Random hypotheticals I thought up

[Jediweirdo]

This isn't really a thread asking for help with anything, but rather a thread asking a bunch of "What If" questions lol. And in case this wasn't clear, I'm not speaking from personal experience; these are just random questions that I wonder if it's possible or not with the aside, here are my questions:

Spoiler: HYPOTHETICAL #1 - Coffee Sucks

- OK, let's set the scene:
You are a person with a head resembling this, trying to do the 112 region unlocking or something. While looking through your Wii U's files (you don't know where o look for the region files because "you're too good to use a guide"), you accidentally stumble upon a Wii U file that had a name of a type of coffee

But you hate coffee, and you know that coffee should have no place on your precious Wii U

So, after a bit of thinking, you come to the very obvious conclusion that you must delete every folder that even hints at it relating to coffee, and also delete any files that refer to or even mention any coffee files in their code.

Then, knowing that you solved what could possibly be the worst problem you'll ever encounter in your life, you proudly restart your Wii U... only to figure out that you literally can't leave the Wii U menu.

By some miracle, you gather up our 2 collective brain cells and press the B button while the Wii U is booting up, and by an even greater miracle than Jesus reviving himself from the cross, you get into the vWii Menu, which is homebrewed and completely untouched from your coffee file purge.

Since you are able to interact and mess with vWii files from the Wii U side of things (like injecting the homebrew channel and even resetting the vWii to a previous backup), could you hypothetically fix the Wii U to a pre-made NAND dump of the Wii U? Think the vWii NAND restorer, but the roles are swapped (so instead of restoring the vWii by launching Wii U homebrew, you're fixing the Wii U by launching vWii homebrew).

Spoiler: HYPOTHETICAL #2 - Gamer Rage

Let's set the scene:

You're playing SSB4, and you're on a major losing steak while playing against a friend that has their hand and legs tied up and is completely blindfolded to give you an advantage. After finally getting your friend down to 1 stock (you have 5), he somehow turns the game around and kills you 4 times, and you're forced to go into sudden death. After trying to smash attack him for the win, your friend does a well-timed spot dodge and punishes you accordingly... which lands him the dub.

Understandably outraged, you pour a glass of water on your launch day Wii U, throw the empty glass at your friend, violently unplug the Wii U from the wall only to hurl it straight at your Samsung QLED "50 TV. And to top everything off you flipped over all the chairs/couches in the house.

Realizing what you have just done, you bury your friend in your backyard (he was still alive and it was in broad daylight, so your neighbors got scared) buy a new $100 TV off craigslist, and flip back over all the couches and chairs in the house.

Now with everything ready, you plug back in your Wii U, and it thankfully turns on. But then, you get the 160-xxx error code when you go into the Mii Maker. So out of pure fear of the worst, you go on HCBUfnq (I wonder if you will figure out the dumb joke) and you ask around for help. After waiting a bit, you get replies telling you that your NAND got corrupted, and to not factory reset your Wii U, as that will brick your Wii U forevermore.

But thanks to your amazing intellect, you know that all 20 replies telling you to not factory reset your Wii U are just straight-up liars, and you go ahead and factory reset your Wii U anyways

...

And low and behold, your Wii U is now a fancy paperweight.

And so, you went to go tell everyone on the thread that you factory reset your Wii U because you didn't believe a word they said. After just about all of the people on the forum call you various different curse words and after 80% of the people who were trying to help you flat out bailed, the remainder of people started to try to think up ways to fix the Wii U. After a bunch of thinking and throwing around ideas, one of them said something stupid-- The Wii U and the Wii U gamepad is connected to each other through a kind of old, 2012 WiFi network that's like a decade old. They also knew that the GamePad can store and send out commands to the Wii U (with an example being the QuickStart menu). So, they wondered if they could do 1 of 3 things:

1. Pretend that their computer was a Wii U, have the Wii U GamePad sync to their computers, load up the GamePad with arbitrary code, then pair it to a regular Wii U with the intent to execute said code on the Wii U
2. Break into any brittle decade-old security the connection from the Wii U GamePad to the Wii U Console may have had, impersonate the connected Wii U Gamepad, then launch arbitrary code
3. Forget the middleman entirely and connect to the Wii U console by using an emulated Gamepad that can attempt to launch arbitrary code

Wow, as of Writing this one, I just realized how stupid this thought in particular is. I don't even think that's how exploits work lol

Also, completely unrelated, but if someone had Tirisumu (I'm sure I didn't spell that right) and this happened to them, could they use Tirisumu to save themselves?

And yeah, I only remember 2 questions I remember. Sorry if my writing is barely coherent because I'm too lazy to proofread and I'm running off of like 2 hours of sleep

 

[The Real Jdbye]

The first one is a maybe. The NAND is physically wired in, but you would need to break out of the sandbox somehow to access it.
The second one, probably not. Even if the gamepad communication could be exploited, it would require a semi working Wii U. Bluubomb requires a working Wii U Menu for example.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

What??
Those two hypothetical stories are written in an entertaining way. Those kind of stories when I want to scream: "Implausible nonsense! This guy/gal is mad!" but can't do this because… because… it isn't implausible. We've had our share of people trashing Wii U consoles with ftpiiu everywhere. People ignoring warnings → no doubt about this. Somebody destroying their stuff because of rage… I'll say it: "I once broke a Dualshock 1 shell with my bare hands when playing Crash Bandicoot 1" and those old controllers can take some abuse.
So an "A+" for your way of fiction telling.

Story 1:
There is some flaw allowing full privileges. Probably no practical implementation. → See wiiubrew.org/wiki/Wii_U_System_Flaws
Story 2:
Sounds similar to Bluubomb but with WiFi. Maybe the great masters of reverse engineering are be able give a definitive answer to that.

The problem with all implemented Wii U exploits is that they require the OS to be (at least partially) functional – same with your stories. What we are missing is a boot time (bootrom) exploit with practical implementation allowing us to execute our own software independently from the main OS.

 

[Deleted member 571007]

So with scenario One I'm not sure, a tool like that could theoretically be created, but I highly doubt it since the NAND is physically tied to your system as well as in the software. In order to even restore a NAND backup people usually have to replace parts of the motherboard in the first place, so number one is most likely a no. However number Two is somewhat possible with the use of DRC Sim, but because of lack of research on the subject I'm forced to assume that you'd need a half working Wii U to execute this.