I was just reminded of this piece that I wrote ten years ago now. It is still just as relevant today as it was back then. If you are working on any kind of reverse engineered product for hardware, learn how to care about your users to keep them safe.https://marcan.st/2011/01/safe-hacking/ …
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That post speaks of 1.2 million installs of The Homebrew Channel, but I think these days we're closer to 10 million. Still zero bricks. We had one near miss, which was saved by the many layers of safety-in-depth I had built in, based on the principles I wrote about there.
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Thankfully the Apple Silicon macs are largely brick-proof*, though restoring them currently requires another Mac. Making this work from Linux is also a project goal. * I'm sure you can if you try hard enough, and I'll try hard to never go anywhere near there, of course.
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One of the reasons why we wrote our own flashing code for Wii bootloader flashing is because I took one look at Nintendo's (BroadOn's?) existing API for it, and determined it was completely unfit for purpose and dangerous.
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It is now well documented that they later bricked a non-trivial fraction of Wiis worldwide, whether they had BootMii or not, when they pushed a dummy bootloader update whose only purpose was to overwrite our installed version (but which unconditionally applied to everyone).
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My flasher not only had the two-copy safety that their design called for (but which their updater was not safely implementing), but also included a novel trick to provide *three-copy* atomic safety. Powering down at *any* time during BootMii installation is, in principle, safe.
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I abuse the way they do bad block lists for the boot area so I can write my patched boot code to free blocks, then in one final write mark the original first copy's blocks as bad so my copy becomes the first copy. Uninstallation then is just erasing that.
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