fordy on 08 December 2012
| HappySqurriel said: For the most part, hacking groups discover possible exploits for systems almost immediately but it takes time to create a viable exploit from these. I imagine that one of the reason's Nintendo forces the Wii U to reboot into a Wii emulator to play Wii games is to act as a "quarantine" to protect the Wii U from possible Wii security holes. While I could be wrong, I expect that the Wii homebrew exploit will fall far short of running software on the Wii U; but it could be helpful for hackers to learn more about the system. |
I think you're on the mark there. Some companies try to contain security breaches of past consoles by forcing the CPU into a downsized mode, which can only be reverted back with a reset. Once that happens, any control gained from the hacking attampt in said mode is lost.
The Wii had a similar structure, in which it could enter "Gamecube mode". This mode switched off any kind of hardware that was not passed over from the Gamecube to the Wii (such as the SD card reader and bluetooth).
