First, wiinewz.com is backup and running. It has been for about a week. YAY!!
Second, wiikey seems to have sprung back to life. Their website, which once was dead, has been resurrected. Seems fitting that this happened around Easter!! They have been working on a firmware update for the wiikey and its in Beta at the moment. So far, things have went well. There will be a new config disk as well that has a couple new things in it. Here is a screenshot of the new config menu:
The update boasts two new settings, Dev Mode and Block Updates. According to ozmodchips.com (one of the beta testers) when these two options are turned on, it blocks any updates on a game disk from running. Also in this update is the fix for the retail disk of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and a disk speed issue fix. With all the people that had read problems after updating to 1.9g, I can only hope they addressed that issue as well.
That was the good news, so here is the bad. There is a program called Trucha Signer. Basically this program allows you to modify the game contents of a game, then using this program, re-sign the files and then burn it and play it in your Wii. If I'm not making any sense, you could make a custom version of Guitar Hero III and if you got everything right in inserting your own music, you could then re-sign it with Trucha, burn it to a disk and then play your custom GHIII. Now we don't know if it was a coincidence or if they just took how trucha worked and made their software, but Datel came up with and released freeloader. It works exactly like trucha. Since that released, Nintendo released an update on March 21st. After hackers analyzed this update, it was found that they were closing the hole on how trucha and freeloader works.They haven't done it yet, but the next update could very well close it for good. Like I said, we don't know if Nintendo's patch was in response to Trucha or to Freeloader. But we do know that not many people was using Trucha, but there are a pretty good lot of people that ordered the $19.95 Freeloader so my money is on the commercialization of the exploit.
