Interesting: the author of the HackMii blog has posted an entry requesting that Nintendo get in touch with him about an exploit he's discovered that would allow piracy of Wii games without modification to the console. He notes that he's tried emailing Nintendo but hasn't received a response. Then he indicates that he's planning to follow the disclosure methodology outlined here. Key parts:

A. [...T]he ORIGINATOR is to email the MAINTAINER about the problem.

B. The MAINTAINER has 5 work days respond. [...] The ORIGINATOR is technically free to do whatever they want to do after 5 work days—however, they should be fair and wait if the MAINTAINER shows adequate initiative to fix the ISSUE.

[C, D, E and F concern the procedure followed if the MAINTAINER acknowledges the communication and works to resolve the issue]

G. If the MAINTAINER feels it's appropriate to alert the public of the issue, then there's no reason why the ORIGINATOR should not. Traditionally, alerting the community of a problem (but not providing full exploit details) has proven to be futile; other researchers are then just as likely to discover the problem as well—and they may not bide by the guidelines set by this policy. Therefore, if the issue is to be disclosed, all aspects of it should be disclosed.

In short, if Nintendo chooses not to respond, there may be piracy-enabling exploit code for the Wii published in as little as five days. This is a real possibility: Nintendo's historical reaction to issues raised by the hacking community has been to ignore it and hope it goes away. There don't appear to be nearly as many institutional resources devoted to mitigating these issues as at Sony and Microsoft — that's apparent from their consoles' relatively simple security systems, the slow and somewhat half-assed manner in which the Twilight Hack was ultimately patched, and the lack of attention paid to piracy on their handheld consoles relative to, say, the PSP's constantly-updated firmware.

A lack of attention shouldn't be confused with a lack of calculation, however: Nintendo might be right to ignore these issues. The Wii's success owes to its adoption among a new demographic — one that's not traditionally associated with gaming, and one that can probably be counted on not to do much damage to Nintendo's bottom line by burning patched ISOs from the Pirate Bay.

Image by Flickr user michaelsharon, used under a Creative Commons license

UPDATE: Nintendo has responded through private channels, and consequently it looks like the exploit won't be released until after a patch is issued. It's still entertaining to check out the comments at the linked post, though, which are full of morons impersonating Nintendo representatives in order to get the exploit sent to them. A hint for these overconfident confidence men: most major corporations don't ask to use IRC to discuss trade secrets.