All this to keep people from owning what they bought. Smh
How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
471–480 of 538 posts
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
These two things aren't even remotely in the same category. Committing a crime, then documenting how you committed that crime and then publishing the instructions for others to repeat that crime with the clear intent to have others repeat that crime, has nothing to do with saying a bunch of words that you haven't even acted on. Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it t…
There aren't many words in the first amendment, and none of them are "unless you're telling someone how to commit a crime"
The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple's iBooks (or whatever it was called back in 2010-2012). I no longer use an iPad and would like to be able to read them on my Kindle. Because of DRM, I can't. I'm all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I've already done that in this case.
I don't see much of an ethical problem with downloading a pirated version of an ebook that you already paid for but can no longer access. If I did that, I'd have no problem sleeping at night.
I agree with that
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#474Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking: "Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
I hope they don't get in trouble for publicising how to defeat the DRM...
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
A proper epub consists of multiple html and css, not to mention the correct font files (ttf or otf). OCR can't recover those. I've found other books like that, you know, where someone didn't even bother to remove the page numbers from the OCRed text, and it's just a subpar reading experience.
For novels where you just want the text it is fine and you can reformat the text as you like.
I can always retypeset the text... but I'm not a professional editor/typesetter. You often lose parts/phrases/words the author wanted emphasized with italic and bold. Blockquotes can be gone. Even paragraph indentations in the worst offenders. I couldn't recreate that if I tried. Lord forbid there's a list/table/figure (even in some of the fiction I've read, they'll have those... weirdo science fiction novels, after all). I've gotten pretty good at fixing epubs with Calibre's editor, some of these are salvageable. Just finished with one where they split the chapters wrong (not at the chapter headings, but in between for some reason). And I'll often go get a high-res cover image off the publisher's website; they like to use bad sized-for-favicon scans off a random google image search for some reason.
But for me, the bad OCR ebooks can be painful to read.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#476May be of interest to this thread - I created a script that drives the Kindle web reader, captures screenshots, runs OCR, and creates an ePub - this wouldn't be as good as the pixelmelt solution, as it requires OCR.
Overview: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/ (there's a sample conversion at the bottom, so you can see if it works "good enough" for your purposes)
Script: https://github.com/raudette/kindleOCRer
In action: https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#477Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking: "Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
This is essentially how I find myself defending a lot of my DIY stuff. "Wait, you work in tech, why would you ever work on your own car when you can clearly pay someone else to do it???" Because I like to learn things.
Agreed, that is the same way I view things. There is also the great feeling of satisfaction when you finish repairing your own stuff.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal -> what actually IS illegal to export? -> munitions! -> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions" -> problem solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_fr…
Do you also remember the researcher Philip Zimmerman’s hack to get around the cryptography-is-munitions edict? The source code to PGP was published by MIT Press as a book that just happened to be in a format suitable for OCR. That framing made it into a First Amendment issue, one the researchers were confident they’d win in court. https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm
As far as legal hacks go I always liked xkcd joke on the matter.
If it is a munition the US government has limitations on it's actions controlling it covered under the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
In reality it nor the first amendment(freedom of speech) hack probably would not work. The limitation was on exporting strong crypto, not using or importing it. It was stupid and impossible to control. But I would guess any charges would be espionage(illegal speech) and smuggling(illegal goods). regardless of how you packaged it.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Giving the physical book away kinda defeats the spirit of buy + pirate.
You are still buying a copy, that I imagine is the practical effect you want. You don't keep proof, though, and probably isn't allowed to keep a backup after you give the book away. But most countries laws don't care about any of this (and it's not a backup).
If you pirate then re-sell the book to a friend and they do the same, only one copy ever gets bought but everyone gets access forever.
Whereas of everyone buys new, keeps the book, and pirates, the author isn't going to see much negative impact.
Hanging on to the "proof" is important. Otherwise all you really prove is that you paid money to touch a physical copy.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
For novels where you just want the text it is fine and you can reformat the text as you like.
I can always retypeset the text... but I'm not a professional editor/typesetter. You often lose parts/phrases/words the author wanted emphasized with italic and bold. Blockquotes can be gone. Even paragraph indentations in the worst offenders. I couldn't recreate that if I tried. Lord forbid there's a list/table/figure (even in some of the fiction I've read, they'll have those... weirdo science fiction novels, after…
The best OCR tool I have ever used is Editable Text and Images in Adobe Acrobat. It can actually replace text in place with a dynamically generated vector font that matches the original font. It is actually really impressive.