Difference between revisions of "Fail0verflow"

Revision as of 08:07, 11 April 2009

Team Twiizers is our resident "1337 h4x0r" group. They are essentially responsible for the past and present formation of the Wii Homebrew scene. They are also responsible for the majority of work involving brick recovery.

History

Team Twiizers is named for the infamous tweezer attack in which a pair of tweezers was used to obtain the Wii's private encryption keys. Once the Wii's private keys were obtained, exploration of the system could truly get into full swing.

At the annual 24c3 hacker conference, bushing demonstrated an altered version of Lego Star Wars which was used to load some basic code displaying Wii Remote data in real time. Video Source: crediar's clip of bushing from the 24c3 conference (Jan 2008).

An exploit found in the save system of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii version) led to the next step: the release of the Twilight Hack, which could load executables containing custom code compiled against libogc. The Twilight Princess exploit worked by using a modified save file containing a name for Link's horse which was long enough to cause a buffer overflow pointing to a memory address which contained the loader code. Video Source: bushing

Then followed the collaborative creation and eventual release of the Homebrew Channel, which was installable via the Twilight Hack or by using a special ISO for Wii consoles with modded disc drives. Video Source: bushing

The Homebrew Channel was and is one of the only homebrew applications to feature an automatic update capability.

Projects

Team Twiizers have collaborated on a wide variety of projects, including a study of Wii bricks and custom booting to allow independence from Nintendo updates that may be otherwise necessary in the future for newer games.

BootMii

BootMii is the "next step", so to speak. It is a patch applied to boot2 that will check for homebrew and launch it instead of loading the system menu (if nothing is present then it will proceed to boot normally into the wii system menu). It could be used to load the homebrew channel, for example, bypassing the need to ever install it on your wii. Or it could load linux, or perhaps even a completely different menu interface which is fully capable of launching channels and games. It could also be used for brick recovery.

Past Projects

...and others

Philosophy

Twiizers has always gone out of it's way to make clear the point that they do not support nor want anything to do with piracy or pirates. They are simply a group of hacking enthusiasts who share their work with the community that they played a major part in founding, and have made every effort to ensure that their work is not associated with bootlegging.

Known Members

The following people are either current members or have been publicly known members of Team Twiizers in the past. Some may be inactive from time to time. Since much of the work is collaborative, at certain times there may be others working with the team or there may be publicly unknown members of the team working behind the scenes.

Troublemakers

Given the stature and importance of Team Twiizers within the Homebrew Community, it is not surprising that they have received some grief from various people on occasion. Aside from the problems presented by pirates and the seemingly endless annoyance of dealing with "lamers", there are a few noteworthy mentions.

Argon, breaking several laws to bring you other people's work DRM locked to their chip without permission. Buy now!
Waninkoko, who has distributed tools shamelessly based on quick and dirty modifications of other people's code which are then used to promote piracy.
Scammers trying to sell homebrew and guides based on freely available information.
News sites spreading false rumors and inaccurate reports.
WiiLi, headed by tuxiido. WiiLi is a failure that refuses to die and will never make good on it's promises. It is known for stolen content and a fake Linux bounty as well as a lot of other evil drama stemming from the dictatorial oppression of it's owner. A sad and lonely place.
Cheaters who use homebrew to screw other players over in online play, giving hackers and homebrew a bad name.

Controversy

Due to Twiizer's stance on piracy and their efforts to keep Nintendo from making things more difficult for homebrewers, the team has had to keep several details about certain exploits and pieces of code under wraps. These measures have caused some concern within the community of end-users, many of whom feel that all of the code and the details of exploits should be made publicly available to everyone, not simply a portion of it. Still others are upset over rumors and misinformation surrounding the issue, and yet more are simply spurned by the deliberate attempt to exclude software pirates. A few simple facts should be noted:

Homebrew is not illegal, nor is any of the reverse engineering that was done in order to enable it. However, software piracy is illegal. This is not to say that laws do not vary from country to country, but as a general rule, it holds.
Twiizers has never used any copyrighted/stolen code in their projects. Everything they have released has been created with original code. As such, they retain the right to do with it as they wish.
Releasing the details of exploits along with certain code would be giving a free hand to pirates while alerting Nintendo to exactly what they needed to patch. Since this would go against the anti-piracy stance of Twiizers as well as making things harder on homebrew developers and their end-users, it is obvious why it has not been done.
Twiizers does not profit from their work. Period. All money goes directly into paying for bandwidth costs.
Team Twiizers is part of a larger community of hacking and coding enthusiasts/hobbyists for whom they shoulder some of the responsibility in keeping the ball rolling. Since that is the case, many of the administrative actions taken by Twiizers are done directly in that interest.

External links

Media

25c3 Appearance (Jan 2009)

Blogs

HackMii, bushing's Blog. Other members also post there.
Marcansoft, marcan's blog.
debugmo.de tmbinc's blog.

@@ Line 2: / Line 2: @@
 == History ==
-Team Twiizers is named for the infamous [[WiiBrew:FAQ#How_did_this_happen.3F|tweezer attack]] in which a pair of tweezers was used to obtain the Wii's private encryption keys.  Once the Wii's private keys were obtained, exploration of the system could truly get into full swing.
+Team Twiizers is named for the infamous [[Tweezer Attack|tweezer attack]] in which a pair of tweezers was used to obtain the Wii's private encryption keys.  Once the Wii's private keys were obtained, exploration of the system could truly get into full swing.
 At the annual 24c3 hacker conference, bushing demonstrated an altered version of Lego Star Wars which was used to load some basic code displaying Wii Remote data in real time.