CVS Disposable Camcorder Hacked

ptorrone writes "We've been watching this on MAKE closely- and the king of the one-time digital camera hacks/analysis finally got his hands on a CVS Camcorder on Friday, the 24th via someone shipping him one FedEx. Within 18 hours, he had slurped the flash memory and has the unencrypted, XVID codec, 320x240, 30fps movies stored in the camera on his computer."

Comments

oh yeah!

[bigwavejas]

Getting a used Pure Digital / CVS Disposable Camcorder shipped to you... $15 dollars
Taking the day off work to be at home for the Fed-ex delivery... $140 dollars
Spending 18 hours hacking the camera for 30secs of video... Priceless!!!

The question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...do they completely reformat the flash every time one of these is returning for processing. This could become a strange form of voyeurism.

Re:Oh, the humanity.

[morcheeba]

I figured someone would criticize me. You're seeing low-res version for slashdot - sorry, bandwidth trumps aesthetics today. Tomorrow the pretty pictures will go back up.

Check the file sizes:
-rw-r--r-- 38000 Jun 24 21:09 PICT0001-info.png
-rw-r--r-- 13343 Jun 25 12:36 PICT0001-info.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 10958 Jun 25 12:38 camcorder-icon-full.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 2334 Jun 25 12:38 camcorder-icon.jpg
-rw-r----- 4547 Jun 25 13:02 index.html
-rw-r----- 23960 Jun 25 13:25 flash.html

My low-res pictures are 13k vs 38k, and 2.3k vs 11k. Overall, loading flash.html is 40k instead of 73k. That means (roughly) 80% more visitors for the same bandwidth!

I also tried GIF and TIFF - they were pretty close in size to the original PNG.

Re:Interesting..

[jackcarter]

This will finally enable you to create your own cheap sextapes, without the chance that some curious CVS employee(s) will see your work..

And the fact that it only works for 30 seconds is perfect for Slashdot users!

Re:Hours of crappy goodness

[bill_mcgonigle]

Considering how many obvious artifacts were in the demo scene from the DVD, I am ready to boycott CVS just on principle. Charging that much money for such crap!

Wow, if you don't like a deal someone is offering, just don't take it. Show me a store that isn't charging too much for something or that offers something that doesn't present a value proposition that you accept. You're going to have to be self-sufficient if you start boycotting all of 'em.

I'm thinking of getting a weather balloon and tying one of these on to see what happens. $30 sounds good.