Comment by gjsman-1000
8 hours ago
I've seen this argument, but I strongly suspect that it's a cope argument. "We couldn't get in... because... we didn't care to! Even though we've hacked literally every other object on the planet just because."
The proof in the pudding of this will be when the Nintendo Switch 2 reaches 2035 with no cracks. That's my prophecy; that this time around the cat actually will catch the mouse. Between NVIDIA's heavily revised glitch-resistant RISC-V security architecture and Nintendo's impeccable microkernel, there's nowhere left to hide. DRM may turn out to have been a very slow long battle to "victory," not a "this will always be defeated."
I have my doubts. I suspect that Nvidia have made mistakes.
Anyway, situations like the one you describe are one to be solved by legislation requiring certain devices be sold as open devices that put power in the hands of the owner.
my nintendo switch is "rootable" by shorting two pins in the controller interface, with a previously set up SD card inserted with the homebrew bootloader.
My PS3 and PS4 were both jailbroken/rooted. I don't remember the ps3 routine, but the PS4 was loading the "system -> help" page while connected to a ESP32 wifi AP running a simple web server that replied to requests with the jailbreak for PS4.
I give it about a year, especially if nintendo has to change the specs or otherwise tampers with customer expectations. there's bound to be some way to reload firmware on a "dead" device without pulling chips, and that's all it takes.
Well, and these systems are also designed with ratchet-type measures in place from the get-go, where holes are plugged, fuses are burned, and newly released titles will only decrypt/run on the latest OS.
So even if Switch 2 doesn't make it all the way to 2035 with zero cracks, there's a strong likelihood that any exploits found will be short-lived.
Which incentivizes people to hold on to exploits for as long as possible, ideally past the console life cycle, just to make sure it can be used, which already is a thing
When you extrapolate out the political economy consequences of your hypothesis being correct the future looks very dark indeed. If you can make an unhackable game console it should be obvious to people on this site what sorts of dystopias you could also create.
unhackable subscription ignition interlock device?
unhackable brain-computer interface required for most daily activities (like phones are today) and with a killswitch "for the public safety" and 24/7 cloud monitoring. Obviously this is pretty out there science fiction today but will it remain so in a century? And if it doesn't, what kinds of political systems are likely to dominate? What will happen to those political systems that for one reason or another decline this capability? I leave these questions as an exercise for the reader.