71–80 of 538 posts
Upper management really enjoyed telling us (the engineers) that we needed to implement more DRM, and we liked complaining that it was dumb.
Fun to see someone reverse engineer what we implemented!
I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.
This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle. Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it bac…
We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.
Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle. Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it bac…
I was on the team that wrote this code. We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since. The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
Why buy an ebook then? Just buy the physical if you want, and pirate it. Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your own paid for jail cell.
For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.
Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again. I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.
This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle. Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it bac…
I was on the team that wrote this code. We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks like X, management see something that looks like X and are happy.