Man in Austria Used Legos to Hack Amazon's Kindle E-Book Security
A university professor in Austria has released the video below, showing how he has automated a low-tech approach to bypassing the digital rights management system on the Kindle.
His name is Peter Purgathofer, and he’s an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology.
Using Lego’s Mindstorms — a basic robotics kit popular with hobbyists — plus a Kindle and a Mac, he has assembled a way to photograph what’s on the screen, and then submit it to a cloud-based text-recognition service. It’s sort of a combination of high tech meets low. The scanning is done by way of the Mac’s iSight camera. The Mindstorms set does two things: Hits the page-advance button on the Kindle (it appears to be an older model, like the one in the picture above), then mashes the space bar on the Mac, causing it to take a picture.
