Nintendo Wii hacked

The Nintendo Wii has been hacked, and can now run homebrew code, meaning there are going to be a lot of interesting homebrew games, and unfortunately ripping of commercial games for the P2P/Bittorrent consumer.

The register reports from the 24th Chaos Communication Congress that Michael Steil and Felix Domke were able to demonstrate how their own code runs, and how the hack works.

During a presentation at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin last week, hackers Michael Steil and Felix Domke demonstrated their own code running on the console and making use of its system resources. The duo were able to pull off the hack after they extracted the keys for signing Wii code, a feat that would not have been possible if Nintendo had used an encrypted drive. Source: Register

Nintendo will more likely do a patch to the system to ensure that the keys are better protected in the future. Avoiding the patch will be interesting for folks who want to play games that are not officially sanctioned for the console.

This also opens the door to people playing backups of their games, or downloading games from the P2P and Bittorrent networks. It will be interesting to see what that does to game sales, and the popularity of the Wii.