Nintendo’s 3DS was supposed to be unhackable. After the Wii and DS were both cracked wide open, Nintendo invested heavily in a layered security architecture for its next-generation handheld… and for a while, it actually held up. Then a developer pointed a 3DS camera at a QR code inside a $5 puzzle game that nobody wanted, and the whole thing started to unravel.
I followed the 3DS hacking scene intensely back then, and looking back, the journey from firmware 4.5 to boot9strap is one of the most entertaining arcs in console hacking history. It started with a bargain bin game and ended with people holding fridge magnets against their consoles to trigger a factory recovery mode that broke the boot ROM wide open. But to understand why any of that mattered, you need to know…