I assume this exploit purely enables booting/reading of games from burned media, but leaves the signature check intact. This would make it useless for homebrew (with the latest updates) but enable piracy. Perhaps he's found an overflow or string format attack in the way the disc header is parsed.
Bushing is playing it like a white hat. Nothing wrong with that, and it's a good way to pad your resume too.
What's unclear is what he plans to do if Nintendo fails to act. Most security-focused white hats will give a deadline, and reveal the vulnerability after that, in hopes of lighting a fire under the vendor. But since Bushing is against warez and this isn't a security threat to users I doubt he'll ever disclose it.
I doubt Bushing really expects a gold age of co-operation between Nintendo and homebrew hackers. He's just pushing the buttons to see what will happen, like any good hacker would.
When it comes down to money, Nintendo will protect it's interests. Squashing homebrew is in it's interests...
- A popular homebrew title competes for our minds and hearts, against all of the shovelware titles.
- Emulators enable free playing of old games that Nintendo is selling to it's customers right now - even when an emulated system isn't on the VC, emulation weakens Nintendo's ability to pitch a future deal with the IP owner.
- Even when you play an emulation of a system who's IP owner has vanished, see the first point.
There are financial reasons why Nintendo locked down it's console. They aren't about to change their minds when they're making money hand over fist.
Last point - to those that are saying that you should need a modchip to run backups, you're on a convenient-but-slippery logic slope. With most of the same arguments, one could easily argue against backups entirely.
