At this last weekend's Chaos Communication Congress, a group of hackers demonstrated a hack for the Wii which allowed them to run software of their own design natively on the system.

This is the first official demonstration of this kind of hack on Nintendo's Wii.

The hack itself -- as explained in the above video -- is quite complicated and probably far above the average Wii gamer, but it demonstrates the future potential for the system to run code that Nintendo never intended it to. While the technique is basically just a proof-of-concept at this point, expect to see Linux ports and rudimentary homebrew software for the Wii popping up throughout 2008.

The importance of this event is difficult to overstate.

The Wii is a wildly popular system manufactured by a company who is notoriously protective of their secretive hardware. The fact that a group of amateur hackers were able to crack the system's encryption proves, yet again, that despite any attempts to dictate how your hardware should be used, once you've sold it to consumers, it's completely up to them what they want to do with it.

With the hack still in its infancy it presents no danger to Nintendo of draining the company's profits through the unauthorized duplication of software, but you can be sure Nintendo is eyeing this hack with great scrutiny.

The Wii, officially “hacked”? [WiiNintendo]