Someone's playing liberator again and "freeing" some of the games offered over the recently launched WiiWare service. We've heard that downloads of WiiWare titles are being seeded over torrent avenues, and this feat has been attributed to a circumvention of security over Nintendo's servers. Get more details at the full story.

(Editor's Note: From highs and lows, and everything in between, QuickPeek 37 is going to hit you hard - and it's going to hit you good.)

Time to grab your trusty QuickPeek walking stick, because there's lots and lots of catching up to do. The gaming industry's taken the high road, and that's our cue to help you guys out. Time for the weekly roll call of the hottest items that dropped in during the past seven days! It's one heck of a landslide, folks!

Frank Yu, former Casual Games Producer for Microsoft in China, recently gave a report on the state of piracy in China following the Hong Kong raid where authorities seized 10,000 mod chips for Nintendo consoles. The last major news of piracy in China was last year; at that time it was for the Xbox 360.

Remember our report about Xbox 360 and Wii piracy in the Philippines? Turns out piracy is popular for both the Xbox 360 and the Wii in China as well.

According to Yu though, there isn't much demand for the PlayStation 3 so there's no modding or any distribution of pirated games in China that he is aware of and he doesn't even mention the PSP, which is a popular victim in many other areas. The Nintendo DS isn't spared however, as the Supercard (R4 card) is being sold in China.

Yu states that the Japanese Wii is a more popular candidate for modding since the US Wii has more protection. Modded Wiis can still download firmware although some of the more recent games, like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption won't work (although Yu believes this won't be true for long).

As for the Xbox 360, piracy is still very much active and rampant in the country. While Xbox 360 consoles in China will still be shut out of Xbox Live when MS detects that the console is modded, Yu has heard of a rumor that talks of a mod chip you can switch on and off. One just has to turn it off to log on to Xbox Live.

Hacking and modding is rampant but also incredible efficient - so much that the "folks at MS are always impressed by the speed and workaround that hackers and modders do to the motherboard." Hacking in China is also popular with foreigners, who aren't strangers with hacking shops at all.

Exploits in the cross-platform browser, Opera, is nothing new to this day and age. However, because hackers tend to use exploits to gain leverage into a closed system, they are alarming to many users. So it just so happens that the Wii's Opera browser inherited a weakness from the PC version, allowing a partial gateway for malcode to crash a console's program.

The newest exploit comes in the form of a cunningly coded JPEG file that when viewed would cause the Wii Internet Channel to crash. It only happens with the final release version of Opera, which happened to be patched later in the PC side after the Wii version's release. So if you don't want to be bothered by sneaky malicious code, you can opt to patch the browser.

Unfortunately, the patch is only available for manual download. So no point-and-press-free updates for you, Wiimote toe gamer! You'll have to get your hands dirty for this trick. You should get to it right away, because aside from announcing that an exploit exists, someone even posted how to create the image to crash your Opera browser.

Microsoft recently admitted to being a victim of hacking through social engineering. Social engineering is defined as "a collection of techniques used to manipulate people into performing actions or divulging confidential information" (Wikipedia). The company's phone support staff released the account details of some Xbox Live users to some callers. As a result, some users were charged with purchases they did not make.

Security experts from Australia believe that this is not an isolated case. Gamers are being warned that they are one of the new high profile targets this year. MacLeonard Starkey, a security analyst for Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (Auscert), said, "I haven't seen [sic] any malicious code that is specifically designed to run on a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox but I would expect (it) is not very far away at all."

He further elaborated on this, citing the attacks on MMORPG gamers. "We're seeing an awful lot of malicious code that will specifically target online games for the purposes of capturing user names and passwords." He stressed the financial ramifications of the incidents saying that these "thieves" can log in and steal the items collected by the players over a course of time. "There's actually some pretty good money in that," he added.
 
However, not everyone sees the threat as inherently malicious. The director of product management at security software maker CA 1, Stefana Muller, believes that the attacks on gaming payment systems and less damaging "proof-of-concept" hacks will be done to show off a hackers proficiency than for monetary gain.

She gave her take on the matter. "I think it's going to be an 'I did it' kind of target, 'I got to exploit this gaming console'. It's obvious that once a new thing comes out, if it's cool, it will be exploited."

Achtung! claims Michael Stiel of the Xbox Linux team, during the Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, "the Wii is the perfect goal for hackers." The gist of his speech is that the Wii is perfectly hackable because of its backwards-compatibility with the Gamecube. As such, the Wii has inherited a couple of hacks from its predecessor.

For example, a variant of the Action Replay hack works with the Wii. Hackers also found a back door in, well, as Google Translate goes, "With the interface, over which the DVD drive assembly with the core of the Gamecube communicates." This probably refers to the interface between the DVD drive and the legacy Gamecube parts or code, or so says another participant in the Chaos Comm. Congress, Felix Domke. The most successful hack for the Wii, he says, is one similar to the DVD firmware hack on the Xbox 360.

Speaking of which: compared to the Wii, the 360 is in fact a harder nut to hack. And the PS3? That's a different story, says Domke. His opinion is that Sony has provided a "compromise" to hackers by offering Linux capability in the box. On the other hand, it didn't stop some people looking for exploits...

UPDATE: Guess what we found on the Tube of You (as Borat might put it)? It's a video, it seems, of a presentation during the Chaos Communications Congress, explaining comparisons between GameCube and Wii, and theories on DVD security and hacking.

Not much else you can say to a headline like that. Chris Satchell, the GM for Microsoft's Game Development Group said something along those lines in an interview with Games Industry.

In the interview, he questions the Wii's ability to remain big in the long term, despite Nintendo's console being one of the fastest-selling consoles ever. "I think the Wii is of interest," he says. "I'm not sure what its long-term potential is. It's a super-strong for Nintendo's first-party IP, but beyond that�"

Also in the interview, is his reservations about Sony's online services compared to theirs, as well as their approach to the market. He mentions, "I don't think Sony has the right focus. I'm not even sure, looking at how they execute, that they even think that it's important."

While trying to remain unbiased, he does happen to throw out a lot of fighting words. Each company does have their strong points and their problem spots, and we can safely say that it's too early to make any sort of prediction. We wonder what he'll be thinking after a year has passed and we see what developers, hackers, and homebrewers can really make out of the systems. Until then, he may want to temper his words for future interviews.

Speaking of interviews, you may want to see the actual interview itself, which is linked at the bottom of our sourced page. Happy reading.