Mama mia! Nintendo in need of a plumber after leak sprays N64, GameCube, Wii code It has been a full week in infosec news. Here are a few things you should know about, beyond what we've already covered. Nintendo console details leak Fans of Nintendo were treated this week to a rare look at the most basic workings of some of the gaming giant's best-known consoles. An anonymous hacker leaked some 2TB worth …
The company that I work for manufactures and sells clinical research medical devices registered with the FDA and we are seeing a huge amount of phishing, malware deliveries, and login attempts every day. Most of it seems to be targeted at people who are filling in for other workers, or are looking for covid news and related protection products. It might just be a coincidence but the incoming crap started when the corporate website was updated to document our covid status and sanitary procedures.
That's not too surprising as the N64 is at an awkward spot in history — high-level languages were in heavy use but middleware wasn't, there was no abstraction layer to mediate hardware access, allowing anybody to apply guesswork, though some low-level documentation was supplied later on to closer third parties. Compare and contrast with earlier platforms that were all low-level, all the time, leading to a surplus of exploration and documentation, and later platforms that extend only high-level hardware interfaces.
That said, would a Compaq-esque reverse engineering work with the leaked documentation? I'm unclear on American law — clearly whomever first converted the leaked documents into specifications would be legally at risk, but would somebody who later took those specifications and worked with them be in jeopardy? Is it like a handling stolen goods proposition where the nature by which the original documentation was obtained taints everything down the line?
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