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Reverse Engineer Finds Kindle's Hidden Features

Posted by Zonk on from the under-the-hood dept.

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.'"

5 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Flagged. by headkase · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position...

    Ok, that's it I'm never buying my "Catcher in the Rye" through Kindle... (Apologies to Mel Gibson).

    --
    Shh.
  2. Why bother with the Crave article at all? by Abcd1234 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, why was it even included in the article posting? It's just a pointless summary of the content present in the original blog postings. 'course, I'm sure they appreciate the additional ad revenue...

    1. Re:Why bother with the Crave article at all? by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is a problem with the "Blogosphere" in general. The vast majority (not all but certainly most) just echo news from other sources, or worse other blogs. They do not offer any insight, commentary or additional information on top of their source information. It's a crapshoot whether or not they actually write ANYTHING original rather than copy+paste.

      The worst is when you have a blog linking to a blog linking to the original info. FFS people...

      The net effect is old news gets constantly recycled and real news gets diluted. How many times have you seen a new blog post about something that actually happened months ago? The "9V battery contains AAAA cells" thing stands out as the most recent example for me: here (2 Jan 2008), here (9 Jan 2007), here (3 Jan 2007), here (23 Dec 2006). You have a "story" at LEAST a year old that has been copied verbatim at least four times!

      Original here (No date) as far as I can tell, since all of the above blogs link to it.

      Plus, all of these blogs have comment sections, which make them twice as redundant because the comments themselves also fail to add anything most of the time. If they do you'll never find them because there are so many other palces that run the same "story."

      Fight the watering down of information! NEVER link to a blog unless it provides something EXTRA to the news! ALWAYS take a few minutes to get as close to the original source as possible! If you run a blog yourself, work to ADD to articles you link to - personal thoughts, additional information, insightful discussion on the topic at hand - be UNIQUE. That's how you get a readership... by having something worth reading.
      =Smidge=

  3. Cellphone CDMA location by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position

    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

  4. Re:eBook readers are all wrong by ubuwalker31 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Okay, I's like to explain what makes ebook readers so bad and what needs to be done to fix them.
    <p>
    Thanks to that first sentence, I read the rest of your insightful comment with a really freakin annoying Jar Jar Binks voice.
    <p>
    Thanks

    PS
    Meesa gonna upmod yousa comment, since Isa hava mod points...