Online can easily see if you are running JB hardware - I imagine the price you will pay for the JB is not being allowed to play online....at all....not too bad if its an easy thing to reboot and lose it but not so great if it requires a lot of faffing....Probably similar to the modded Xboxes getting hit with the ban hammer the moment they started playing online back in the day. To be honest I hope N are brutal with the bans as really dont want to see a lot of hackers ruining online gaming for me and N.
Good point! Yeah, online play is probably the only real downside of this if people start modding their consoles to give themselves unfair advantages against other players.
They cannot ever fix the hackable issue with software though, as the issue is with the chip itself, so they physically have to change the internal hardware to stop hacking of systems being possible.
I think they are working on this, so at some point switches will be sold with new internals. But even if they do that, all the millions of switches that have currently been sold will always be hackable, plus all the ones currently being manufactured still use the existing chip that has that issue.
However, this really isn't such a big deal as it sounds, as the hacks cannot hack other people's switches (only your own).
(so is more applicable for the ability of homebrewers, who now have the advantage of putting whatever games they want on there, etc, and new chips coming out will just mean that they won't be able to do it on future consoles).
It is also worth noting that pretty much every console on the planet eventually gets figured out how to be hacked for modding, so is not just exclusive to switch, and even any console with new so called hack proof hardware is probably only a matter of time.
The online cheating by users who have hacked and modded their content is probably more solvable by software though, as technically all they have to do is what apple do with MFi lightning cables on iPhones, where it physically recognizes the serial numbers and device IDs of specific consoles. (can detect blacklists of hacked devices). And to detect whether games have even been hacked in the first place they can do things like hash checks of the game data. (takes less than a second to do, as all it does is creates a unique has code based on certain text based attributes of the file, for example, its file size, and any change whatsoever will produce a different hash code, so anything not 100% identical will be instantly recognized by a computer as not being an exact match, and thus fails the validation).
Now obviously, when playing in an offline sense, a hacker could just overwrite the bit on their console that does the validation check and get around it. But in an online sense, they can't. (as the validation check happens at server level, not from their device).
Basically the validation check (if designed properly) would happen at Nintendo's end, and can instantly reject any users from playing online that don't pass the hash checks of the valid values it is checking against in its online database, so will be much easier to gate than anything that is local play). They can't do anything about it if you're not connected online, as it won't have to go through such a validation check. But for online games, if you don't pass the validation, you just don't get in.
So that's the good news at least. (well, good news for you, and for those of us who play it the legit way without hacking stuff. Possibly not such good news for people hoping to cheat at online games!)
