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Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

ptbrowne.github.io

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Re: Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

#2

Post by sdoering »

Wow. This was a fun read. I would have been lost - but loved for somebody to explain it in a way I was able to grasp with my level of technically understanding.

Thanks to the author - I would love for this data to be in an open format, as I would love to do some kind of personal analytics on that (same with Audible data actually).

On a different tangent, I really love the ease in the Kindle/Audible ecosystem to switch between the same content in different media. Reading on the kindle app, switching to Audible in the car and back to kindle in the evening in bed. That really makes reading/book consumption great.

Re: Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

#3

Post by kilroy123 »

I'm very interested in this. I read a lot of books that aren't from Amazon on my Kindle. I do a lot of highlighting, which I like to export to readwise.

In order to do this I have to plug in my Kindle. Mount it. Find the clippings file. Upload the file to readwise.

The best I came up with was a script that detects when I plug-in my Kindle and opens the finder window and opens the readwise page. Pretty lame.

Re: Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

#4

Post by fprog »

Loved section 1.5.1, "Bytes in color". The author wrote code to help them understand a custom binary format by coloring the bytes based on their value, making patterns in the format visually obvious. The structure of the binary becomes much more clear when visualized this way. That's a handy approach I've mentally bookmarked for the future.

Re: Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

#7

Post by sushicalculus »

kilroy123 wrote: post #3

I'm very interested in this. I read a lot of books that aren't from Amazon on my Kindle. I do a lot of highlighting, which I like to export to readwise. In order to do this I have to plug in my Kindle. Mount it. Find the clippings file. Upload the file to readwise. The best I came up with was a script that detects when I plug-in my Kindle and opens the finder window and opens the readwise page. Pretty lame.

Could you post this script to somewhere? Gist, codepen, etc?

I want to see if can improve it. There might be a way to have the terminal auto-copy the clippings file

Re: Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

#9

Post by rektide »

would this work if Amazon was using cert pinning? cert pinning basically seems like a way to make apps able to resist user's having any freedom or power. the author here installs a custom CA to man-in-the-middle. now more & more apps use cert pinning, which would block that, I believe, & keep the user from being able to reverse engineer & probe.

imo the forces in favor of securing things have done the users great great damage. who are we securing things for? imo the security world needs to re-orient, & begin to harken to RFC 8890 The Internet is For End Users[1], allowing users some means to see how their systems are behaving. "secure" standards like cert-pinning favor giant companies & totalistic visions of security, taking from computing the person & personal. cert-pinning is a good layer of defense, but it takes away user affordances that must be added back.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8890

Re: Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync

#10

Post by ptbrowne »

tshrjn wrote: post #6

readwise kinda helps do something similar?

Hi, thanks I did not know Readwise. I signed up for an account to check how it works. It uses a browser extension to sync the highlights instead of using the API. It can sync automatically but your browser must stay open (which is OK IMHO). Readwise can sync much more sources also.

Thanks for introducing me to Readwise, I might use it :)

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