Amazon is closing a Kindle loophole that makes it easy to remove DRM | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is closing a Kindle loophole that makes it easy to remove DRM

androidpolice.com

28 pointsmiles16 comments

All DRM is pointless.I rented a digital textbook years ago. On a PC I made an automation script that screenshots each page and then turns the page. Compress each image and throw them into a PDF. Then you could run OCR on each page. Then I requested a full refund. BOOM! Free book.

First, ebooks should not have DRM. I only buy Kindle books because I know I can remove it; if I couldn't remove it I would not buy them, period. So this is a shitty move there.

Second, whoever wrote this is a jackass and should seriously consider never writing again. I mean look at this garbage:

> This is how Amazon offers some of the best-formatted e-books on the market (blowing ePub out of the water).

> The thing to remember here is that it is illegal to remove DRM, even for personal use, but that doesn't stop everyone, creating a problem

> so it's not like we are losing access to dragging and dropping files onto a Kindle, we are simply losing access to a tool that facilitated easy piracy by pushing older formats of retail books from the website to your Kindle over USB.

This never had anything to do with piracy for me, but I refuse to "purchase" something I don't own and can't control, and that includes DRM.

DRM apologist author

"Please notice me Amazon I want a free kindle"

Absolutely pathetic on the authors part

The pattern is clear, they're trying to do away with "ownership" forgetting they lack leverage. We can just buy books printed on paper. Print books out-sell eBooks 4 to 1. DRM hardliners can will just lose out on sales.

The funnier part in all of this is that, in another article, the same author shares a lot of details around how he spends time ripping movies from DVDs and BluRays to play on Kodi[0] including the custom firmware he uses to make it 'faster and easier.'

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/how-i-made-my-shield-tv-much-m...

Android Police has really gone downhill since they were bought out by a larger media company. Basically blogspam at this point.

I did buy a print copy of House Of Leaves, but most every other ebook I couldn't care less about the 'formatting', it's just chapter titles and text. Maybe a textbook with diagrams would be different, but I would guess most Kindle purchases are novels etc?

I only have a kindle because I knew if I bought a book, I could remove DRM and really own it.

I'll have to look into Kobo and Nook again to see if it is any better elsewhere.

Truly, a pox upon the house of the executives at Amazon who reject the concept of ownership. Thank God LibGen exists.

it wont matter what you do, one typist is all it takes to crack document DRM for everyone

Or these days? Maybe $4 of tokens on a frontier LLM.

and this could even be obfusicatively re-packaged as a video, or photo album

[edit] gadzooks i just realized, that the cat and mouse game ends with the death of document files, and evolution to a DRMable image or video form, served out y0u7ube style

Of course, then you will simply point a camera at a cheap smartphone and feed that to an LLM. The analog hole will not be patched until they can feed DRM content straight into our brains.

Remember: scifi can dream up of horrible dystopias (Black Mirror style) and real-world entrepreneurs will go "hey, that's a neat idea!".

There's a Philip Dick short story where ads are forcefully pushed into your brain (they kind of put that bit in the movie adaptation of "Minority Report", though it was another short story that had brain ads)... you can be sure that in the real world, if they could they would.

If there is a theoretical way to jam your brain to prevent it from seeing DRM'ed stuff, you bet they will make it real and close the analog loophole for good.

> theoretical way to jam your brain to prevent it from seeing DRM'ed stuff,

Maybe something for Neuralink?

Even then there's an analog hole at the neuron interface unless we just install decryption algorithms in the brain directly

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