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Reverse Engineer Finds Kindle's Hidden Features
bensafrickingenius writes "CNET's Crave site has an interesting article on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, and the extensive reverse-engineering that fans of the device have accomplished. The site specifically points out the work of Igor Skochinsky at the Reversing Everything website. His work on the Kindle's Root Shell has revealed some fascinating goodies: 'Among the ones uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.'"
Yeah, you missed that one.
Good movie, although a bit date today
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
eInk displays can't have images burnt in (short of physical trauma to the screen), and they only use power when the image changes. So using a screensaver would merely eat up all of your battery life, and not really protect the screen at all.
A root password of "Fiona"? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Neal Stephenson's novel _The Diamond Age_? The one who was educated by the nanotechnological Primer book?
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
All current CDMA chipsets have location capability, due to E911 requirements for cellphones. They go through all sorts of gyrations to get a fix quickly when starting the GPS from cold (can't leave it running all the time or it would kill the battery), and to get a fix in "difficult" environments like urban canyons. They get a rough location by triangulating on cell towers, determine available satellites, doppler and code phase estimates, then tell the GPS what it should be listening for. Instead of taking several minutes from a cold start, they get a fix in a second or two.
When you get a cellphone the service agreement will say that you agree to be located if you call 911 (read it, it's there). Any other location must be initiated by you, or with your permission, due to privacy issues. I did software for dedicated CDMA location devices and users got a special service agreement from Sprint. It said if you buy and use this thing, you are agreeing to be located.
It's pretty slick.
...laura
It is probably in the CDMA chipset anyway, since it's required by law to be included in phones. It probably would have cost them a lot more to build the device without the position sensing capability.
A bluetooth monitor? Bluetooth can transmit at up to 2.1 Mbit/s. DVI can transmit 3.7 Gbit/s in single-link mode and 7.4 Gbit/s in dual-link mode. A 320x240 @ 24bpp would ideally take .9 seconds, but could easily take 5 seconds to fill the screen. And that is a tiny screen. 320x240 @ 8bpp would still ideally take .3 seconds. At a more standard resolution (1280x1024 @ 8bpp), a simple screen fill would ideally take 5 seconds and could easily stretch to 30. Granted, one could try to fix this problem by using a compression algorithm on the data, but PNG and JPEG aren't effective enough to fix the problem (especially in larger displays). USB would help, but it's still only 480 Mbit/s (I don't feel like doing the calculations again).
Not to say the idea is entirely without merit. A worker in a server farm could load a problem ticket (@ 1 bpp?) onto his monitor and walk off with the ticket. There might be a few specialized applications for this, but everything involves writing some sort of specialized "painting" system, which goes against the basic idea of a monitor-only system.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
Seeing as how the Kindle doesn't even have a backlight, it wouldn't help with that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.