How to break Kindle DRM with Legos and an Apple iSight camera

[thewayne]

This is awesome. Guy in Austria built a robot using Lego Mindstorm that presses the Next page on the Kindle, then presses the space bar on his Mac to take a picture of the screen. The image is run through a cloud-based OCR package and a text file is returned.

Totally impractical since you can download software that'll strip the DRM in moments, but still pretty awesome cool.

The creator has a great comment on the Vimeo page quoting Jeff Bezos in an O'Reilly interview talking about people should have the right to share, trade, or sell ebooks, he then turns around and takes that right away from his customers.

http://vimeo.com/73675285

http://allthingsd.com/20130906/how-a-man-in-austria-used-legos-to-hack-amazons-kindle-e-book-security/

Comments

[silveradept]

An interesting idea - lower-tech copying using what's available.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Lois McMasters Bujold used a similar technique in a Miles Vorkosigan story where Miles is stationed to an arctic military base and needs access to classified information, his cousin Ivan (half a planet away) conveniently has a secure classified console that is air-gapped, so Miles has Ivan turn the secure console to face the public console and uses the camera to read the info he wants off of it.

I thought this Lego thing was quite clever.

[silveradept]

Definitely clever, and completely unable to be defeated by DRM means. The rate is a little slow for most people, but it will get the job done.