Why you shouldn't follow video tutorials from non official sources ["EL YAKARAZO" edition]

It was around mid June or late July, 2016 or so, I can't remember quite well which month it was, but was around half that year. I was unemployed and spending my time at home, making repair services for videogame consoles, most of my main costumers were friends and family so I hadn't many requests over the lapse of the last three months. I owned all the current consoles from the time, but my mainly used were the Nintendo 3DS and the Playstation 4, but mostly the first, as the scene was newly bursting with tons of news, homebrew and hack solutions to boot CFW, and I was keeping my eye on there since the "Fundraiser fiasco" (I may write a new entry talking about that topic).

I clearly remember that I had two 3DS's, one modded with spiderhax + RXTools sigpatch edtion (argh!) + emuNAND, and the other laying around as a testing unit, hardmoded with the SD adapter and with the first ever public CFW (a beta leaked from Yellows8) with New Super Mario Bros 2 installed and some test homebrew as well, it even had BigBlueMenu (a modded DevMenu app) on it.

It was Monday morning, 7:00 AM, I woke up so sleepless but I just couldn't sleep again. I decided to lurk the site (GBATemp) from my computer to see if I could get drowsy or something, but no luck. Then I saw it, a new exploit entry point for the 3DS was just discovered, a solution that wouldn't require online anymore: menuhax. As I said, I was too drowsy to even care to follow the tutorial, even yet to read it (English is not my main language) so by pure lazyness, I looked up for youtube videos on my language. At the time, I already knew that it was not recomended to do such a thing, but I repeat, I was so sleepy that I just ignored the warnings for once.

Then, it was when I met this particular Youtube Channel that gives my blog name its edition subtitle. If you are from Latin America like me, you'll recognize him well. He went quite popular for some time for his video guides, just before Youtube started to take down channels and videos that offered ways and guides to directly pirate your game consoles. But putting that aside, I will focus on a particular thing that caught my attention from him at first glance. As I said, I was quite familiar with the 3DS scene since its first baby steps, as well as the comunity devs and such. Unlike what are you expecting given this blog entry title, I successfully installed Menuhax using his video guide, but man, if you looked at my SD card back then, you surely would raise your eyebrow:

"yakaboot.3dsx"
"yakaextdata tool"
"yak.cfg"...

Yaka this, yaka that, yaka FUCKING EVERYWHERE, even on the installer screen menu, there was his label. I already knew something fishy was going on there, as many respectfull devs don't go and put their name on fucking everywhere with their tools (ehem roxxas doesn't count lol) aside from the credits, neither have Youtube channels with video tutorials and download links filled with captchas and url shorteners (aka money grabbers for lazy people). So some hours later, after finally got the chance to get some sleep, I decided to investigate the new MenuHax on my own here on GBATemp.

I don't need to explain what I found, so I immediatly uninstalled my previous MenuHax setup and did the official guide again with the original files as intended. Quite a relief if you ask me, and I said to myself to NEVER do that EVER again.

Anyway, some months passed, and I already had a new work, near from my place. I still did console repairs in my spare time, but only for my friends and such, as with them I could have the benefit of longer deadlines to deliver my work, also is worth mentioning that I moved away from the 3DS scene for a while, because I didn't have much time for it.
Then this fateful day, remembered with fear by many happened.

It was on January 2017 if my memory doesn't fail me, still on holiday season. That it started to happen. One of my closest friends called me at midnight, asking for help too desperate: "Man, I'm in serious trouble, my 3DS doesn't start anymore, and I would like to know if you could lend me a hand to check what is happening." I had nothing to do at the time and he lived just around the corner, so I asked him to come to my place with his 3DS. When he arrived, I took his console to begin the inspection, and asked to him what was the last thing he were doing with it, at the same time I was trying to power it on. "You know, there's this new thing called ARM9Loaderhax, I wanted to install it by myself, it seemed easy so I just tried". I looked up for ARM9Loaderhax here on GBATemp, did a quick readup and went to the troubleshoot section, repeated my reads until everything was clearer to me. Then, to be even more familiarized, I dusted off my test 3DS to install A9lh on it, with complete success until the final step, what could have happened then, to his 3DS? My main bet was the downgrade section, easy but time consuming to fix if that were the case.

So after about an hour or so passed already, so I checked again his 3DS and then noticed that the SD was still inside. "Maybe is just your SD card with some missing files or wrong names, I will check to make sure". I inserted the SD card on my PC, opened it up, and then everything started to make sense when I stumbled upon a file named:

YAKAREAR dotfucking bin

I started to shit out laughing at that, my friend looked at me with fear combined with a forced smile.
I asked to him where did he found the guide to mod his 3DS. "I was following a video guide on youtube". I couldn't resist my laugh again, but I tried to keep it silent as I didn't want to see my friend's sad puppy face just about to cry floods. I asked him again, what was the video in question (I already knew the channel) then he clicked on it.
Man... that... comment... section... was... a... true... SHIT FEST.

EVERYONE, literally, EVERYONE was crying and shitting on the poor youtuber demanding an answer, a fix for something that happened to each and every person that followed his faulty guide: An unrecoverable BRICK.

It made more sense at that point, and I didn't want to be the bringer of sad news to my friend, but it had to be done. "Man, your 3DS is fucking dead, you are an asshole for not asking me first to do the mod for you, you littleprick eediot"

Man, I didn't sleep that night, it was truly a show for me. I kept viewing all the winning comments flooding the video, but after some more hours they were dissabled, just for the video to be deleted some minutes later. Every hacking and homebrew site, and here on the Temp mainly, were flooded with poor souls asking for help, some admiting they were following this man's shitty guide, others saying "it suddenly happened when I was playing Pokemanz" and others just blaming on the main devs themselves when they had nothing to do. A complete floodgate was opened and it would be long before it closed.

Me, on the other side, was contacted by many asking for help to repair their 3DS, just to find out they followed that video guide too. That could have a bright side if at least I could fix those bricks, but at the time we didn't have NTRBoot yet so... litteraly unrecoverable but at least, expensive paperweights for them. Some of them even offered to sell me their dead 3DS's to use the pieces as replacements, but I only managed to get five at good price.

For those wondering, the reason of the brick waves was that this Youtuber in question left his own 3DS otp.bin on the files renamed and tampered by him to have his name label all over on the process, and as many already know, that file is critical and is meant to be used by the same 3DS where you dumped it only, otherwise you would... well, no more need to explain.

This fucking moron believed that the otp dumping process was a mere workaround to avoid antypiracy rules aka "we won't provide the file as it is copyrighted, so dump it yourself". He later made the excuse that he "forgot" to remove the file... upsies!

And that same statement was the one explained on the gaming news sites I mentioned before, but the conclussion ended split in two sides:

Reputable sites like this, maintained the recomendation of "Never, EVER follow video guides".
And IGNorant "gaming journalism" sites blamed the hackers, saying that "Hacking your console is always known for render it unusable *proceeds to ball lick Nintendo and breathes*, so is the hackers fault and not anyone else bleh bleh 1/5 too much stability"

So people, this is one of my stories that fully explains why you shouldn't follow video guides or unnoficial sources whatsoever, always search for official stuff and follow the main devs on their twitter accounts, join their discord servers and everything needed to make it even safest, saddly, I'm seeing the same pattern being repeated on the Nintendo Switch scence, just that this time we don't have ridiculous labelling on tampered files.