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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As silly as the law is let's hope that it's repealed/reformed and soon.
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.
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Anyone?
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Wait, do I see one in the back? Yes? Care to explain yourself?
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Ahh. Well, we have one guy in the back who was in a coma. Anyone else not see this coming?
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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.
Now you won't have to get all embarrassed taking your home-made digital pr0n pictures back to the store for processing!
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
That would make the hackers, Ritz Crackers.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
is available here.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.