Remember the new firmware update which Nintendo just sent out to do away with all those nasty people who have been running the Homebrew Channel? You know, another one of those feeble attempts to lock something down which the hacking community will have found a workaround to with in a couple of days?
Well, it’s already been worked around for those of you who don’t mind voiding your warranty, but we all knew that was going to happen. Where the actual news comes in is that there have been reports of the update rendering perfectly normal, unmodified Wii consoles inert.
The issue seems to be occurring during the downloading process. Reports on NeoGAF and Nintendo’s technical support forum claim that the download is freezing before completing and then will not reboot. Word is that the changes to one of the programs is causing write errors which prevent the system from starting up.
To their credit, Nintendo has already addressed the issue in a statement on their support forum (who says hackers are the only ones who can work quickly in these situations?). They claim that the issues are predominately occurring on modified consoles but have offered assistance in the form of free repairs to Wii owners who have never — even unwittingly — participated in such shenanigans as doing what they wish with the product they spent their money to own.
This is what we refer to as “collateral damage.”
