Everyone has probably heard about Mario Kart 7 online's recent 1.2 update at this point. While the forums and others on the Internet might have gone crazy with comments like "Why Nintendo!!?", "Just let the 3DS die already", "The 3DS should already be forgotten about.", "Does anyone seriously still use a 3DS? Anyone still unironically plays this game?", I just ignored such comments, didn't think much of them, and didn't care to read further. It was just nice to see my favorite Nintendo system getting a bit more of official support.
Not everyone has access to my profile, so for those of you who might be reading this, here's what I initially posted about it:
Still, I fully agree with my friend @KleinesSinchen here and have held a similar opinion pretty much since the official discontinuation of the 3DS and Wii U family.
The 3DS and Wii U (and well, older systems as well) will always be alive for me, no matter how little or much official support remains. The full discontinuation of support for still-existing services will also be a blessing of its own, since I am not a fan of reliance on proprietary services provided by such corporations, and it will likely just push the community to work more on open-source replacement services and compatible open-source server replacements for existing services.
Now, going forward to today, we see the public release of this new exploit, which basically fully explains the existence of the MK7 update.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/enlbuff...irst-party-3ds-wii-u-and-switch-games.623672/
I'd recommend that you just read the thread's original post, it should explain everything that there is to know, and I won't waste time repeating things that already got said in the linked post.
Despite some of the things I'm about to say sounding a bit negative, I do want to give my thanks and congratulations to @PabloMK7, Rambo6Glaz, Fishguy6564, and others that might have been involved with the discovery and implementation of this exploit. I do still think that it's better to have such vulnerabilities discovered, rather than ignored or hidden for years.
But now, getting to the reason why I was going to make another profile post, but instead decided to write this blog entry:
"I wish the Wii U was still alive in some way!"
Of course, official support is once again not necessary for it to be alive in my heart, but if I am understanding this right, Nintendo can't even be bothered to fix such an awfully simple but serious and dangerous vulnerability in the still officially supported online features of Wii U games?
I am hoping that this will not cause "innocent" users to get malware on their consoles or even have them turned into bricks. I also hope that it won't cause the official services to be shut down any sooner than Nintendo might be planning to - sure, I believe that the community reverse-engineering efforts are going great, and that soon enough we'll have functional replacement servers, but that will simply never be the same as playing with the wider community that might not be willing to or understand how to use custom community servers.
It seems that Nintendo cared about fixing the issue in 3DS games, at least Mario Kart 7, so why not Wii U games? Lots still play those games online, and I imagine that the consequences of such a vulnerability could be really dangerous, if some malicious entities decided to abuse the vulnerability to its limit (which sounds to be about as high as the sky).
Of course, it's possible that I'm wrong here and understanding something incorrectly, but everything seems to suggest that all of this is in fact the case. However, I do also wonder if other 3DS games are affected by this vulnerability, since Mario Kart 7 seems to be the only one that got an update so far. It would be interesting to see Animal Crossing: New Leaf affected by this, but also just as sad in the end, since I'd probably be too afraid to visit a public island ever again. I was even wondering in the years prior to this, if such a vulnerability might exist in the game. I don't really have the energy to mess with the released codes now, and I never managed to set up a working environment for 3DS plugin development under Linux anyway, so I don't know if I'll ever find out.
Well, I think that's everything I have to say about this for now. Thanks for reading if you got to the end, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about something.
Not everyone has access to my profile, so for those of you who might be reading this, here's what I initially posted about it:
Still, I fully agree with my friend @KleinesSinchen here and have held a similar opinion pretty much since the official discontinuation of the 3DS and Wii U family.
The 3DS and Wii U (and well, older systems as well) will always be alive for me, no matter how little or much official support remains. The full discontinuation of support for still-existing services will also be a blessing of its own, since I am not a fan of reliance on proprietary services provided by such corporations, and it will likely just push the community to work more on open-source replacement services and compatible open-source server replacements for existing services.
Now, going forward to today, we see the public release of this new exploit, which basically fully explains the existence of the MK7 update.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/enlbuff...irst-party-3ds-wii-u-and-switch-games.623672/
I'd recommend that you just read the thread's original post, it should explain everything that there is to know, and I won't waste time repeating things that already got said in the linked post.
Despite some of the things I'm about to say sounding a bit negative, I do want to give my thanks and congratulations to @PabloMK7, Rambo6Glaz, Fishguy6564, and others that might have been involved with the discovery and implementation of this exploit. I do still think that it's better to have such vulnerabilities discovered, rather than ignored or hidden for years.
But now, getting to the reason why I was going to make another profile post, but instead decided to write this blog entry:
"I wish the Wii U was still alive in some way!"
Of course, official support is once again not necessary for it to be alive in my heart, but if I am understanding this right, Nintendo can't even be bothered to fix such an awfully simple but serious and dangerous vulnerability in the still officially supported online features of Wii U games?
I am hoping that this will not cause "innocent" users to get malware on their consoles or even have them turned into bricks. I also hope that it won't cause the official services to be shut down any sooner than Nintendo might be planning to - sure, I believe that the community reverse-engineering efforts are going great, and that soon enough we'll have functional replacement servers, but that will simply never be the same as playing with the wider community that might not be willing to or understand how to use custom community servers.
It seems that Nintendo cared about fixing the issue in 3DS games, at least Mario Kart 7, so why not Wii U games? Lots still play those games online, and I imagine that the consequences of such a vulnerability could be really dangerous, if some malicious entities decided to abuse the vulnerability to its limit (which sounds to be about as high as the sky).
Of course, it's possible that I'm wrong here and understanding something incorrectly, but everything seems to suggest that all of this is in fact the case. However, I do also wonder if other 3DS games are affected by this vulnerability, since Mario Kart 7 seems to be the only one that got an update so far. It would be interesting to see Animal Crossing: New Leaf affected by this, but also just as sad in the end, since I'd probably be too afraid to visit a public island ever again. I was even wondering in the years prior to this, if such a vulnerability might exist in the game. I don't really have the energy to mess with the released codes now, and I never managed to set up a working environment for 3DS plugin development under Linux anyway, so I don't know if I'll ever find out.
Well, I think that's everything I have to say about this for now. Thanks for reading if you got to the end, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about something.
