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

Comments

[silveradept]

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

[thewayne]

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.