Hackers break Kindle DRM
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
As one of the engineers who worked on Kindle, I'd like to point out that most people at Amazon are pretty anti-DRM themselves - it's the PUBLISHERS who insisted on it, and we put in DRM so as to keep THEM happy, because without publishers, there are no books to sell. We knew full well that the device and DRM would be hacked eventually - the hope was that we could just stay ahead of them for long enough to prove the feasibility of selling books in this way to publishers.
"Once upon a time, Apple laced its iTunes-purchased offerings with similar DRM restrictions that evoked major headaches when trying to do something as simple as transferring songs to a new PC."
…as if Apple came up with the the idea to begin with. I think most people reading know the parties that insisted on having DRM in the iTunes Music Store, but it is still misleading, lazy reporting.
As someone who has worked in media, I can state with authority that the majority of engineers know DRM is merely a futile speed bump. Sometimes a speed bump is just fine with the lawyers. They'll take it.
The technique is very sensitive to the version of the Kindle app. It's currently using the hash of the executable to choose which breakpoint locations to set and hook, which are hard-coded virtual addresses.
If you don't have a Kindle, that might be a problem though. But I think Amazon lets you "register" a Kindle, so you can just make up a serial number, buy books, and decrypt them.
Basically, the DRM scheme is just a joke to keep publishers happy. If your eyes can see something, it can be copied.
Also, the PID is not the kindle serial number, but can be calculated from it. There's another script around to do that.
right now I just can't stand the idea of paying almost as much as a real book for something that I can't share and will die with my kindle in a couple of years.