Community Wii U network Pretendo gets new hackless ‘SSSL’ set up method

thesixthaxis.com:

Yesterday saw Nintendo shutdown their online servers for the Wii U and 3DS consoles, cutting off any and all games from any kind of online functionality. But now Pretendo, the community-created replacement network, has announced a new hackless way of getting back online. No Wii U hacking, no Wii U homebrew, no Wii U custom firmware, just some DNS tweaks to the network settings.

Pretendo is described as “an open-source project that aims to recreate Nintendo Network for the 3DS and Wii U using clean-room reverse engineering.” The team has been working to recreate the online infrastructure that Nintendo has now completely shut down, with everything from Friends, Miiverse and Chat to multiplayer in Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, Mario Kart and more in the scope of what they’re trying to do. This is a complete replacement, and there’s no way to access user data from Nintendo’s now shutdown servers.

Up until this point, it was required that Wii U users hack their consoles and install homebrew in order to redirect all of the network calls to Pretendo, however, with the closure of Nintendo’s servers and issuing new firmware the least of Nintendo’s concerns these days, Pretendo has unveiled a new hackless method of accessing their network. This exploits a bug in the Wii U SSL system simply by redirecting to a different DNS server.

There are advantages in terms of not needing homebrew and being very easy to set up here, but there are some limits to what this can achieve. Any game that calls to Nintendo Network is supported, and so are in-game Miiverse features, however, the Miiverse app, the in-game Miiverse posting app and games like Watch_Dogs which use their own SSL code are not supported.

This method also does not work for the Nintendo 3DS, so installing custom firmware is still required there.

See Pretendo’s latest blog post for more details.

So, who’s up for some old school Splatoon?