HackMii

Argon contacted me a couple days ago, asking for a reasonable conversation and apparently willing to cooperate. We had an IRC conversation where I explained what the problems where and how they could fix them.

The end result seems to be that Argon has removed everything that us and other homebrew developers have produced, including all of the channels except for WAD Manager (waninkoko obviously let them use that). The Twilight Hack is gone from their archives. I haven’t checked whether they use my nandloader. I suspect they do, but I hope that if I confirm it and tell them they’ll get rid of it too. I’m not sure they know what a nandloader is or whether the one they’re using is mine… Jan 16: Argon has informed me that they are not using my nandloader.

What they didn’t remove is the illegal IOS16, the illegal cIOS, the illegal banner, etc. They probably realized that there’s no chance of argonchannel existing in a usable form without stealing from Nintendo (at least not with their skillset), so they decided to take their chances. Fine with me – it’s not my problem.

Update: Argon contacted me again on Jan 16. I guess they’ve finally seen the light – they’re getting rid of the illegal 3.4 firmware installer and the copied banner. The current downloads are supposed to be going down soon and a clean version should come up on Monday.

As far as I’m concerned, the battle is over with the homebrew scene. Nintendo can still get these guys in a load of trouble though, as things currently stand. Most modchips are illegal in some countries, but, well, the current Argonchannel installer is illegal in practically the entire world.

Most of our faithful readers probably already saw this, but for those who missed it, Marcan and I presented on behalf of Team Twiizers at the 25th annual Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin. Slides are available, and you can watch the video.

The content of it will be familiar to most readers here. With most of the team there at the conference, we had made it our goal to get BootMii displaying something on the screen for the demo; the challenge here is that the Starlet can’t directly write to the video registers, so we have to inject PPC code to the Broadway over the EXI bus, and then have THAT actually draw to the screen. We didn’t quite manage to finish it before the presentation started, but the rest of the crew got it working while we presented, and we eventually got something up on the screen at the end of the demo.

It’s a shame, because that modest demo (a simple console on the screen) doesn’t reflect the enormous amount of effort required to get to that point. At this point, we have a fairly solid BootMii core, but it doesn’t do anything useful. We need to write an installer to be proud of (with error checking and stuff), as well as some low-level applications that use it (backup / restore, etc), and need to implement IPC so we can actually present a nice UI.

We’re working on it. 🙂

Here’s the ridiculous response that I received when I sent them an e-mail demanding that they stop hosting the Twilight Hack.

According to the COPYRIGHT LAW the owner of the “SOFTWARE RIGHTS” need to proof that.

We need some evidence that you wrote this code, and better if this code is currently registered on a COPYRIGHT AUTHORITY.

Marcan, is not simple says “I’M OWNER OF THIS CODE” to ask COPYRIGHT protection.

If you can proof under your responsability (is a code that brake DRM protection of NINTENDO WII, without any licence of NINTENDO) that this code is yours, we will remove it from our ZIP files.
Before of course we cannot proceede

I’m waiting a EVIDENCES

ARGONCHANNEL TEAM

I guess Argon is special, and “Copyright (C) 2003,2004,2008 tmbinc, segher, bushing, marcan” just isn’t enough for them.

Or maybe they want me to submit full source code to them?

It’s pretty funny that they, of all people, would try to claim that we’re braking DRM.