Anything $ony can do, Ninten-cando too.

Do you remember little while ago I wrote about a trojan that could turn your PSP into a very nicely designed brick? Well, not to be outdone, Nintendo’s DS has got a couple of its own too.

The first one is getting in the same way as the PSP trojan, using home-brew creation/playing software to trick people into putting the software onto your machine. Dubbed the ‘DSBrick’ trojan, it works to turn your lovely fun toy into a lump of unusable plastic and components. More about that one here.

The second one apparently gets in through downloads of applications to show hentai (Japanese cartoon pornography of women) on your machine. This is a more common approach for hackers. Pornography has always been a good way of launching attacks on people’s machines because the user is less likely to report what they were trying to do to authorities. It’s sneaky, but nothing new, other than the fact that it’s attacking hand-held machines. Source here.

I really fail to see how anyone other than Nintendo stands to benefit from this, all that happens is that a load of strangers end up scared to use non-commercially produced products, putting users off from experimenting with new software on their machines. That certainly doesn’t do any favours for small software designers, who are the kind of people who have the jobs that many of these malicious programmers would one day like to get.

To look at this from another point of view, the PSP’s curved corners make it a difficult building block, but the DS has straight edges. Out of the two, the DS is ultimately going to prove the most useful building material, so if you own both and fancy turning one of your machines into a brick then I suggest that the DS with give the best results.