very hard to get back in (i.e. a new boot2 and all new IOS's that verify signatures before they will execute a new IOS). They'd have to make sure they audited all their code, so that there was no chance of another exploit. We'd know exactly what they were doing but like the boot1 with trucha fixed, once updated there would be nothing we could do about it (at least through software).
If they did both at the same time and put out a good game that required it which couldn't be patched to run on the old firmware, then that would cause the most impact.
Starlet is effectively a hypervisor, just not a very good one. 360 & PS3 show the effectiveness of a decent one. They both have had less serious problems, but they patched them so long ago now that they may as well have never existed.