Slashdot Mirror
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As silly as the law is let's hope that it's repealed/reformed and soon.
That would truely be funny, using the DMCA to stop you from transfering pictures that you have taken and hence own the copyright to.
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?
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!
[
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
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.
. . .
. . .
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.
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)
Now you won't have to get all embarrassed taking your home-made digital pr0n pictures back to the store for processing!
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
That's not a Ritz hacker, that's a Ritz Cracker!
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
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
is available here.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Then again ? When you pay rhe deposit if it gets stolen no one loses out. Since you bought the camera
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
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 ?)
Moreover, if you "rent" something and don't stipulate a return-by date or charge a fee for extended possession, it most likely would fail to meet any legal condition for "rental". The idiocy of a company can rarely be mitigated by the idiocy of law.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Do you sign a rental agreement? Is there any paperwork in evidence to suggest that the transaction is anything other than a normal retail sale?
No? Then it's not stealing. It using your lawfully purchased property in the manner you see fit.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
- 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.
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
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
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?
Found this on a messageboard... Camera autopsy / dissection
I had a sucky sig.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Huh? No need to open the case at all - for reading out pics I used the connector from an old Palm III dock and it works nicely. The batteries are standard AAs, exchangeable by a normal battery hatch - no need to unscrew anything.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.....
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
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?
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 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.
There could still be ethical concerns. Ethics can require things the law does not (and vice versa). If you hack the camera, you're getting more than you paid for, more than the seller intended to give you, for less than it cost him to provide it.
It is logically coherent to think this is wrong even if legal. For instance, medieval philosophers like Thomas Aquinas had a "fair price" doctrine on which it is unethical to charge more for something than it is honestly worth. Moreover, it did not matter for the doctrine whether the buyer knew this. (Think of a case where a starving person is sold a loaf of bread, from the only food producer in town, for $100. He knows he's being cheated, but he's still being cheated.) There is something inherently plausible to the fair price doctrine, though it is not something that we would really want to enshrine in law except maybe in extreme cases (not everything unethical should be illegal!), e.g., because the law is just too crude an instrument for such cases.
The fair price doctrine has some interesting consequences. For instance, it might mean that Lexmark's and Ritz's business plans are unethical, because they are charging more for something (cartridges or processing) than is fair.
However, one might reasonably think that there is a converse to the doctrine. If it is wrong to sell something for more than it is worth, it is wrong to buy something for less than it is worth--unless of course the discount is a GIFT of the seller. (There is nothing wrong with buying a loaf of bread for $1 and giving a voluntary gift of $99 to the baker.) So it might be wrong to hack the camera.
Of course the fair price doctrine is highly controversial. However, it seems to be logically coherent at least. And if it or something like it is true, it might be that such hacking is wrong even if legal.
(Note, too, that one does not have a moral right to exploit someone's honest mistake. Suppose that a video store instead of making you sign a rental agreement by mistake hands you a sale agreement--which you don't bother reading. You come home with your $3 DVD, look at the agreement and discover that it seems you are legally the owner (assume this is so--IANAL). You still have a moral right to return the DVD. Of course in the case of Ritz, the mistake is of a different order, but still similar considerations might apply.)