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Ritz Disposable Digital Camera Hacked
morgue-ann writes "The $10.99 Dakota reusable digital camera announced in July was usefully hacked on November 6. First attempts to extract picture data took 10 hours to read out 16MB, but new code for Linux and Mac and Windows lets you get pictures quickly over USB and view or print them without Ritz's help (and with fewer of your $$)."
...no secret Ritz crackers on the inside?
I want my money back.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Ritz will probably use the DMCA to stop it. There's a good story in today's Washington Post regarding the DMCA and how businesses are being ensnared even under "fair use". In Lexmark's case (detailed in the Wash Post story), Lexmark claimed that their copyright was violated.
As silly as the law is let's hope that it's repealed/reformed and soon.
Great job, you killed a cheap digital camera. Congraturations!
A WINNER IS YOU! VICTOLY!
That would truely be funny, using the DMCA to stop you from transfering pictures that you have taken and hence own the copyright to.
seriously, how many people will go to these lengths to have a digital camera with these limitations..
you jump thru hoops, and get a crappy digital camera for 12.99.. instead of a better digital camera, with support, for 99..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Hurray for the cracking of various consumer products so we can get these people screwed by the DMCA!
was there really ever any doubt this would happen?
So basically now for 10 bucks I can get a 2 megapixel camera... well looks like i just wasted 200 bucks on getting a 4 megapixel camera.
ritz is going to have a field day with this. they can try the DCMA but information is one of the hardest things to stop.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Apparently, somebody is stupid.
Just quoting the links here people. That's what I get for RTFA
I don't understand why this seems to happen every time.
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
Do these people shy away from proven algorithms because they don't have the processor power, because they don't want to pay licensing fees, etc? Do they use proven algorithms and implement them badly? Or do they just figure that they can make up something on their own, and that it will stand up to attack?
Yeah, it got replaced just as I was reading it at about 8:16EST. Hope they've got a copy.
I was just at Walgreens last night to try to find one of these suckers (who offer a different packaging, but same concept and circuitry). They didn't have them. I was going to go to a couple area Ritz to see if they had them. But noooooo. Slashdot broke the story and now Ritz will yank them off the shelves or others will grab them first.
Damn, damn, damn, damn! Damn, damn, damn, damn! Damn, damn, damn, damn!
[
I clicked on the article, read a liitle bit, clicked a link, then came back to find the only content was an entry reading "I am stupid" Not sure if it's because he allowed himself to be slashdotted, or because he posted the info and fears the ol' DMCA C&D letter.
Getting back to the camera. What the hell do I need a camera for anyway? What the hell do I want to remember? Nothing.
Does their business model (the manufacturer, not the hacker) depend on remanufacturing these things? I don't know about DMACA (digital millenium anti-competition act) violations, but I'd think a simple deposit on sale system what fix any issues with consumers keeping the cameras. It works for car batteries, it can work for these cameras.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
It's a wiki, which implies back-revisions. It's just a matter of fighting the trolls until they get bored.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Ritz did the same mistake that most companies do, they opt for the obscurity is security model. A smarter model is to instead follow the open source model that uses equipment that is prohibitive for the average user to purchase.
Example, rather than use, say, USB cabling, use some proprietory GPIO system that only Ritz controls. Heck, patent the heck out of it. Only needs a $5 CPLD to impliment a controller, but most casual hackers don't care to get into hardware-hacking on this scale. Sure, someone will break it, but then those capable will be a limited subset of the market, and damage is minimized.
Shoot, I should apply to be a corporate consultant!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Where can I buy one of these?!
Preferrably online.
~ Aero
Beware terms of service! They still probably own the camera, and therefore lease it to you, under certian terms. These terms may include owning pictures.
#define DRM chmod 000
. . .
. . .
Anyone?
. . .
. . .
Wait, do I see one in the back? Yes? Care to explain yourself?
. . .
. . .
Ahh. Well, we have one guy in the back who was in a coma. Anyone else not see this coming?
. . .
. . .
As I thought.
-Trillian
of failed business plans, right next to my collection of mint condition CueCats.
it's a fairly crappy camera; for 11 dollars.
you can get a logitech pocket digital for like 37 dollars; basically same specs, but looks a whole lot nicer and does exactly the same thing - except maybe actually storing more pictures on the internal memory.
With parts and time invested, I think it is more than worth the 26 dollars difference.
Yes i know there is the geek "i hacked my cheap-ass camera" factor, but come on... if you want to be a geek, there are more worthwhile projects on which to spend your time!
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Yeah! And Lexmark put together a business that relies on revenues of printer cartridge sales. Congratulations to those hackers/crackers who have likely now put those individuals out of work.
Wait...why is it my job to ensure that someone's business model succeeds? I bought the thing--let me tinker with it.
This business-model deserves to die a painful, CueCat-style death.
sulli
RTFJ.
My wikifukker.pl runs as a cron job scouring the google for wiki's to add goatse.cx to. It never really gets bored. Now and then it looks at me funny though.
I have a feeling that the makers of these cameras will start to spin how the computer community is to blame for hacking every consumer product and making it do things that the manufacturer never intended. They can say stuff like "We can't make any good products because when we do, someone finds a way to hack and ruin it!" They then run behind the DMCA so that they can make money on a plan that is shown to be flawed. Do they make a better product? Nope. They just get behind their lawyers and try to cram bad products down the public's throat. I say we need need to spend less money fighting for flawed methodologies and products (do you hear me RIAA/MPAA?) and more time on R&D.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Wiki is a PHP app? No wonder it can't take the load!!
Now you won't have to get all embarrassed taking your home-made digital pr0n pictures back to the store for processing!
I'm not supposed to get jigs in it!
really scary what happened to that guy. in the prime of his life, too.
But the article describes it as a $99 camera that will requires a decent amount of time, skill and some materials to crack, so not that many people will do it. Its about the cool factor more than anything. Its not that type of product that somebody will buy for 10.99, modify and then try reselling for a profit. The margin there would just be too slim, except for high school kids with too much time on their hands. Maybe you could sell em raw on ebay for $20.
And if the masses do decide are able crack it? Do you think they will pull the camera off the shelves, or just unload the failed product and cut their losses. Since digital cameras are advancing so quickly, I wonder what the intended lifespan for this product was. It couldn't have been more than 2 years. Obviously the next generation of cameras will be much more secure.
I think these suckers will sell out quickly, but I doubt they will pull them off the shelf.
I feel no compulsion to prop up stupid business models and no guilt when I break them to do something I want to do, within the bounds of the law.
My camera. I bought it. I do what I want with it. End of story.
Saw this on the page: "Note to self: Make this page so that ordinary users, who double-click on this page, can't edit this page..."
And uh, I guess he hasn't fixed that yet. Wonder how long before someone decides to delete it all?
I really have never sympathized with that line of reasoning. It's not as bad as the "but these new horseless buggys will put God-fearing men out of work" anti-technology advocates, but it's in the same ballpark.
/. these days means to seem it automatically becomes morally clean...), everyone saw this hack coming.
As others have noticed, Ritz put together a business that relies on security through obscurity rather than through, y'know, actual security features. Some of the ideas posted elsewhere on this topic included a cheap, pattented Ritz-controlled cable, limiting the hacking to extreme hardware hackers, or using an open or closed-source encryption method rather than a standard picture file type. Whether or not the hacking is "morally" clean (although it's almost certainly violating the DMCA, which on
Ritz didn't think far enough ahead to prevent something that that was (apparently) relatively simple.
And to stem off responses, this is not an argument about how hacking is good because it shows your "vulnurabilities." The majority of Slashdot has _seemed_ to agree that this argument is bullshit, as it would be if you said you broke down someone's door to prove its weakness. But Ritz didn't even put up a door in the first place. They seemingly made no effort to prevent such hacking and, as I've repeatedly said, seeing how it was so predictable that, as I said at the start of my post, I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for them.
-Trillian
Damn - I know that asshole...
After the company talks to the press, won't this be looked upon as stealing?
It depends on the deposit. If it's too large, it will negate the point of getting a 'disposable' (I know it's not actually disposable) camera. If it's too cheap, people will just take it anyway.
For example, no one will put down $60 as a deposit on the camera, being told they'll get $50 back when they return the camera. And if the deposit is only $20 (for a total of $30 for the camera) people will still just walk away with 'em.
I think it'd be really hard to come up with a deposit cost that would both be keeping with the idea of an inexpensive disposable camera AND prevent people from stealing it.
-Trillian
First attempts to extract picture data took 10 hours to read out 16MB
well, I think that they must have put up *some* kind of effort. it just wasn't enough, obviously.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
is the webserver running on one of those cameras ?
Music is the language of the heart, the sound of the soul. -Joe Satriani
Personally.. i think this is a SMART move for a company, to not enovke the DMCA.. as another posted stated there only available in select cities.. well im in Canada.. and i can tell you ill have one in my hot palm by Xmas, as im sure most of my buddies will.
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Or the hackers/crackers have just given the individuals who worked on this camera a two year extension on their contracts so that they can develop reliable security. Its all about how you look at it.
That's not a Ritz hacker, that's a Ritz Cracker!
My new business model is for all Slashdot users with ID numbers ending in '9' to pay me five dollars per post. You can always re-register until you get an ID that doesn't end in 9 if you don't want to pay. How can you put me out of work by not paying me for your post? I rely on that revenue!
Evil hacker!
Beer wants to be free
It is a no brainer for them to just charge for everythig up front.
You can call it a deposit or pre-paid processing or whatever.
That way when some geek wants to hack the camera, they laugh all the way to the bank.
Starting when someone sucessfully extracted the cheese from the middle of two ritz crackers. It was the first time in history that crackers sucessfully cracked other crackers, though I hear a few tried too hard and went 'crackers'.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I hear you're an expert on putting together "a business that relies on revenues that it will no longer have"...
I understand the potential risk for the manufacturer in this, but honestly, how many consumers who would consider using this service would actually consider taking the trouble to hack it?
Granted the cheepskate nerd community (myself included) isn't negligible, but is it enough to destroy their market segment?
I guess more specifically and applicably, what kind of cash goes into making one of these? How much do they lose for every camera sold and not returned?
He who controls the past, commands the future... He who controls the future conquers the past.
Sigh. I hate trolls, but I will respond anyhow.
You'll take note that the error messages are database related. It has nothing to do with php not being able to handle the logic or programming needs of the website.
What is happening in this case is the database server has too many active connections at one time, and is denying the php script from any more connection attempts.
Another point. A wiki can be built using more languages than php. There are python powered wikis too, to name but one example.
user@host$ diff
Dakota Digital Camera (Note to self: Make this page so that ordinary users, who double-click on this page, can't edit this page...)
:-)
(please try and keep this document readable at large)
(if it grows further, it needs to be organized into separate pages)
Usably hacked! Download your pictures the fast, easy way with the bulk-transfer software for Mac, Unix and Windows. Download your pictures (actually, entire flash memory contents) the raw, 10-hour way with flashdump.c, flashdump2iso.c, and optionally chewfat.cpp.
This is a very cheap ($12) "disposable" digital camera sold at select Ritz/Wolf Camera stores. Note that this is NOT the same as the one sold at Walgreens. Normally the camera must be returned to the store (negating a big feature of digital cameras), another $12 is paid for processing, and you get prints, an index print, and a CD (they try to call this a "free" cd, but of course its not, don't be fooled, you paid for it). Build quality seems variable - these sample pictures suck these pictures are ok (aside from the content
The camera has a Flash, a delete button, and a 10 second self timer, but no LCD for picture review. It claims a 2 megapixel resolution, but it seems its an up-scale from 1.3 megapixels. The focus is calibrated at the factory, and the lens glued in place with a drop of epoxy. It uses a cheaper CMOS sensor, instead of a CCD sensor, which is what most cameras over $150 use. For comparison, Ritz's sells a $99 two megapixel camera with an LCD.
Camera review/disection: http://frutsel.terrainhost.com/frutselapp/dump/dak ota/index.htm
Nice professional dissection at EE Times by the guys at Portelligent: http://pavleck.com/ritz/www.eetimes.com/
Hardware
there is preliminary evidence that there are two different version of a disposable digital camera. One by Ritz/Wolf Camera, the other by 'Walgreens'
Pinout:
1. : R57, not stuffed
2. : GND (battery neg)
3. : R18-via-r68-r47-left switch inner contact and delete button
4. : r25 not stuffed
5. : r5 (1K ohm) to sunplus pin 33
6. : 5v in (from USB) (red usb wire)
7. : GND
8. : USB data (green wire)
9. : USB data (white wire)
10. : GND (black usb wire)
Pins are marked on the printed circuit board - pin 1 is nearest the shutter release and pin 10 is at the bottom of the camera.
This camera is based on the Sunplus SPCA504B camera chip, in use in many cheap webcams and still d-cams.
8051-compatible microprocessor (code is not using '251 extensions)
In-circuit programming (not sure how to do this if it's ROM)
audio in/out, but not pinned out in 128-pin package
128KB x 8 program memory, SST part number SST39VF010
8MB picture memory (25 pictures), Samsung part number K9F2808UOC-YCBO
8MB (4M x 16) SDRAM, TMTECH part number T436416A
HOLTEK 1621 LCD driver (why they didn't use the smaller package baffles me!)
HCT373 octal latch de-muxes address and data for the SST flash memory.
Hardware connections:
Pin Name I/O Description
30 P1.0 in Shutter button, active low
31 P1.1 in photo flash connector pin 9
32 P1.2 out photo flash connector pin 10 (through D5, anode at pin 32, cathode on connector)
33 P1.3 out J3.5 through R5 (1K)
34 P1.4 out photo flash connector pin 6
35 P1.5 out SST A16
36 P1.6 out photo flash connector pin 5
37 P1.7 in Seems to be Power Button, active low. This is pulled up by R51, and down by the collector of Q2, which is fed through a divider network from the power switch.
38 P3.0 in pulled low by R40 (100K). Goes somewhere, but unknown!
39 P3.1 in Timer button (S2), active low
40 P3.4 in Delete button (S1), active low
104 GPIO15 out Holtek CS*
105 GPIO16 out Holtek WR*
66 ???? ??? Holtek DATA
The HCT373 acts as an address de-multiplexor for the processor. Port0? connects to the SST flash's data lines and to the D inputs of the '373. The '373's Q outputs connect to A0-7. P2 of the processor connects to A8-A15 (
That would make the hackers, Ritz Crackers.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Don't like it?
Chew harder.
I did a HOWTO on the cable. I demand a C&D!
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
is available here.
I am a pervert and I stand by that firmly.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Ritz has an honest business model, and consumers shouldn't download their own pictures from the camera.
:)
Even if using the DMCA to combat this is morally wrong, so is downloading your own pictures, in this case.
Certainly you have to sign a contract to rent the camera?
Of course, you could place your own favorite pics on the camera, and send it in.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
the transfer was probably just god dang slow.
anyways, they should have just sold the damn cameras at profit ang get over with it. it's not like the damn cameras would have cost more than 20-40$ anyways(judging from picture quality).
and more importantly the product seems so shitty nobody technically apt wouldn't use it in the first place for the price(actually, they might rake in profit even if they were just used once with full amount of pics to test out the service and picture quality, per unit). if i want pics that look like they came out of a disposable camera i'll stick to my cellphone.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's interesting to see so many people respond that this is a bad thing. How is this any different than people that hack their XBOXs to run Linux? You're essentially using a device differently than its intended use, and depriving the manufacturer of an expected revenue stream. What's the difference? I'm not saying that people shouldn't have the right to do whatever they want with something they buy ... I do ... but there seems to be a big difference in how the slashdot community interprets two very similar situations.
This is a clear case of reverse-engineering for compatibility, which is a DMCA exception big enough to drive a truckload of cheap digital cameras through... Asice from the little detail that there's NO copyrighted work being protected here.
Think it through, friends and neighbors... (Gee, "think it through" rhymes with "Get a clue" but is ever so much more polite...)
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Those film disposables are actually reuseable.. The film is in a normal 35mm cartridge.. The trick is the winding mechanism rolls the film into the camera when a shot is taken (most cameras do it the other way around). so reloading the camera is practically imposible and not worth it (you'd have to do it complete darkness)
I'm surprised they didn't do something similar to the digital cameras. Don't make it imposible, just not worth the effort. I gues they didn't try hard enough.
Hmm, anyone else remember the I-Opener?
A $99 computer with a proprietary (QNX-based) OS on a flash disk, that was sold at a loss because the company figured they'd make money from their dialup service... Until someone found the IDE connector on the motherboard and installed something else.
Well, after a short war between the hackers and the company (including state of the art protection mechanisms as epoxy glue on the bios, torx screws, clipped IDE pins etc) the company finally had to raise the price of the unit, resulting in the sales plumeting, and in the end bankrupcy.
Now, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to hack devices like this, heck I've got an iopener (running jailbait linux) standing next to my main computer. But there is a good chance that soon nobody will use the $11 developing deal, resulting in the cameras getting pulled from the stores.
Just as there were lots of people happily using iopeners as they were intended, I'm sure there are lots of people happy with the service that Ritz is providing, and if so it's a shame if we, the hacker community, proceed to destroy yet another service for other consumers.
If PHP had connection pooling, like Java and even ASP has, it wouldn't be a problem.
What kinda battery does this thing have in it? It would be cool if you could recharge it, but the work is worthless to take 25 or so pictures and to have to go and hack another one.
ItWasFree.com - Take the mystery
OK, so we can now read the data ourselves instead of paying twice as much to have Walgreens do it. But how reusable is the camera itself? Are the batteries replaceable? How long do they last?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
it seems like you would have access to the cameras private key and ritzs public key
How? Neither key can be deduced from the other without brute force, and the relevant keys together with crypto hardware can be hidden in a tamper-proof chip (see also TCPA).
you can always hack the firmware / hardware to just skip all that crap
The firmware is Flash this time, but the next version might be a mask ROM, whose contents cannot be changed.
since the data is obviously unencrypted and digital at somepoint
Unless the encryption happens on the same die as the image sensor, in which case "somepoint" is not accessible to those with macro-scale logic probes.
Will I retire or break 10K?
When most people pay a deposit, they will feel like they rightfully purchased the camera. Hence, you are actually encouraging people to keep the cameras.
Hehe. I can get a real handheld scanner for $40.00, and one that fits in a charger for a $100 more.
How many people in society use disposable cameras? many hands raise How many of you know or care about taking a few hours to go to the lengths needed to get this hack done? few hands raised. To sum up for everyone crying doom for this business model:
Hacking value for fun: 8 out of 10 points.
Hacking value for ...um.... actual value: 1 out of 10 points.
In short, RTFA if you think Joe and Jane six-pack will care about this. If you still think this matters to the business plan after readinging TFA, keep refreshing untill you slashdot it again and get the I'm stupid page.
(actually, for all I know, that could be the answer. I have no fucking clue.)
Hey, I know! Ritz can get the government to put a hidden levy on Palm m100/m105 hotsync cables! Because, you know, everyone who purchases hotsync cables must be intent on using them, at least some of the time, for ripping Ritz pictures.
Kinda like what they do with CDR for RIAA. It's such a good idea.
After they're done with that one, I think they'd better put in a levy on Craftsman tools, because home mechanics are cheating Midas Muffler out of revenue, and a levy on Tupperware containers, because we're all cheating Safeway out of grocery sales when we keep our leftovers.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
They won't get you on infriging copywrite, they will try to get you on using the camera in a way they didn't want you to.
Is that possible under the DMCA? It prohibits circumventing security, but is this such a circumvention?
Well, go ahead and mod the parent up because it is a legit argument, but... if the business model falls apart because someone is "circumventing" an idiotic law that shouldn't exist to begin with, the business model is the problem, not the person who was savvy enough to figure out the work on their own.
Any company who's business relies on a shaky, ambiguous, morally (and quite probably legally) reprehensible law that a bunch of big business suits bought with some extra cash they had lying around isn't going to make it and doesn't deserve to.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I mean this is like breaking into the Louvre and stealing a crayon drawing
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
According to a Mercury News story , the camera is nearly unhackable through its proprietary interface (aha! those wily hackers will never figure this one out!).
"Hackers will have a hard time making Dakota Digital cameras reusable at home. The cameras have a special plug, so you can't use any standard computer cable for connecting to a personal computer. Also, you can't erase more than one picture and the images are stored in a raw format that won't be recognized by photo-editing software."
Really... how many times does it take for stupid marketers to learn security by obscurity doesn't work?
*scoove*
if it was a 3 or 4 mp camera i'd be willing to expend the effort to do this, but it's only 1.3mp... check out these crappy pictures! I'm not minimizing the hard work it took for the people to get the camera working, but my time is worth more to me than the lousy pictures i can get from this camera.
So if you shoot amateur porn with one...
Tits on a Ritz... Mmmmmm GOOOOOOD cracker!
What if the press' temptation to use "Cracker" instead of "Hacker" finally caused them to get the two terms right?
At least *some* good might come of this...
-- My Weblog.
And /.ers treating Microsoft harsher than other companies surprises you?
To save you from shock in the future, please read the rules of slashdot
(but don't ever admit to doing so!)
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
about the only reasonable use I can think of this hack is for stuff like model rocketry, where you want a reusable but really cheap camera in case it gets destroyed in use.
This space available.
i work at a Ritz camera... these things are so stupid and are definately not worth it... just go for film disposable... i always saw this as a toy...
Yet you would bitch and moan if your credit card info was stolen and used. All the more if the credit card company would not reverse the charges.
Why should crackers and identity thieves care that your financial standing is so fragile? Or that you depend on people "behaving in a way people don't behave?" (whatever THAT means)
You seem to think (as most Slashdot does) that you're some kind of Robin Hood. Steal from the "rich" (all businesses) and give to the "poor" (whiney white middle and upper-class brats). You think that REAL people don't depend on their business. You think that it is alright to disrespect business' wishes, yet don't harm the individual! As if you don't depend on the business that employs you! Just wait until the world wakes up and sees how overpaid and useless IT workers really are. How they sit on their asses each day, doing a mere hour of work and then bitching about things beyond their control on Slashdot for the remainder of their time.
The business model is only fragile if no-one wants that product. Purchasing the product and using in a manner disrespectful of the creator's intent is completely asinine. This is the downward spiral of today's society. Disrespect. You disrespect one person or business and they continue to disrespect. You've probably been burnt yourself at some time. Most likely a business. And I guarantee that, since this is Slashdot (and your userid is low enough to remember the early days and how it all started), it was probably a certain software business (or depending on your age, a certain hardware business). Perhaps it is time to end the cycle, eh? Only you can do it though.
But I already know what will happen. You will continue to believe as you do. You probably skimmed what I wrote and picked out things to get pissy about. Then you will write a tirade, as if standing up for your fellow herd members. Ah yes, here it comes...
> Congratulations to those hackers/crackers who have likely now put those
> individuals out of work.
Funny, last I saw it was Ritz that priced these things under cost, not us hackers.
If McDonalds spent $5 per cheese burger for all that is needed, and only charged $2, would you blame every person that just wants to order a cheese burger for the loss of the McDonalds workers jobs?
Aparently so.
Blame the person that didnt realize if ( cost > gain ) failed_business();
Just as I am very curious why there are always individuals on slashdot that question the integrity of the whole group based on reactions of (different) members.
XBOX hacking good : YES (xxx %) NO (xxx %)
Camera hacking cool : YES (xxx %) NO (xxx %)
This is a forum, with many people, some agree with you, others don't (even on this point there will be people who agree and people who don't). Some may be hypocritical, but I don't agree with you on this point, where do you see the many people saying this is a bad thing ?
This is not the American government, 2 groups of people having different viewpoints actually results in a mixed reaction of the whole. (which is a statement made to question just how representative american representative "democracy" is, wanna bet there will be 2 viewpoints on this as well ?)
Why bother? Everyone knows anyone can edit a wiki... what does your script accomplish other than annoy some people and apparently give you some weird satisfaction?
Is this whole thing a DMCA violation? I doubt it, but that doesn't mean Ritz won't try to use the DMCA to stop it.
Do the Faux News Channel t-shirts sold on www.agitproperties.com violate Fox News Channel's copyrights? Probably not, but that didn't stop Fox from leaning on the site to stop selling them. In that case, the site owners called Fox's bluff by ignoring the C&D, and Fox didn't pursue the matter, probably because they were getting ridiculed on other news channels. However, they made threatening noises, even though they didn't have a legal leg to stand on. In many cases, this strategy works, so, justified or not, don't be surprised if Ritz uses it.
Since being publicly ridiculed seems to be the only thing that scares corporations from bullying anyone who gets in their way, perhaps we need a site that does nothing but chronicle these abuses. Do it in a humorous way that uttlerly humiliates these goons, and maybe they'll give these matters a little more consideration before they go shooting from the hip. Or does such a site already exist?
When you go to www.iopener.net, there's a nice graphic telling you that for support of your iOpener (damn you Apple, I can't spell anything anymore!), call your ISP.
Or visit www.iopener.net.
How do you keep a moron occupied for hours?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The fee you pay for the camera is intended to be a rental fee. The primary difference is that they eat the cost if it gets broken or lost. They only offer the cheap price because they intend to get it back. Much like with game consoles where they sell you a computer for negative profit expecting to make it all back with game purchases.
Either they stopped selling them on their 800 number or are just to stupid to find them in their computer, even if you give them the catalog number...
I've seen the pictures from this camera. It's truly awful. It may have a 2MP sensor, but the images are worse than the 640x480 webcams you can get for $10 after rebate...
Typically, public-key crypto isn't done on arbitrary-length messages; instead, it's done on short symmetric-cipher keys of fixed length.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Perhaps because running Linux on your X-Box isn't hurting Microsoft in any way, while this not only violates your terms of agreement but keeps Ritz from getting the camera back, which is how they can offer it at such a price?
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
FUCK!
Grow up and contribute to the conversation, instead of posting links to goatse.cx crap
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Yuck. I understand the want/need to hack it, but seriously, those pictures from that camera are just nasty-awful.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I have an iOpener - running peanut linux, and I use it as a portable sniffer.. Neat little hack, and worth every bit of the $100 that I paid for it...
If the morons at iOpener wanted to charge me $200 or $250 for a device that I could toss an OS onto, I would have *gladly* paid that price.
I'm not out to rip anyone off. But if a company creates a product and doesn't expect it to be used in any way other than they designed, then they are living in fairy land and they deserve what they get.
All iOpener had to do was not act like a bunch of crybabies, and say "Hey, that's a neat idea we hadn't thought of... we *might* not make as much $$$ off of it, but so long as we cover our costs, maybe we'll come across a new use and we can sell some more...". Shit, they had hackers wanting to create new uses for the thing! Which they could have sold - give the hack who created the idea some bucks (or beer!) and run with it...
But no, they had to engage the lawyers. And we all know how well that worked out...
Ritz hasn't yet invoked the DMCA, blah blah blah. What they ought to do is look at what's been done, see what the flaws are, and improve the camera. Maybe give some cameras to the people who originally came up with the hack, and see what they'd do to make it better. Then implement those ideas.
OK, so the business model of selling a camera cheap, and then getting to develop the photos isn't working - but all I can say is "DUH!". Digital cameras are driving development out of business, people can buy their own color printers for cheap, and print their own pix at their home, in their underwear... What does their service provide that one can not provide for oneself?
They ought to release a software package and allow one to simply handle the picture "development" as one desires... OR give the option of bringing the thing in for Ritz to handle it.
Market the cameras to tourists, wedding planners, schools, parents, etc. ADAPT the business model to the CHANGING marketplace. But by all means, forget this crap about trying to keep the marketplace from changing by suing people (esp. hackers) - there's no way to win by suing your customers...
Get a fucking sense of humor, ya dumbass!
...to "take a picture".
MWAHAHAHA!!
- The camera itself is shit. Take a look at these stunning examples of just how terrible the image quality is. It uses a CMOS sensor (not a CCD) and a hella-cheap fixed-at-infinity plastic lens.
- It's a 1.3 megapixel sensor scaling up to 2 megapixels, as though the image weren't bad enough already.
- The busniess model is not necessarily fundamentally broken just because a bunch of unwashed
/. hackers buy these $10 cameras and never return them. Most dickhead consumers are lemmings, and they do what they're supposed to do. If those consumers wish their single-use cameras were digital so they could share their photos with their Internet pals, which is ostensibly one of the reasons to make this camera in the first place, then I expect that people will do just that if the price is right. That's the factor that could kill this product, not a bunch of freakish /.ers cutting up USB cables.
_______________________Sigs are insignificant.
Calm down have a look at the samples what is the point in disposable digital cameras that take pictures like these?
You are stupid. Die, die die..
Look what has been accomplished! We actually invested TIME and MONEY to extract data from a lousy $10 camera. Big $#*)%#*@ deal. Up next: how to reuse paper plates to reduce your dish budget.
Is having it for free REALLY that important? I hear there are digital cameras now that you can take unlimited pictures with. Why, they might even be for sale. Imagine that!
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Validation in public key crypto is a little different than what you are thinking.
There is ever only one key involved on each end, and they both have to be part of the same pair. In encryption you encrypt with the recipient's public key and they decrypt with their private key(*)
In validation (or digital signature) you take a hash of the message (usually SHA1) and encrypt that with your private key. Thus the only key capable of decrypting it is your public key (which everyone has). Remember with key-pairs what you do with one you can only undo with the other.
Anyway, the recipient creates their own hash of the message, decrypts your "signature" (which is an encrypted hash) and if the two match up, then they know it was signed by you and that it was not tampered with.
(*) Actually, public key crypto is painfully slow. What REALLY happens is a random symmetric key is chosen to encrypt the message, then the public key is used to encrypt the symmetric key. Decryption is the reverse, you decrypt the symmetric key with your private key, then use it to decrypt the message. This actually ends up being a lot faster than doing the whole thing with public key crypto. I left this out above to make it a little simpler.
Finkployd
Bacause the xbox actually makes a useful computer, and still costs less than even those $300 bargain-basement computers. And you largely know what hardware you're getting with an Xbox, so you don't have to worry that you'll get some no-name sound card or ethernet that you can't find drivers for.
This thing is a crappy camera for not much less than the cost of any other cheapo camera. I don't see much value in it.
to run on it without using a mod chip :)
Ritz put together a business that relies on revenues that it will no longer have. Congratulations to those hackers/crackers who have likely now put those individuals out of work.
And shame on those who put together the business model. Honestly the stupidest business plan in the world has to be to sell hardware for less than it costs to make it. Do you honestly think people are going to feel bad at trying to maximize their utility from products they purchased? I use things as they were not intended by the manufacturer all the time. Do they have a legitimate complaint? No, they happily sold it to me and I have no obligation to help them succeed at what is undeniably a poorly thought out business model.
Do you feel bad every time you don't purchase something you see on TV? A lot of people worked hard to put together that business. That is why it is called "risk" Sometimes you do something stupid and lose. The customers are looking out for number 1, they are not on the company's side (as companies are not on the customer's side) and if one slips up, the other takes advantage. Every time.
Finkployd
Does anyone know if they are available in Canada? Specifically Vancouver, but on-line from back east would be fine too.
A business model that relies on me doing a particular thing with your product after I've purchased it is stupid. Thinking up new things to do with existing stuff is call innovation you mindless consumer! Not disrespect. If you're selling a product at a loss because you expect to make back that loss from a service, only people work out that they can use your product without the service, you should have thought of that. Jeez, certainly by now you should have thought of that. CueCat anyone?
A sucessful business is not a right. The government is under no obligation to prop up every half-arsed business plan just because it generates jobs. I'm sorry if you lost your job working for some snake-oil salesman, but you should have been able to look at the business model and worked out immediately that it would fail -- or at least gone in with your eyes open knowing it was risky.
I make two regular payments to a subscription service. My ISP and my mobile phone. I contribute to the payment of a land line, water, power and council rates. While some might add stuff like Everquest to the list, most people buy a product once and enjoy it however they see fit. Why would a company nobody's ever heard of think that they can change this?
If you give away Everquest CDs at a loss that's your choice and I think they make a good frizbee then that's my choice.
Let me guess, your VCR flashes 12:00.Where do you get "hundreds of dollars to make?" I have a much nicer HP camera than that, which I bought for $75.00 (2 megapixel with an LCD screen, movie capability, and a CF card slot so I can take many pictures. Now standard retail economics says that the wholesale price was probably half of what I paid, or about $40.00. Presuming that the manufacturer makes some profit, the cost to make my camera was probably around $15-20. So the cost of manufacturing the Ritz dispo-digital is probably abount $5-10.
So what if i purchase the camera but never take pictures with it? Is that stealing? What if I only bought the Playstation II to have a DVD player? Is that stealing?
Maximizing your utility on a purchase is not stealing. If the company's business plan counted on you acting a different way, then they screwed up, not you. Business is risky, doubly so when you come up with a amazingly stupid business plan that involves selling people hardware under cost. if they want to rent the camera out, then rent the camera out. If they want to sell it, then they have to accept that people will use it anyway they see fit. That is the difference between renting and selling.
Finkployd
In reading this article and others on the DMCA, I have yet to find a case cited where the DMCA actually won. All the cases I've read about are "pending". Does anyone here know of any cases where the DMCA won?
I hate ditto posts, but EX-FRICKING-ACTLY! I am getting so tired of companies these days coming up with "business plans" that wouldn't survive a week in the real world, just because they can hide within the labyrinth of laws and smash anyone who acosts them. If they are "selling" those cameras at a loss, then that is *profoundly* stupid and they deserve to take a beating on it. (and they will since, now that the crack is out, it's never going to go away no matter how many people they sue)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
The more often I hear this argument, the shallower it sounds.
All business is based on some assumption of law. For example, you can't just beat up your competitors. Is it moral that the law protects the weak from the strong? I think so, but there is a case to be made for the opposite.
In this case, we're the strong, and it's the artists, writers, programmers who are the weak. The DMCA is an effort to protect them. Is it therefore a shaky, ambiguous, and morally reprehensible law? Or just inconvenient to us?
Epson ink cartridges have a chip that prevent the printer from printing once the ink has dropped below a certain level, presumably to stop damage to the printers; however, the chip makes it difficult for aftermarket ink manufacturers to make compatible cartridges and forces you to buy ink more readily. I just had a cartridge run out and I know there is still ink in it. Sounds like a somewhat similar situation. Maybe some nice person will write a fix to allow me to use the rest of the ink that I purchased. Or is ink protected under the DMCA?
The pictures are stored on the flash as straight jpeg. You read it off with standard USB commands. Can't circumvent a copy protection scheme that's not there.
paintball
>> No, that's not how MacroVision works. It's a flag set in content (for a hefty fee, of course!)
Now, I hate Macrovision, but that's even worse! On what principle, exactly, can someone prevent me from setting a bit or byte on a disc I create to whatever I want? As messed up as things are, Macrovision can't have copyrighted the bit that turns it on or off. Or should the Onion have reported, "Macrovision patents One, Zero?"
A reusable digital camera. Who woulda thought!
well, part of ritz's business model involves taking back used cameras and reselling the hardware itself. they assume that they always get their hardware back since people want their pictures. hmm so anyway what exactly does the purchase price pay for? do the cameras have little things claiming that they still belong to ritz (like... some things do that i can't remember)?
We can't make any good products because when we do, someone finds a way to hack and ruin it!
Judging from the quality of the pictures on that guy's website, this is certainly NOT a good product. A cheap-O disposable 35mm takes much better pictures for the same price or less.
This product was doomed to fail, regardless.
Found this on a messageboard... Camera autopsy / dissection
I had a sucky sig.
the camera is a real piece of shit. Lens optics are deplorable... shoddy engineering (uses only half the flash chip).
It probably doesn't cost 3 bucks to make in the right country. Well, at least not more than $20 because...
It's not reusable (!). So you don't see re-used ones back in the new packages at the store.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"So a camera costing hundreds of dollars and provided on a rent and return basis can effectively be stolen and the company goes bust?"
Hundreds of dollars? US, American dollars?
Are these mil spec? Or are they just made of solid platinum? I read the article and it says it has a plastic lens.
So to put this in perspective, Ritz has paid "hundreds of dollars" for a 1.3MP camera with a plastic lens?
If true, I think worrying about hackers is the least of Ritz's problems.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
and it's really a piece of shit. Not worth taking pictures with unless it's for a website at low resolution. Not even worth it for insurance claims.
(check the links and see for yourself... ugh) you get what you pay for.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Seriously, Fry's sells a crappy $37 camera that you don't have to go through all this to get the pictures off of. I think the additional $10 is worth the convenience of NOT having to hack the damn thing.
Hell, spend an additional $40-$60 and you have a camera that takes really NICE pictures and you don't have to hack.
This doesn't even take into account VERY QUICK picture download.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Actually, some of these points are not in the articles, and (not surprisingly) seem to be causing some confusion based on some of the comments I have seen above.
1) The cameras are purchased, just like any ordinary (non-digital) disposable camera. There is no rental agreement, nothing to sign, no deposit, etc. Some previous comments have asked about this. Also, the camera IS cheap; the hardware itself costs probably no more than $25-50 to manufacture, and likely pay for themselves in 1 or 2 processings. The big draw is that you can use them in potentially hazardous environments, and if it gets destroyed or stolen, this only sets you back $11 + a few minutes to solder a new connector into a new camera.
2) The batteries are changeable by the user - they are ordinary AA alkalines. They will last much longer than 1 25-picture cycle (I haven't yet managed to exhaust a set), but when they do run down, just open the battery cover and pop in fresh ones.
3) The sensor is actually 1.3 megapixels, not 2MP as claimed on the package.
4) The picture quality is mediocre - but not nearly as bad as these samples would have you believe (I don't know what happened to that guy's cam). Try the samples here and here (middle of page) for other samples. The biggest problem seems to be motion blurs from not holding the camera steady enough (the "shutter speed" is pretty slow). The other problem is that the lens is adjusted to be in-focus at some specific point probably between 4-12 feet from the camera. In practice, your subject will usually not be exactly at the in-focus distance. While you've got the camera open to solder in a little USB socket (or whatever), you can rotate the lens to adjust it for other distances, up to within an inch of the lens.
5) Concerns that this hack will be singlehandedly responsible for driving the cameras off the market, driving Ritz out of business, etc., seem largely unfounded. They will probably go off the market anyway - last time I was in Wolf Camera, the sales associates were actually warning people away from these cameras, saying that they would get slightly better image quality from the film disposables (for less $$, and 27 vs. 25 pictures - it's a no-brainer, come to think of it...)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
this is both a good and a bad
thing in an interesting sorta way.
--
Roy
What would interest me is recovering pictures that were deleted but not wiped from the camera's memory... There's nothing quite like spying on people!
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
2 AA's - you change them by (surprisingly enough) opening the battery cover on the bottom and letting them fall out, then popping 2 fresh ones in their place. In practice though, you can take a lot of pictures on 1 set of batteries (especially since this cam lacks power-hungry CCD image sensors, backlit color LCD screens, etc.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Fine.. I'm renting it... for the next 80 years.
Nothing new... extremely long "rentals" (copyholds) were used by the church to get around some new laws a long time ago in England. See Heydon's Case, 3 Co. Rep. 7a; 76 Eng. Rep. 637 (1584)
Maybe I shouldn't reply to this, but it sounds like a sincere statement, so...
... the same DVD. Which I can't use. However, fortunately for me, other people have found themselves in the same boat. And they have the smarts to be able to figure out how to make this work. Unfortunately, the DMCA makes it illegal for them to tell me this information.
Here's some food for thought (and I admit that this may be a philosophically weak argument, but I've yet to find anybody to help debate this and make it better), and in particular, this is a basis for some sort of morality (yes, an attempt at a universal right and wrong, good and evil, etc).
When a person is born into this world, that person has a fixed amount of time until death. That person is then able to trade their time (eventually) for stuff which is either desired or needed, such as food, shelter, entertainment, etc. In our society, we tend to use money to represent the value of said time (quite literally, time is money). Yes, there is much more to this, and I need to write it all down someday, but this summary will do for this discussion.
Now, where does this idea tie in with the discussion? Well, anything which takes time from me without giving me back something that I value equally could be considered to be wrong or evil. For instance, if somebody steals $20 from me, then I have lost the time it took me to earn that $20, and it cannot be recovered. Hence, stealing is wrong in this system.
Now, put it in terms of the DMCA and the limitations which are placed on those subject to its rule. I buy a DVD with the expectation that I will be able to enjoy the contents on that DVD. I have equipment which is sufficient to allow me to do so (to wit: A computer equipped with a DVD-ROM drive), and so this would seem to be a reasonable expectation. I bring it home, pop it in, and find out that, for no better reason than I choose to use Linux (instead of Windows), I am unable to play the contents of this media.
Now, nobody will give me a refund on this opened DVD. The best I can do is exchange it for
Under the DMCA, it is very possible for me to find myself out the money for a DVD which I might actually enjoy. Somebody has stolen some time from me, and I have no recourse. Now, before you tell me to use Windows, keep in mind that I must buy Windows, somehow, some way. Which means that I am out even more time. Or a stand-alone DVD player, which has the same issue.
The DMCA steals from me the ability to help others make use of the items which they have rightfully purchased with their time.
Now, for the counter-argument: The DMCA is meant to stop mass copyright infringement as has been enabled by the internet. I'll simply point out that mass infringers are already convictable under other laws. The DMCA gives no other benefits to help prevent actual infringment. None. It only allows producers of content to steal from me (and yes, they are stealing my time, by virtue of requiring potentially pricy extras that I may not already have to enjoy what they produce).
Gah, it's getting late here, and my brain is shutting down as I type this (I think the first part is more coherent than the second part). Thoughts from you?
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Oh well.
CueCat dorks now have something else to do.
-dc
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/onlineTra
then I think this qualifies:o nnections.php
http://nl.php.net/manual/en/features.persistent-c
I use persistant connections in my php programming all the time, and the difference in impact on the server is quite noticeable.
To combine your reply and the other reply at the time of this writing, here's a timely (coincidental) bit of news...
Java is coming to BeOS. Read more about it in an interview I posted recently.
Enjoy. ;)
user@host$ diff
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
That's all fine and dandy.. spend 10 hours to extract a crappy picture and save $10 in developing. I have a better idea. Turn the camera into a mp3 player, voice recorder or something better than it was.
I'll buy that argument for the first time you buy a DVD - if you weren't aware of the DMCA, etc.
But now that you are aware of the DMCA, if you buy a DVD expecting to play it on a Linux system, then you're an idiot, pure and simple. From the point the law was passed, that was THE LAW and being ignorant of it is not a valid excuse.
No - they are not stealing your time. If you buy a DVD, then you are a willing participant in the so-called "theft" of your time and it is not really theft anymore.
If you happen to live a country not being crushed under the heels of the DMCA, good for you. If not, quit bitching and get the right equipment, or change the law.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Now they can't prove who wrote that article.
here is the main issue w/ your argument, as i see it. The content producers can't steal anything from you since it is you who are initiating the transaction. Now you CAN argue that the publisher of the DVD is engaging in false advertising or providing a broken product because it says it's a DVD and your drive says it's a DVD drive yet the disk won't play. But then again maybe it's a fault of the DVD drive manufacturer. You can get the two manufacturers to fight it out because one of the two isn't working to spec. However, what i think you'll find out is that the DVD drive maker probably included a windows DVD playing program for windows with the drive and you just happen to be using the drive in an unsupported way. So really, your beef is with the DVD drive maker for not supporting Linux, or perhaps with Linux itself for not running "Windows " programs. As you can see, this gets pretty strange, but philosophically, i don't really see a problem here.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
My focus was on DVDs, and that's my failing. The same scenario plays out for any of a hundred other items anymore. The point of my little article was to show why the DMCA is wrong, not to focus on DVDs and issues with them (as I said, though, brain is shutting down). Re-read with that thought in mind, and tell me how to get the DMCA repealed. And tell me why I'm wrong, and that the DMCA is a good law. Oh, I'll start working on getting the DMCA repealed right away (and yes, I do tell people, and yes, I do send letters. None of that has done much yet).
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
I like those little cue cats, they're really usefull. I have one here on my desk at work, and several at home too. When we have projects that use lots of forms, I write-up code that lets the data entry folks scan in the answers with bad codes, etc. Lots o fun.
Another point (back to the cameras) that occurrs to me is that the DMCA doesn't stop those of us who mirrored the site and the software from sticking it online somewhere else in the world '-)
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yeah, it was a sincere comment.
I buy a DVD with the expectation that I will be able to enjoy the contents on that DVD. I have equipment which is sufficient to allow me to do so (to wit: A computer equipped with a DVD-ROM drive), and so this would seem to be a reasonable expectation. I bring it home, pop it in, and find out that, for no better reason than I choose to use Linux (instead of Windows), I am unable to play the contents of this media.
Obviously, your expectation was false. You should have some research before buying the media. If a business can't expect its business model to be honored, then why should a customer expect his expectations to be honored? That, IMHO, is the other side of the coin.
Under the DMCA, it is very possible for me to find myself out the money for a DVD which I might actually enjoy. Somebody has stolen some time from me, and I have no recourse. Now, before you tell me to use Windows, keep in mind that I must buy Windows, somehow, some way. Which means that I am out even more time. Or a stand-alone DVD player, which has the same issue.
You bought a DVD on the assumption that it would play on your system. Nobody forced you to buy that DVD. Your assumption turned out to be false. I don't see how anybody has stolen anything from you.
The DMCA steals from me the ability to help others make use of the items which they have rightfully purchased with their time.
The key word here is "rightfully". You cannot play DVDs "rightfully" without the appropriate licenses. Its like complaining that somebody stole from you because you can't go into a movie theater without a ticket. After all, you spent some time going to the theatre. And the ticket is not a strict requirement for watching the movie: a pair of eyeballs and buttocks will do, and you have those.
So from your point of view, there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to watch the movie. But the bouncer disagrees. Do you call him a thief?
...but that picture was almost definately made with a disposable camera.
At least _I_ sure wouldn't want to use it again.
Or for that matter, see or eat, but thats another matter entirely.
I love how everyone assumes it is illegal claiming the DMCA or some other law when it hasnt even been judged so in a court of law. The slashdot crowd is getting dumber and dumber, i guess it is time to leave.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"not funny haha, funny queer"
I'm not that surprised, but the reporter was fed an outright lie. The camera stores pictures in flash using the Smart Media format - something I'm sure is recogonizable by many computers reading flash memory cards. I wrote a program to de-smart-media-ize an image and convert it to a iso image -- when I mounted the image, my mac automatically launched iPhoto and showed me the pictures!
But, I got ahead of my self. The pictures aren't stored in raw format; they are in JPEG, complete with the header and everything.
I'm still working on the erase, but people tell me that the standard gphoto command to erase all the pictures works fine. I guess they were talking about the little button on the back.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Public key operations are expensive, but nothing says that the key operations have to be done on the camera at all.
For instance, the camera may be preloaded with 25 secret encryption keys stored in plain text, and the same keys encrypted with a public key. Each time a picture is taken one secret encryption key is used to encrypt the picture, THEN erased. When the camera is done, all of the secret keys are erased, so it is not possible to decrypt the images. One must return the camera where they read out the 25 encrypted encryption keys, decrypt them, then develop the images. When a camera comes in, the block of 25 encrypted keys is sent to a centralized server who replies with the decryption keys and a new replacement key block of new secret keys and a block of encrypted versions of the same.
With this, the camera need do nothing other than encrypt the images, not a single RSA operation.
The attack on this of course would be to read out the keys from the camera before taking any pictures, then use them to decrypt the pictures later, but someone with the forethought to do that would be probably willing enough to replace the firmware entirely, so I don't worry.
Any company who's business relies on a shaky, ambiguous, morally (and quite probably legally) reprehensible law that a bunch of big business suits bought with some extra cash they had lying around isn't going to make it and doesn't deserve to.
It seems shortsighted to dismiss the service this company provides just because the camera can be hacked. Hackable==bad business model, end of story? The world isn't black and white like that.
We don't have the DMCA (quite) here in Australia. So what I want to know is: where can I get one of these cameras in Perth?
A "one time use" camera is sold under the theory that you'll eventually turn it in to get the pictures out, at which point the reusable parts are salvaged and not returned to you, but used to make another "one time use" camera. Clearly, Ritz is giving you the camera under the theory that you'll give it back to them.
But here's the question... is there any fine print that requires people to return the cameras? Otherwise, it'd be perfectly legal to buy the camera for it's "one time use" price, and take it apart for the clearly more valuable parts...
The key word here is "rightfully". You cannot play DVDs "rightfully" without the appropriate licenses.
Except that's not true. When you buy/rent a dvd/cd/book etc you DO have a right to view/listen/read it without any additional license. You essentially recieved a limited licence the moment you handed over your money. Copyright law spells out these rights and some limitations (no commercial use etc) in a reasonably ballanced way. The DMCA basically throws that ballance away and gives all rights to the publisher. IMHO that's just plain wrong.
Its like complaining that somebody stole from you because you can't go into a movie theater without a ticket.
No it's more like selling you a ticket and then informing you that you'll have to view the feature while standing on your head and no there are no refunds but we'll happily exchange your ticket for another showing where you'll also have to stand on your head.
Well, go ahead and mod the parent up because it is a legit argument, but... if the business model falls apart because someone is "circumventing" an idiotic law that shouldn't exist to begin with, the business model is the problem, not the person who was savvy enough to figure out the work on their own.
Every law is "idiotic" to those who don't like what it means.
Using the DCMA to protect digital cameras of this type isn't an injustice. Many people cannot afford to buy expensive digital cameras or have only a limited use for them - there is definitely a market for this sort of thing. By striking against the company that sells this service, you are really attacking the people who would want to use this service by making it economically impossible for the company to provide "rental" cameras.
The technically "savvy" means of circumventing the system here isn't morally different from putting one quarter into the newspaper box and taking all of the copies for yourself. Your argument is that if newspapers want to protect themselves they shouldn't rely on laws prohibiting theft but should instead invest in expensive newspaper vending technology that will prevent customers from taking more newspapers than they pay for. Fair enough, I suppose, but that doesn't excuse the actions of people circumventing the system that's in place. The DCMA isn't such a bad thing, and it's not as if Ritz is ripping people off with their system.
How will Ritz react? They'll probably have to create rental agreements with customers, under which the customers agree to return the camera to Ritz within a specified period of time and also agree not to use any other means of accessing the photos stored in the camera. Then they'll have to sue people who won't return their cameras or obviously use an alternate means of getting the photographs out. The net result of this isn't a victory for freedom of information. It will be a matter of a few jerks ruining it for the rest of us.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
I'm fascinated by your argument...and I'll be spending several days thinking about it. The economist in me is amused.
... the same DVD.
For the most part, humans do think this way, but there is one area we don't: children. The loss of a child's life is amazingly tragic, whereas the loss of an adult's life is less so. This doesn't make much sense, in that the adult had more time on them, and more learning...consider a 30 year old has 30 years of investment for life, whereas a newborn does not, and a newborn is easily replicated using the old fashioned way, with a fairly small time investment.
Now, nobody will give me a refund on this opened DVD. The best I can do is exchange it for
Fortunately there's ebay. An invention which has made it possible for people to redeem time for other forms of time much more effeciently than ever before.
If you think about it, the cameras probably cost them in the neighborhood of about $10.99 each, and that any returned cameras turn into profit quickly. And the vast majority of customers will return the cameras and pay for processing as designed. Let's face it: cameras made this cheaply are going to be cheap cameras. Hackers aren't going to stock up on them because they're only worth the $10.99 you pay for them.
Say some percentage of the cameras are never returned, and of those that are, some percentage of those are unusable. They're still making their money, they're making lots on the processing, and the hacker-factor can be safely ignored as a blip on the fiscal radar. With any savvy at all, Ritz will know enough to simply ignore the hackers. If some clueless PHB gets his panties in a twist over it and demands lawsuits, then Ritz simply ends up with all the bad PR over a "Big Corp. v. Little Guy" lawsuit, and galvanizes the hackers against them. The hackers won't stop hacking, regardless.
If they truly are concerned about rates of return of the hardware, then we might expect to see cycles of upgraded firmware that "dodge" the published hacks. Or, we might see "rental agreements" at the cash registers. I think that it won't come to this, however. I think the cameras simply aren't good enough value for the money for many customers to keep, even with the hackability factor. And that was probably the business plan to begin with.
John
In the knee-jerk reaction against anything that mentions the DCMA, people seem to have lost sight of the fact that this might be a useful service. Off hand, I can't think of any way to implement this sort of thing cost effectively if the 'unhackability' requirement is imposed.
As the parent post noted, it appears that the presumption that anything that can be hacked constitutes a bad business model seems to rule out many useful and beneficial developments in the future.
The DCMA might have been bought by corrupt businesses from corrupt politicians, but as far as I can tell, it was in turn a reaction to many people's blatant disregard for copyright as demonstrated by Napster et. al.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Despite the cheapo-looking lens assembly (the part it screws into is plastic), the lens itself is a solid, seemingly quality glass-and-metal affair with antiglare coating on both sides. At the proper focal length you can take a surprisingly good picture.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I worked for Ritz Camera, and all I can say is I'm not surprised how cheaply constructed the camera is. I remember seeing one of the machines that would download from that camera, but when it got shipped to us, and the tech came to set it up they couldn't figure out how to connect it to the network, so it got shipped somewhere else. Little known fact is that Ritz only has 2 main labs in the whole US--Atlanta and Minnesota. So, if you are in a Ritz/Wolf store in California and need something done that can't be done in the mini-lab it will get sent to Minnesota. So much for same-day slides! Considering the fortune they spend on FedEx to ship orders from their hundreds of stores to the main labs, no wonder it costs $12 to print some digital photos!
Fuck off and die, you fucking queer-bashing piece of shit! Hets like you make me sick.
It seems shortsighted to dismiss the service this company provides just because the camera can be hacked. Hackable==bad business model, end of story? The world isn't black and white like that.
The world isn't black and white? Someone ought to let
-a
i hate to tell you this, but the *only* place the business plans do survive is the real world. In my imaginary world, these companies...errr...bad things happen.
In Denmark we have something called faith.
If you do not act with good faith, you know you are wrong, you act with bad intent.
The states are so infested by the legal system, that there is no good or bad, no morals, simply who gets the best of it.
The giants use the law to their protection, and the ones who blame them use the law as an excuse for acting with bad intent. Now I really can't feel sorry for freedom fighters of america no more, they act no different than the gluttons in control.
Bottom line, yes its possible to circumvent a product for personal gain, it is also possible to go down the grocery store and bring home without paying. The manufacturer of a product such as a camera has invested much in developing the camera, if people act with bad intent, they may be fucked and employees laid off cause lack of income because someone felt it was alright, cause of the law!
fuck the law you shitheads.
change it, or act as people.
shitheads. THINK.
There's not more than a few pounds (or dollars) worth of bits in these. We're not talking about 6MP 3CCD stuff here, or masses of memory. Furthermore, charging $24 (not $12, RTFA - there's a "processing" fee as well) seems more than a little ridiculous. You can buy a half-way decent digital camera for 50 UKP (***** FOR FUCK'S SAKE, SLASHDOT JANITORS, FIX HTML ENTITIES *****) these days, and getting prints from a memory card or CD-R is about 10 pence per photo.
charge a deposit. Say, $30. That would more or less make them break even on every hacked camera. Not the perfect solution, but not the end of the world.
Low end digital cameras are cheap. How many people will bother to hack a disposable one and be stuck with tape to close it after connecting to a PC and changing the non-rechargable battery when it dies?
There are too many things that are protected unnecessarily and at the cost to the company's profit margin or far more often the end user. Microsoft should just ship xbox with Linux preinstalled. You can't really use it for regular applicarions without a second PC, since you can't use a regular monitor. Sure there are some Linux games, but how many geeks who managed to run them will resist a nice copy of Matrix revolution in fry's?
There are no terms of service at all on the package.
"Camera price does not include processing" - 'price', not rental fee...
When you buy/rent a dvd/cd/book etc you DO have a right to view/listen/read it without any additional license.
No, you can't lump all these things together. In order to play a DVD, you need to crack the encryption. Legally you need a license to do so. The DMCA requires this.
No it's more like selling you a ticket and then informing you that you'll have to view the feature while standing on your head and no there are no refunds but we'll happily exchange your ticket for another showing where you'll also have to stand on your head.
It's not like that at all. The analogy revolves around the fact that mere capability does not translate into a right. The right needs to be bought separately -- in the case of a movie, you need to buy a ticket, in the case of a DVD, you need a license to crack CSS.
Just because we are strong and always capable of viewing and ripping their products no matter what they do, that doesn't mean we have a right to do so -- just like somebody who is stronger than you doesn't have a right to forcefully take your money off of you. This is how the DMCA protects publishers.
I do think the DMCA is too draconian, but at the same time I do see the need for protection. I can't quickly think of a way to change it so that it becomes less draconian while still providing the same kind of security.
if you try and abuse this, this will stop!
I suspect that the camera is paid for after the first or second customer use cycle. 99.9% of the people out there will buy, shoot and return it back to Ritz. Fighting this will only make them look greedy (like RIAA greedy).
Ritz Camera has never had a problem charging more than most other places and getting it.
BTW, the DMCA is a bad law and using it to enforce a business plan that would fail without it is bad for everyone.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
They were reading byte by byte - each byte read required multiple calls on the USB channel. That was before they discovered the commands for doing bulk reads, now it takes less than a second to get a pic off the camera.
The initially posted pictures aren't good - there are two other sites with samples that are better quality. Seems the first guy might have had a cam with misaligned lense or something like that...
It's cheap, but the pics I can pull of mine are definately OK for web use - and the camera is cheap enough that I don't need to worry about it getting lost, stolen or abused at some drunken party...
I'll probably get another one and adjust the focus so it can be used at really close range, to document electronics and such.
This is just a variation of the bait and switch routine. First, you fool a consumer into believing the price is really cheap, then after the consumer is done taking pictures and locked into the product, you hit him with the REAL price.
It doesn't matter how much time it takes you to own certain thing. It's 100% irrelevant. Granted, you work hard, and they pay you in a generic way *dolars* because you produced something of value to other individuals, and that money entitles you to draw something from the global pool of offerings that other people's work create.
In fact, you're exchanging your time for some other guys time (except the lucky bastards that live out of rents). That's the basis of any trade economy with money as the common denominator, and it's certainly not novel. Magically measuring wages in terms of time will not change anything, though it might be a nice visualization, just as measing wages in terms of food/shelter/etc. You could also measure time against freedom. For example, the "personal freedom" ramson imposed on you may be (this depends on the subjects personal opinion) say us$ 200.000. Once you reach that amount, you are free at 5% interest rates. Because you earn about us$900 a month (and can live like a champion in many countries, without having to please any boss or doing anything other than what you want to, not what others want for you).
So, it doesn't matter how you visualize the issue. Time is not a measure of how much harm someone has done to you, "x" money is the metter of for all applicable laws.
unfinished: (adj.)
The democratisation of digital photography is a relatively good thing. This camera puts quality digital photography into the hands of people who couldnt otherwise afford to invest in the hardware up front.
As a business model you could argue its similar to selling cheap shoes - it's ripping the poor who spend more in a given 10 year period on shoes that the wealthy (non fashion victim) who only buys a few pairs in that time.
Nevertheless. This is a business model based on trust. And the public cannot be trusted.
I run a convenience store with flowers in a basket outside - people pick em up and come in to pay for them. People also pick em up and wander off without paying because Im not watching all the time and my 'business model' only works because people obey the law - but more importantly respect my rights to try and make a buck selling them stuff.
I see no difference. Just because its tech doesnt mean its not theft.
(I dont run a shop by the way - for anyone thinking Ive made a drastic lifestyle change! Do come again!)
The world isn't black and white? Someone ought to let /. readers in on that little secret.
I take exception to that comment. I am a regular Slashdot reader, and I am perfectly aware that the world isn't black and white. For example, there's a nasty green bar just above the box where I'm typing this, and some grey buttons underneath it.
Ok if we're gonna have the DMCA anyone who plans to use it to protect their product must warn the customer with a FULL EULA that cant be on a computer screen. The customer must sign it to buy a CD or camera or anything else that can be hacked at a violation of the DMCA and it must clearly state the rules and what will happen if they break them. The product itself should also carry labels - TVs for example often have "Warning, do not open, no user servicable parts inside" and "This device conforms to FCC/some other agency guidlines" and something similar needs to be done for the DMCA eg "Warning, removing the data from this camera is a criminal offence and may carry upto 5 years jail time" etc. Im sure if theres enough rallying you could get a law in for this then everyone will be fully aware of the DMCA and demand that its abolished *COUGH* i mean i just want people to be aware of the law so they know their rights and wont break the law and if that means the cashier hands them a 5 page legal document with "CRIMINAL OFFENCE" in 24pt bold on it every time they buy a CD, DVD, disposable camera, DVD player etc then thats what needs to be done ;)
:P
I just hope that downloading the pictures violates the DMCA or this whole post is OT
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Exactly. I wish I had mod points :(
Damn, even my Nokia phone takes better pictures than that, and they are not all that good.
They do seem to have the same thing in common, fuzzy edges while the center of the picture seems to be fairly sharp.
Anyone know why that is?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.....
Heh. I'm already enjoying this debate.
Anyway, to continue with your analogy, I think the problem is with your expectation of being able to use the DVD/camera/whatever for whatever private purpose you want.
However, it follows that I beleive the DMCA is an improper law because it eliminates that validity of that expectation.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Sure, there's a way to make the business model effective. Shrink-wrap licenses.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
But if the DMCA didn't exist, then there would be no place for copyright at all in this issue. If anything, there might be some protection to the user, as they took the pictures. Fine, it'd be "protecting" this business. But it's still taking a law waaay outside its scope of applicability to protect a business model that wouldn't survive in a free world.
Ritz has an honest business model, and consumers shouldn't download their own pictures from the camera.
How can anyone claim that a company that bases it's business on a law that forbits fair use and how people can use things they buy in their own homes as "Honest" ???
It may be "Legal" but if it's one thing it's not, it's "Honest" !!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I'm not talking to you either, I'm just making sure your idiocy doesn't infect anyone else.
They should be asking for a deposit up front, or similar. I think, that if not this model, then a new model with LCD relying on re-use for profit will surely go town the tubes. Once knowledge of how to modify them gets out, i'm sure people will find many uses for them.
Cheap small LCD displays? DIY VR anybody?
With cameras and ram as well? Theres a whole range of diffrent hacks smart people are sure to think of.
I know I'll probably be kicked off /. for saying this, but I don't see how you can say hacking this is not immoral, unethical, harmful or wrong. They are selling this camera at below wholesale cost so they can make their money on the back end, in the prints. As I understand it from when I first read about these cameras (this may have changed), they even give you a CD-r with your pictures on it when you get the camera "developed", so you can even print more copies without going through them. I think their approach is the most consumer-friendly yet- certainly more consumer friendly then a PhotoCD, where you pay an outrageous price for low-res files.
By hacking this camera, you're not only hurting Ritz by negating their ROI, but also hurting other digital camera manufacturers by making a $10.99 digital camera do what a $199 one will.
Now obviously everyone isn't going to hack the camera's, and hopefully enough non-geeks will buy and use them as intended to make it a viable product. But consider this- would it also be moral, ethical, harmless and right if someone bought 100 if these, hacked them, and sold them for say $50 each on the street or on eBay?
This is exactly the type of thing that the ludite politicians will use to keep the DMCA in place, and to introduce "Super DMCA" legislation in the future. Would you consider that harmless as well?
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
But would you buy a CD-ROM if you didn't have a CD player? You're buying a DVD-ROM without a player for that DVD. (Sure you can play one type of DVD's on your system but then the expectation that you can play other types of DVD's is just a matter of semantics and ignorance.)
Actually a great example is if you bought a CD-ROM with Quake III on it and tried to play it on your home stereo. No can do.
Anyway, despite your missed argument I like the concept of time as a commodity. Sounds like you might have read Atlas Shrugged which introduces similar concepts (although the moral concept it draws is flawed).
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
I read the article and hoped to find some insightful comments regarding hacking hardware and cameras. Instead almost every post is about DMCA and legal ramifications of hacking the camera.
Has Slashdot changed direction without me noticing? Is it now for lawyer wannabes instead of hackers?
I have a thrid reason for the hack: I wanted to verify that whether it is possible to read the previous owner's pictures from the camera. I hope they did the erase correctly, but considering that this camera's firmware was originally written for a camera where the owner didn't need to return the camera after developing, they may be doing a simple table-of-contents erase rather than actually erasing all the pictures.
Summary: I did it mostly for fun, but also to make sure joe's pictures are kept private.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Excuse me, but THEY decided to use this hardware that could be hacked easily. Don't feel sorry for someone just because they made a bad business plan. Do you think people felt sorry for MS when Bob flopped? Do you think people felt sorry Apple when the Apple /// flopped?
I would say that xbox hacking = good, camera hacking = bad. My reasoning is that the camera hacking basically takes advantage of a company attempting a unique business model, and destroys its only income source. The Xbox hacking is very unlikely to change the number of games someone buys (the main xbox income), so Microsoft isnt really getting taken advantage of.
Maybe I missed something, but does it say if the camera can be "reset" to empty once the pictures are downloaded?
I have 3 cameras (35mm SLR, 6MP Digital SLR, 3.3MP Digital P&S). This 1.3MP digital P&S camera with a fixed focal lengh/fixed focus lens competes with none of mine for image quality.
My friend (also a photo enthusiast and major geek) and I went to Ritz and bought one of these Dakota digitals (I had to drop off a roll of film). About an hour later, he had the software and made a connector out of a ruler, some tape, and a spare USB cable. He was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the images after downloading them into his computer. 1280x960 JPEGs aren't bad, and you can get 25 of them on the built-in 16MB flash memory.
When we went back to Ritz later (among other reasons, to pick up the prints), my friend wanted to buy a good 10 or 20 of these cameras. The guy behind the counter didn't flinch. He was very helpful. "There's more of them over in that corner." He also told us that they have a new model coming in a month with an LCD screen to preview the image for $18. My friend decided to wait for the ones with the LCD screen.
I like the Ritz camera store. They do a good job with prints, and some of the sales staff are very helpful and knowledgeable. Mind you, this was one of their bigger stores (a Cameras West) in the area. Some of the smaller stores have complete airheads behind the counters.
Anyway, just like the XBox hacking, the cheap DC hacking is not likely to hurt the revenue for these devices. My friend hacked his XBox, too... It has all of the NES games and Quake on the HD.
One interesting tidbit: Ritz charges about $11 for the developing and printing of a roll of 35mm film with 24/25 exposures. If you consider that by not returning the camera, they don't have to process your photos, it seems like a winning proposition. The camera certainly felt like its COGS (cost of goods sold) was $2-$5, so they should still be able to make money on it.
Great pictures are made by the vision of the photographer, and the processing skills of the developer, not the camera.
Excuse me, but my main point was that it is not ethical, moral or harmless as the post I was replying to stated. And my secondary point was this us just more fuel for the Pro-DMCA crowd.
Your argument is tantamount to saying that it's ok to rape a girl if she's "dressed like she wants it". Poor judgement or decisions may be a factor in becoming vicitimized, but it doesn't mean it's ok to be the victimizer.
At least with "filesharing", some might claim that it's ok to steal copyrighted music because the recording industry has been ripping everyone off for so long and their product is overpriced and not available in a consumer-friendly format (you have to buy 8+ crap songs to get the 1 or 2 you want on the CD). But Ritz actually stepped up and came out with a very consumer-friendly product. As cheap as a disposable film camera, as cheap or cheaper to "process" and get prints, and you get an enhanced end result- prints and a CD for a fraction of what prints and a "PhotoCD" would cost you with a disposable camera. My guess is they made it "easily hacked" because 1) They knew no matter what they did it would get hacked eventually by someone and 2) The harder they made it to hack, the more expensive it would be, and they're already selling it at a loss.
I mean, come on, they aren't even screwing people on developing like the printer companies do with ink cartridges (where ink is more expensive than Dom Perignon).
So yes, I do feel sorry for them, although that was totally not the point of my post. And I certainly don't think that offering a much better product at a much better cost is a bad business plan. Do all business plans have to include a "how to we keep from getting f*cked by geeks" section? Maybe theirs did- maybe they thought if they offered enough value, the hackers would leave them alone and go after people they hate like MS and the RIAA. This certainly isn't a case of championing the rights of the consumer - this will hurt consumers if it becomes widespread. Now that's something to feel bad about.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
I know I'll probably be kicked off /. for saying this, but I don't see how you can say hacking this is not immoral, unethical, harmful or wrong. They are selling this camera at below wholesale cost so they can make their money on the back end, in the prints.
Oh fuck off (okay, that's out of me). Ritz chose to take on the risk of this business model. If it fails, then they need to learn and evolve. There is no moral dillema in buying something and then playing with it to one's heart's content. Whether Ritz uses the DMCA is a measure of their good will in the marketplace. Pissing off customers is like walking through an unmapped mine field in the business world. Only the regulated monopolies (phones, power, post office) get away from this without real consequence.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Wait...why is it my job to ensure that someone's business model succeeds? I bought the thing--let me tinker with it.
Thank you. It's not really in our interest at all to help these people succeed unless they have a valuable product and a viable business model. If I buy a car and tinker with the engine no one will complain, that's a common thing. Now lets say I come across a way to run my car on banana peels and cat hair. Let's pretend this has a side effect of causing the car to run well and last for 3 million miles. Now, I've just put many many oil workers, gas station attendants and car-assembly line workers out of a job.
I'm I evil? Is what I did wrong? I don't think so. The enviroment has changed, either adapt or become food for someone else.
As far as this camera goes, it's an ease of use issue. If it's easier to send the camera in to get pics developed than it is to hack it then they might make it. However, I don't think this business would make it anyway. Why buy a disposable digital camera that makes crappy pics when I could either buy a film disposable that makes decent pics or a nice digital that I wouldn't have to send anywhere (or hack) to get great quality pics from?
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
The more often I hear this argument, the shallower it sounds.
No, you are just getting more jaded.
The law serves to protect businesses from harm that occurs independently of their business models (theft, corruption, racketerring, etc.). The law should not ever protect the business models themselves. Do you really want to live in a government-controlled marketplace, where the only business models are those dreamed up by politicians, the same people who lovingly invented "pork"?
When the government gets involved with something, it is nearly always inevitable that something goes rotten. It is unnatural, and it drives away people who know a bad thing when they see it. This is why it is so common to see people in the government who are often very cynical yet conditioned to being a cog in the regulatory machine.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Is it therefore a shaky, ambiguous, and morally reprehensible law?
Yes, because the artists don't need "protection." If they can't make a living off of grants, commissions, and sales, then they need to go do something else. Why do you think they are so deserving of our charity? Why are they "better" than anyone else? They are not.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The cheap ones use LCD technology, while the expensive ones use CCD. LCD can be manufactured on conventional chip lines which makes them very cheap, like a buck these days. WebCams, CellPhoneCams, ToyCams, etc. use the cheap LCD. They dont have the contrast and color evenness of CCD. CCD is used in professional cameras, broadcast TV, cinematic TV, telescopes, etc.
Every law is "idiotic" to those who don't like what it means.
We aren't criticizing this law because we simply don't like it. It is a law that creates fear where there is no reason for it. It stifles the free market in arbitrary ways. It is simply a bad law. This really is not ambiguous.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
depriving the manufacturer of an expected revenue stream.
Since when was any company entitled to revenue? You assume way too much. Microsoft should be grateful for every XBox sold. Ritz should be grateful for every camera sold. If they aren't, then fuck'em.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Give me a break! If Ritz wants to sell the camera below cost that's their problem. They could solve the matter easily by simply making the processing fee higher, the camera free, and requiring a sensible (but not prohibitive) deposit to ensure return of the hardware. Asking for security deposits is hardly novel.
Similar question using your reasoning: is it immoral for me to buy a Sony Playstation (priced below cost) and only buy used games? If I do that, Sony loses money on the deck and never makes another penny off me when I go to buy games. Does that make me a crook?
If you were paying any attention you'd notice that this is both a hardware and software hack and is hardly likely to have much impact on the larger digitial camera market... or even on Ritz' service itself (which IMHO sounds like a horrible deal, considering that for $25 I can get 35mm film scanned onto high quality Photo CD, then I get the negatives and a CD).
I've processed bw/ and color film. Always in complete darkness. When you take a picture of something red it will show up on the negative.
Color print making complete darkness.
BW print making.. Red light!
I'll ignore your opening comment in hopes that despite it, we may be able to have an intelligent discussion, which is sort of the point here, isn't it?
/.'ers to come to my defense when Ritz sues me.
I totally agree that if you buy a commercial product at a fair price, you have the right to do whatever you want with it because you paid for the hardware and own it.
However, the business model of providing a product at cost or a loss in order to sell consumables or service is (IMHO) vital to getting technology and higher ticket items into the hands of those who cannot afford it and don't have the credit to finance it. Now inkjets are a bad example because (again, IMO) they try to make too much on the cartridges. But what about broadband? How far would we be if ISP's hadn't ponied up the $$$ for the cable and dsl modems? It was easy for them, because of the "last mile" monopolies, there was little chance the hardware would be used for any other service or purpose. But Ritz tried to bring this business model into an area where consumers are paying more than they need to for film and developing, in many cases because they can't afford a digital camera and printer.
Now please, spare me the BS about pissing off customers. A "customer" that pays $10.99 for a $100 to $200 camera and then doesn't bring their processing business to Ritz is a customer they can do without.
I can't help but laugh at all the people that are trying to apply the pro-p2p and pro-XBox hacking arguements to this one. P2P can be used to share legal downloads (free samples from indie bands) and even sample music you might buy once you decide you like it. An XBox is sold for a respectable profit, what you do with it is your business. The only arguement I hear (and keep hearing) for hacking these camera's being ok is that it's Ritz fault for making them hackable. I'm sorry, but that's the lamest excuse I've heard in a long time. Just because some states have drive-through liquor stores that will sell you a pint of whiskey, can of coke and cup of ice doesn't mean it's not your fault if you mix your drink in the parking lot and then run over a kid on a bike.
And I didn't say anything about Ritz using the DMCA- I doubt they will, unless someone starts hacking and selling the camera's in quantity (I suppose that's ok, too?). What I said was that this is a perfect argument for the a''hole lobbyists from the RIAA and MPAA to convince politicians that don't know any better that we need the DMCA and even stricter "Super-DMCA" laws. And that would hurt us all.
A few geeks hacking these cameras isn't a big deal- I'd probably do it myself if I had the time and didn't already have a decent camera. My fear is that hacked cameras are going to start showing up on ebay, and then Ritz will no longer offer them, nor will anyone else. Then a huge population of people who don't have a computer and a photo printer, or who can't afford a digital camera will loose this option for cheaper, faster and more flexible photography.
But hey, screw them, we'll still have our digital cameras because we can afford them. Let them use $15 disposable cameras, pay $8 for developing and another $12 for a PhotoCD, and fill our landfills with plastic cameras. And screw Ritz for thinking that if they provided enough value, people wouldn't bother them too much. And screw ethics, I'm going to change my eBay ID to 20dollarDIGIcam so I can profit from other's work and innovation. Perfectly moral, and I can count on the majority of
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Hey, I'm right there with you on the DMCA being a bad law (right along with PATRIOT, PATRIOT II, and a lot of other horse manure generated by the asses in WashDC). Get the law changed? Not me - I won't even have representation when the Emperor DeLay and Monkeyboy Perry's little redistricting sham completes.
I'm as frustrated as you are, probably, and my brain was shutting down, so I may have been overly harsh.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
However, the business model of providing a product at cost or a loss in order to sell consumables or service is (IMHO) vital to getting technology and higher ticket items into the hands of those who cannot afford it and don't have the credit to finance it.
This is a risky business model. All Ritz can hope for is that enough people don't hack the thing to make it profitable for them. This is the full extent of what their expectations can be.
A "customer" that pays $10.99 for a $100 to $200
Where does the $100 and $200 numbers come from? Do you have an inside peek at their accounting records? All the customer should take for granted is "Gee, a digital camera for ten bucks! Sounds like a great deal." From that point on, Ritz is gambling that that customer will also use their development service (essentially, the camera could be considered advertising for Ritz' other services).
it's Ritz fault for making them hackable. I'm sorry, but that's the lamest excuse I've heard in a long time.
It isn't lame at all. If Ritz wanted the cameras to be truly reusable and recycled through their business, they would have stuck an inexpensive encryption processor in the camera, requiring their developer services to get the pictures back. It is, in fact, a sign that Ritz didn't really put much thought into these cameras. It's just like Adobe's cereal-box-toy encryption on e-books. These companies deserve no legal protection whatsoever for their own naivte (only a child-hugging Democrat or a corrupt Republican would argue otherwise).
convince politicians that don't know any better that we need the DMCA and even stricter "Super-DMCA" laws.
If those politicians fall for this, then they are truly corrupt, espeically considering the principles of a free country and the Bill of Rights, and they should be voted out of office ASAP.
Ritz will no longer offer them, nor will anyone else.
My bet is that someone smarter than Ritz will simply do it right the next time around. Of course, with crap like the DMCA, they simply don't have to, causing stagnation in the marketplace.
And screw Ritz for thinking that if they provided enough value, people wouldn't bother them too much.
We don't know yet if Ritz is providing value. Remember, this whole Slashdot thread is based on speculation, anyway. People will buy these cameras and use Ritz' services, if, indeed, they do provide a valuable service, hackers or no.
Also, in business, people don't get an "A for effort" like weak teachers give out in school. If there aren't results, the business model fails, no ifs ands or buts. The next attempt might finally squeak out a D-, which is the start of getting the business model worked out.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Hey, I was right! Intelligent Conversation! :-)
Good points, although I still don't agree completely. You're probabaly right about not enough thought going into it- they probably were rushing to market to be the first, which isn't such a bad thing, if they learn from their mistakes and tweak the product.
The $100 to $200 figure was what I suspect you'd have to pay to get the equivelent of a hacked Ritz camera. Probably closer to the $100 figure, since although the resolution is more in the $200 range, I seem to remember that it doesn't have a display. I was trying to estimate it's "street" value if it were intended to be used as a standard digital camera.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I still maintain that it is not moral or ethical. I will concede the net result may be harmless, if the benefits of showing them the error of their ways offsets the losses they experience from the cameras that get hacked without generating any revenue to offset the cost.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
The DMCA is vague on that point. It says that it is illegal to circumvent the technological measures used to protect a copyrighted work. It seems to be assumed that you do not own the copyright to the work in question, but this isn't explicitly stated from what I remember.
So if Ritz goes any circumvents a technological measure to protect a copywrited work (their OWN technological measure, but a technological measure regardless), to download YOUR copywrited photos, can you sue them for DMCA violations?
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
Blockquoth the poster:
And the response correctly noted your error in the first point. As for the second point, this "pro-DMCA crowd" would either be making the same mistake you have, or cynically gaming the legal system for profit. The relative likelihoods of either possibility is left as an exercise for the student.
Exsqueeze me? Baking powder? Nobody's assaulting any humans here. The correct analogy is perhaps that of a hooker who discovers that having hard-core sex in a downtown doorway results in a crowd who satisfies themselves without paying her. Time to change MO, or accept the losses.
The camera is a salable artifact, offered to the market for what value it may have. Finding value in the product in a way that the vendor didn't foresee is absolutely ethical, moral, and harmless. Indeed, trumping up the DMCA to prevent this kind of behavior is the harmful alternative, since it would unfairly distort the marketplace to limit the market's behavior to the vendor's imagination. Hmmm, the 'merger of state and corporate power'
No, it was the subtext and premise, and your pity is misplaced.
Erm, since Day One, when its "f*cked by our own oversights" as in this case. Should it be illegal to develop your own snapshots instead of taking them to the Jiffy Foto where you bought the film? Puh-leeze.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Why? By the long-established ethics of the marketplace, Ritz has no problem (ethical or logistical) in saying 'Caveat emptor', leaving it up to the marketplace to accept the value they offer (even if they're getting the parts at 3 cents a ton and pulling down a 99% margin). What responsibility does the buyer have to their business model? To pay the going price, or negotiate a different one. Nobody is defrauding or stealing from Ritz. The marketplace has no duty to a particular vision of the future; this is the fundamental problem with the DMCA in the first place. I don't see that you've demonstrated any real ethical/moral problem here - your assumptions about the marketplace relationship are flawed.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
The law serves to protect businesses from harm that occurs independently of their business models (theft, corruption, racketerring, etc.).
The question is whether copying a DVD constitutes theft -- i.e. whether digital works need copy protection. The law seems to think so, and I tend to agree.
The question is whether copying a DVD constitutes theft...
I thought "fair use" covers this.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I thought "fair use" covers this.
I don't know that it does.
Mass infringers ignore the DMCA, so it doesn't affect nearly all of the duplication for profit. It doesn't protect the artists/programmers/etc. whose copyrights are violated - that's a separate issue, and the money from those violations probably will never see the bank account of an actual artist or programmer in this universe. The DMCA is present to control access to media - to circumvent other laws (copyright laws) which allow works to enter the domain after a period of time once the author has been permitted to sell them for a limited period of time. The DMCA forces users not to circumvent access control measures which can then be installed. indefinitely. Once access control can be made permanent, the bargain between the people and the author that made copyright worthwhile to the public is negated. Access to works can be denied to many groups who are supposed to benefit from its use, such as poor people or libraries who may not have the money to pay for continuous rental of a work that by all rights (and by copyright law) should have defaulted to public domain. It allows the copyright business model to be replaced by one in which information is hoarded by those with money and restricted from those without. If law is supposed to protect the weak from the strong, the DMCA is contrary to this conception, by allowing the strong (the wealthy, information holders) to prey on the weak (the poor, the people) by taking away public domain and restricting their access to information paid for by them (through the gov't and the Copyright Office and the bargain on which copyright is based).
The DMCA protects no one who isn't already protected by copyright law - it however allows people (artists/programmers and their respective corporations) to rewrite copyright law without the consent of the people. The effort (and intent, since its means don't protect anyone not already protected by copyright) is to guarantee permanent copyright, thus rewriting copyright law in addition to the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution - by forbidding the dissemination of means, the DMCA is a significant abridgment of free speech. The DMCA destroys rights that benefit all citizens while giving legal rights previously exercised only by Congress to a few (whose output was already protected by other laws). I see no reason to support a law which takes away rights given me by Congress and gives them to private individuals, and in the bargain takes away rights deemed necessary to the existence of a free nation, all to benefit people whose output is already protected by law. This seems more than merely "inconvenient".
I take exception to that comment. I am a regular Slashdot reader, and I am perfectly aware that the world isn't black and white. For example, there's a nasty green bar just above the box where I'm typing this, and some grey buttons underneath it.
You mean you're not using Lynx?
-a
The concept of Hack-everything-hackable sometimes is a bit...sad?
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
> In Denmark we have something called faith.
Yeah, and that is such a quantitative value. The makers of DeCSS (may have) made it in good faith with simply the intent to watch movies in Linux. Then people use that in bad faith to rip movies. Who is at fault and how do you prove it? Take your own advice and THINK, troll. Not everything is black and white.
Searched on Google for ritz disposable digital camera 10.99 and found two matches. One is the previous /. story on this subject, and the other is in Danish (http://foto.diip.ee/archives/001285.html).
http://ritzcamera.com/ appears to have no information on the subject.
I could go down seven floors and ask at the Ritz store in this building, but what would be the point?
--
E_NOSIG
You guys keep saying that selling hardware at a loss is a bad business model, but it's really not...
Take a look at cellphones. That's hardware you bought at a loss to the company in exchange for the revenue from future service.
XBox and most other consoles... hardware at a loss, money in games. Most people buy enough games to make up for those that only buy a few.
WalMart selling certain items at a loss to get you into their store to buy more stuff.
CueCat... free hardware, but it theoretically locked you into their service.
iOpener... perfect for the home grandma, and she doesn't have to buy a big expensive computer up front. At $99 they were selling well despite the hacker interest... and people liked them and the service they provided.
All good ideas, and decent hardware... some of them just failed to adequately secure their revenue stream. Doesn't mean the idea, or even the numbers weren't good... if everything went according to plan.
I still think there's a market for returnable digital cameras, especially as the costs for digital prints get cheaper than developing film. I hope the idea continues and the cameras get better and better. In the meantime, thanks for the free CCD (or is it CMOS sensor?)
--D
No doubt you also think it's consumer-friendly to advertise a printer based on its low initial cost in the hopes that the consumer won't realize till later that the cost of the printer itself will be insignificant compared to the cost of keeping it fed with ink.
The rest of us don't see it that way. To the rest of us it looks an awful lot like what they're trying to do, in both cases, is to make the task of comparison-shopping more difficult and, in doing so, to fool the consumer into spending more money than they intended. In many cases the consumers who buy the "cheap" printers would have been better off with a different printer; but thanks in part to the "consumer-friendly" pricing, they miscalculated.
So Ritz tried to pull the same trick, and failed. Can you see why we don't feel so sympathetic?
Companies could avoid this sort of problem by simply basing their selling prices on the real cost of their merchandise instead of trying to play these elaborate games to deceive consumers.
--Bruce Fields
Whose version of "fair price" are you using? I agree that the price is fair, but that's not the point. Say I bought the camera and did this hack, I have exchanged my money for a product. That's it! I did not sign a contract with Ritz or otherwise agree to use it in the way they want me to. Their expectations of my behavior after the sale are wholly irrelevant. It's mine now, free and clear, and I can do with it as I wish. Nothing unethical, immoral or wrong about that.
Say they only built 100 cameras, expecting to make their money back on repeat photoprocessing on those cameras. I am teaching a class on designing embedded systems and I decided to purchase all 100 of these cameras as lab equipment for my 800 students. Now I have "deprived" Ritz of any addditional income they expected, but I have enriched > 100 young minds on an important aspect of technology.
Now, taking your approach, we have to decide which of these is more important. Depending on your value system, the question can become quite complicated. But considered as the simple economic transaction that it is, the answer is obvious: product was sold on the open market for the price asked. No further questioning is needed.
As far as buying them, adding value, and re-selling them at a higher price, of course that's OK. Ruf Porsche (if they're still in business) buys showroom stock cars, mods the living hell out of them and resells them for even more ridiculous prices than the original. Should Porsche whine that they're not getting enough of that money?
Should my Toyota dealer complain that I change my own oil and do my own repairs using aftermarket parts, thus depriving them of that revenue (repairs/parts are where dealerships are really making money these days)?
Get back to reality already! The reality is that any sensible company selling a loss leader like this estimates that a negligible percentage of customers will hack it. Honestly, I doubt that worldwide, 100 people will hack the camera, out of thousands sold. Now a stupid company would be one that sold a 6Mpixel camera for $10.99 with a similar business model, because at that point, the value of hacking becomes great enough that a few people will buy hundreds/thousands of the cameras to hack and resell for $150 or so.
And I'd be one of them!
I would qualify that by saying it's a risky business model if you have no control of post-sale behavior. If your customer signs a contract that says he must buy $xxx of consumables it can be quite profitable. The company I work for does just that. We often give away equipment or sell it at cost along with a contract for supplies that makes us tons of money... I guess it's like giving away the software, but charging for support. Where did I hear that before?
Actually, in another part of this thread I compared it to inkjets, mentioning how at least with the Ritz camera, they're not trying to rip people off like printer companies do with ink that costs more than Dom Perignon.
I also mentioned that the cost of the camera and developing is in line with disposable film cameras, with which you don't get a CD so you can print as many as you want on your own printer. That's the only reason I'm defending Ritz at all- they seem to be trying to offer greater value for the same price. And this model (as well as with injets, even considering the overpriced ink) allows people who otherwise couldn't afford the technology to participate.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
I really don't think it's complicated at all. Forget about contracts, EULAs and the law - Ritz is selling you that camera with the understanding that it's $10.99 because you will bring it to them for processing. Otherwise, you couldn't touch that camera for under $50, anywhere, period.
My point is hacking the camera is taking advantage of them, and you can't use the excuse that they're price-fixing CD's or charging more for ink than Dom Perignon. They charge comparable fees for processing, and provide the added value of a CD so you don't have to come back to them for reprints or enlargements. That's all I'm saying. That and it seems that everyone here is so wrapped up in the DMCA and getting screwed by the RIAA and Lexmark that all companies are bad, and screwing them is good. I just disagree, if only in this case.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
So? We take advantage of things all the time. It's called being a wise customer. I only buy certain things when on sale, cause at full price it's not worth it. This is no different.
Consumer PhotoCD (aka "Master PhotoCD") is 3072x2048. That's hardly "low-res".
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Not at all. There are plenty of CDs on the market which aren't region coded and/or aren't CSS-encrypted.
Perhaps if DVD manufacturers put warnings on their DVDs saying "CSS encrypted, may not play on your computer" you'd have an argument there.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Basically, I could go buy a $12 Ritz disposable digital camera, take 25 pics, spend some time reading various web pages, go buy a USB cable, buy a USB connector, solder the connector onto the camera, download and install some software some guy wrote, connect my el cheapo digicam to the USB cable, copy my crappy pics to my PC, print them on that crappy printer my company was throwing away but I was able to solder wires to the busted connector and jury-rig the ink cart so I could refill it with my el cheapo toner of old cigarette ashes and stale coffee, and I'm done? And then I can show all my crappy pics to my friends, and have them laugh at me and call me a dumb cheapskate for wasting my time trying to get unlimited use out of something that is so obvously not worth the effort? Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to simply buy the Target special I saw for $25 the other day (which is probably less money than you would spend trying to "crack" Ritz's camera, even assuming your time is free because you have no marketable skills)? Which comes with a cable and everything? Gee, I see why people are wondering if Ritz is gonna come after them. It is so clear that Ritz stands to lose tons of cash once people realize they can take crappy pics with a crappy camera without having to shell out $12 dollars every time they feel like taking crappy pics. I mean, everyone knows the whole world is gonna jump on this, the potential for taking crappy pics is just too good for anyone to pass up. I predict Ritz will be driven out of business by this before it even hits the courts.
Ok, I won't use them all to take picture and have them processed at RITZ.. well, there's not even a Ritz camera in Quebec city. Anyway, I would like to build something interesting from a case of those camera so if anyone could help me figure out where/how to buy one, I would be pretty happy =)
Thank you,
PIBM
What I find tragic is the loss of morality in almost everything to do with money, people put the worth of things, tickets and even time much higher than is sustainable.
I'm getting sick of greedy artists, if they don't enjoy creating art then why do it? money? ha then it is not art and they have no right calling it so. it is a product, one which is over priced.
then you get all the greedy lazy people who don't have to do anything at all to get money, by logic that _is_ stealing and blaintly points out that some one is getting used. but thats just logic, very hard to apply to reality.
I'm reminded of Douglad Adams Removing 1/3 of a planets population, all the middle men. sounds about right to me.
I tried to track one down today. The local version (Kit's) said that they don't carry it. I found the following link: msn newsgroup which gives the item number so you can order it from ritzcamera.com. Unfortunately, I called tonight and the salesperson told me that they stopped selling them. All good things must come to an end. Seeing the example photos, I'm not sure if this camera qualifies as a "good thing".....But it woulda been cheep.
Good. People bought the camera, and so they have the right to take it apart and and use the parts for their own purposes. Ritz can change business model or price if they don't like this.
However, the business model of providing a product at cost or a loss in order to sell consumables or service is (IMHO) vital to getting technology and higher ticket items into the hands of those who cannot afford it and don't have the credit to finance it. Now inkjets are a bad example because (again, IMO) they try to make too much on the cartridges. But what about broadband? How far would we be if ISP's hadn't ponied up the $$$ for the cable and dsl modems? It was easy for them, because of the "last mile" monopolies, there was little chance the hardware would be used for any other service or purpose. But Ritz tried to bring this business model into an area where consumers are paying more than they need to for film and developing, in many cases because they can't afford a digital camera and printer.
Wrong. Ritz sold the camera. If they did so at a loss it is their problem and they don't need "protection". It is their problem if they go bankrupt for doing something stupid when the masses unexpectedly take advantage of it. Assuming that everybody is too dumb for such a hack is stupid business - it only takes one to make a crack for everybody.
They could have a safe business model by renting out those cameras instead. They could forbid modifications to the camera they own, and withdraw it if used in "inappropriate" ways. (ADSL providers where I live use this model - they don't sell ADSL modems, they merely let you use them for a fee.)
There is no ethic problem whatsoever, even if someone starts a shop doing mass-modification on such cameras. Sure, Ritz will have to stop selling them for $10 then. They can still rent them out for $10 - essentially the same business model but now they retain ownership.
DeCSS don't make illegal copies of other people's work - people do.
If you ask me, any disposable camera is indecent.
Besides my digital camera cost only $200 last year, and since then I've never paid for film or developing, but I've had great fun messing with the photos on my own computer. Now why the hell would you pay someone else for access to your own work, even if they gave you the camera for free? It's stupid.
I hope no other companies try to enter the same market - it would mean that they have no respect for the intelligence or ownership rights of their potential customers.
That too is stupid, and inevitably doomed.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
> DeCSS don't make illegal copies of other people's work - people do.
Absolutely, I agree with that. Unfortunately, however, it seems that many lawmakers (and almost all corporations) intentionally look past the legitimate uses and assume everyone using it is a criminal.
> it seems that many lawmakers (and almost all corporations)
I apologize for my automatic anti-corporate statement. Of course probably the only corporations who care about this are movie studios & producers, etc, and "almost all corporations" don't give half a shit what DeCSS is at all.
No longer on sale?
/.
I bought two at a Wolf location. The afternoon after this article reached
The display still had 15+ remaining when I left, so I didn't feel too guilt about being a pig.
And only a little guilty about taking advantage of a good idea, done in a stupid way.
Well, really I didn't feel guilty at all, it took 20 minutes to get one of the 3 sales people to ring me up at the check out and there were only 2 customers in the store.
After the wait the clerk made it a point to tell me that the camera had to brought back to that store to get the pictures out, I didn't bother to inform her otherwise.
I've seen lots of comments about how 'cheesey' the cameras supposedly are. I'd have to disagree, they are well balanced, have a well thought out 'swoosh' ridge for a finger grip, and as important as anything else the have some substantial weight that makes it easier to hold steady.
Hi,
Does anyone know of a place in Canada that is selling these cameras? Or how about an American company willing to ship to Canada?
Thanks.
Alan.
encription is not manditory, if the dvd-r I made of home movies does not get encripted (which it's not) then it will still play on my home theatre dvd player. (as same with video tapes) Think of it as putting a password on a zip file. you don't NEED to, but you can.
You said By this you are implying that if I buy one of these cameras but before using it I receive a better camera as a gift or prize I am obligated to use the Ritz and return it for processing.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. And they should use the DMCA to sue you if you don't. And if you get hit by a bus before you get a chance to use it, they should be paid from your estate.
Seriously, someone replied to my posts with a very good solution- they should rent the camera for free with a small deposit instead of selling it. Then their rights would be clear. You have to remember that so far Ritz hasn't said anything (to my knowledge) about this. They may be fine with hacking the camera. I've changed my opinion through this discussion as will. Since they chose to sell it instead of renting or loaning it, then that's their problem, I guess.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
"And let's not even think about the violations if they keep a copy of the file."
This could be a problem. The Photo Imaging Controller system Ritz uses with these cameras keeps orders on the hard drive for up to three days by default.
+++ATH0