Reverse Engineer Finds Kindle's Hidden Features 108
bensafrickingenius writes "CNET's Crave site has an interesting article on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, and the extensive reverse-engineering that fans of the device have accomplished. The site specifically points out the work of Igor Skochinsky at the Reversing Everything website. His work on the Kindle's Root Shell has revealed some fascinating goodies: 'Among the ones uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.'"
Flagged. (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, that's it I'm never buying my "Catcher in the Rye" through Kindle... (Apologies to Mel Gibson).
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What the Yertle? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Flagged. (Score:5, Informative)
Good movie, although a bit date today [imdb.com]
Catheter in the Rye (Score:1)
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Saver? (Score:4, Funny)
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Russians Save The Day Again (Score:1)
instide there is a real printed book (Score:5, Funny)
Why bother with the Crave article at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why bother with the Crave article at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst is when you have a blog linking to a blog linking to the original info. FFS people...
The net effect is old news gets constantly recycled and real news gets diluted. How many times have you seen a new blog post about something that actually happened months ago? The "9V battery contains AAAA cells" thing stands out as the most recent example for me: here [makezine.com] (2 Jan 2008), here [edn.com] (9 Jan 2007), here [blogspot.com] (3 Jan 2007), here [lifehacker.com] (23 Dec 2006). You have a "story" at LEAST a year old that has been copied verbatim at least four times!
Original here [axecollector.com] (No date) as far as I can tell, since all of the above blogs link to it.
Plus, all of these blogs have comment sections, which make them twice as redundant because the comments themselves also fail to add anything most of the time. If they do you'll never find them because there are so many other palces that run the same "story."
Fight the watering down of information! NEVER link to a blog unless it provides something EXTRA to the news! ALWAYS take a few minutes to get as close to the original source as possible! If you run a blog yourself, work to ADD to articles you link to - personal thoughts, additional information, insightful discussion on the topic at hand - be UNIQUE. That's how you get a readership... by having something worth reading.
=Smidge=
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views on originality.
Re:Why bother with the Crave article at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is still no excuse for not adding to it. You can copy an article verbatim and still improve it's value by making some addition to it, either as a personal comment, further research into the topic, or a retrospective analysis of the article itself.
The "Information Revolution" is more like an "Information Echo Box" - Plagarism is not revolutionary.
=Smidge=
You want dupicate info (Score:2)
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First, articles are user submitted. Most blogs have one person or maybe a small group of people who add all the "news" to the site. This technically makes Slashdot a news aggregation site, not a blog.
Second, Slashdot has structured and filterable discussion. This, along with a strong and generally knowledgeable user base, ADDS VALUE to the news in the way of useful comments. A threaded discussion model enhances this greatly, over the typical "list of rep
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Re:Tracking Hardware?!?!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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<hat material="tinfoil">
Constantly, or on request. You connect to the net and some steganographic message in some metadata (say, whitespaces in http headers) tells it to triangulate its position and send it to the requesting party. Such piece of software could be hidden quite deep in network drivers or such.
</hat>
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What the guy discovered is similar to what they just released in the laste
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What gets me is that this is no worse than your cell phone. If you have a cell phone then it could be tracked by the towers. You really don't need any software on the device.
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"Fiona"? (Score:3, Informative)
A root password of "Fiona"? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Neal Stephenson's novel _The Diamond Age_? The one who was educated by the nanotechnological Primer book?
--Rob
Re:"Fiona"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Annoying pop culture reference or 1337 geek reference - you decide!
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Cellphone CDMA location (Score:5, Informative)
All current CDMA chipsets have location capability, due to E911 requirements for cellphones. They go through all sorts of gyrations to get a fix quickly when starting the GPS from cold (can't leave it running all the time or it would kill the battery), and to get a fix in "difficult" environments like urban canyons. They get a rough location by triangulating on cell towers, determine available satellites, doppler and code phase estimates, then tell the GPS what it should be listening for. Instead of taking several minutes from a cold start, they get a fix in a second or two.
When you get a cellphone the service agreement will say that you agree to be located if you call 911 (read it, it's there). Any other location must be initiated by you, or with your permission, due to privacy issues. I did software for dedicated CDMA location devices and users got a special service agreement from Sprint. It said if you buy and use this thing, you are agreeing to be located.
It's pretty slick.
...laura
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Are they really "triangulating" using cell towers? Or are they doing something like finding a rough area for the phone by which the cell the phone is associated with and which towers can see the phone? So if towers X, Y,and Z can see your phone, but X has strongest signal, you are probably in a certain area and closest to tower X.
Triangulation, technically, is using the angles to a target from two known locations to determine the target's location. I don't know if the base stations have the ability to
Re:Cellphone CDMA location (Score:5, Informative)
Do a search for "AFLT". They estimate the travel time from multiple cell towers (easy with CDMA) and work from there. They call it triangulation, though it's a lot closer to hyperbolic navigation.
...laura
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AGPS uses the AFLT to ask the towers to download almanac data to fast-start an actual GPS satellite receiver, or process the fragments received by the satelite to narrow down the location to the same resolution as a standalone GPS, without the startup time and delays.
This means that within a 3 seconds, you'd have a general idea which 1 mile block you're on, within a 7 more seconds, you should have an actual
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They all do. gpsOne uses a number of methods to determine location.
If the network can tell the GPS approximately where it is with AFLT,
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Actually it's trilateration -- using the distances to three points, rather than the directions. The basic effect is the same and most people don't really care about the gorey details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateration [wikipedia.org]
They're watching you! (Score:4, Funny)
Alt-1 show current location in google maps
Alt-2 find gas station nearby
Alt-3 find restaurants nearby
Alt-4 request department of homeland security respond to current location to investigate suspicious brown-skinned person
Alt-5 find custom keyword nearby
Alt-D dump debug info to the log and toggle highlight default item
Alt-Z toggle zone drawing and show log
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Layne
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eBook readers are all wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:eBook readers are all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
<p>
Thanks to that first sentence, I read the rest of your insightful comment with a really freakin annoying Jar Jar Binks voice.
<p>
Thanks
PS
Meesa gonna upmod yousa comment, since Isa hava mod points...
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Actually, they are aimed at the wrong market (Score:3, Interesting)
e-books need a business use first, then
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A bluetooth monitor? Bluetooth can transmit at up to 2.1 Mbit/s. DVI can transmit 3.7 Gbit/s in single-link mode and 7.4 Gbit/s in dual-link mode. A 320x240 @ 24bpp would ideally take .9 seconds, but could easily take 5 seconds to fill the screen. And that is a tiny screen. 320x240 @ 8bpp would still ideally take .3 seconds. At a more standard resolution (1280x1024 @ 8bpp), a simple
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The one problem with this is that as the protocol gets more and more complex, the horsepower needed on the clientside gets larger and larger - and eventually you end up sitting there thinking "why didn't we just put an OS on this thing in the first place".
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No external appliances to render the screen data.
First, you need an expensive smart phone or even more expensive laptop to have it working.
Second, battery life of the display would be moot, the laptop/phone would die hours earlier.
Third, you'd waste lots of battery life of the device on transmission.
I don't agree with any external device to render the contents. The reader, in 'reading mode' should be totally self-contained and portable. It can (and should) depend on a number of external devices for uploa
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Rest of your points are valid, but..
1)suggestion was make it a USB device, that would eliminate any power load on the display, if completely USB powered display, means 2 displays, one plug in at the airpo
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I disagree that ebook readers are bad because they cost only slightly less than computers but do so much less.
The Kindle, like the 16GB iPod touch, both go for $399 - but so does one incarnation of the ASUS eee PC via quick search on Amazon. I'd have to believe that the eeePC does WAY more than either of the other two, but n
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The device _I_ would like to see would be along the lines of a $59.99-$79.99 DVD player with a 6" diagonal screen (like I can buy now) that could read TXTs and RTFs and PDFs off of a CD. I, probably like many others, don't need to be able to USB-load everything interactively onto a device but can do perfectly well with carrying one or two CDs, CD-R/Ws, DVDs, etc. with LOTS of books on them. The storage is cheap and long-lasting and swappable/tradeable.
Give the devi
Another good Reason To Stay With Traditional Books (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't believe it (Score:2)
From what I've seen, there's only one fan of this device, and his name is Jeff Bezos.
How do you become a Reverse Engineer? (Score:1, Funny)
The best use for a kindle (Score:1)
http://www.comics.com/wash/opus/archive/opus-20071230.html [comics.com]
Nope... (Score:3, Informative)
One justification for location sensing (Score:2, Insightful)
there must be printers out there with freeciv... (Score:2)
Danny.
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Likely it's a limitation in the internal browser, something that may get fixed in the future, at which point, I would expect th
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