HackMii

It’s been a quiet few months around here — Nintendo seems to have been neglecting the Wii. We expected to see a firmware update bundled with Super Mario Galaxy 2, but found no such thing — however, a few weeks later, we have ourselves a brand new 4.3 update. As usual, Nintendo describes the update as:

June 21, 2010

Wii Menu 4.3
Unauthorized Modifications
Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.3 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files. In addition, there are some behind the scenes enhancements that do not affect any prominently-used features or menus but will improve system performance.

If you are seeing “Error:004,” please click here.

What a disappointment… this is just a rehash of, well … every update in the past 2 years, except for the 4.0 update (which actually added some features). The only thing that will drive people to install this update will be the broken Shopping channel and hypothetical future games which will come with this update on disc.

Anyway, here’s the technical changelog — much of this can be seen in the last few Wiimpersonator reports.

IOS

• Fixes in all versions — the 2 exploits we were using in the HackMii Installer, as well as the /tmp bug that has existed forever and a half and been used by everyone else to downgrade IOS. Updated existing IOSes (9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 53, 55, 56, 57, 61)
• Added two new IOSes — IOS80 and IOS58. IOS80 continues the trend of a new IOSx0 for each system menu, and IOS70 was stubbed out. IOS58 was previously only found on one disc, and is interesting because it contains an EHCI (USB2.0)
• Added a stub IOS that will finally overwrite BootMii/IOS with a higher version number.

System Menu

• Updated to block title IDs — HAXX, JODI, DISC, DISK
• Updated to *really* block Bannerbomb – shows Error 004 now

So there’s nothing interesting at all in this update. Just the usual bugfixes. They do get credit this time to actually block exploits. The Bannerbomb block seems to be stable this time and they didn’t leave our privilege escalation exploit unfixed like in the last update.

We’re currently working on new exploits and a new release of the HackMii installer but we’ll spend some more time to obfuscate our exploits this time to make it harder for ninty to find and fix them. It might therefore take some more time until our next release.
Just don’t update – there’s nothing interesting in this update anyway.