Hackers claim victory in cracking Kindle

BANGALORE, INDIA: An Israeli hacker presented a not-so-merry Christmas gift to Amazon.com with the claim that he has successfully broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

The hack will allow the ebooks stored on the reader to be transferred as PDF files to any other device, said a BBC report. The hacker, known as Labba, responded to a Kindle DRM challenge issued on Israeli hacking forum, hacking.org, it said.

Meanwhile, a U.S. hacker who goes by the name "i♥cabbages," has also created a program called Unswindle that promises to convert books stored in the Kindle for PC application into a different file format.

Amazon sells content for the Kindle in an ".azw" format, some of which has DRM (digital rights management) technology, which prevents a file from being transferred to an unauthorized device.

However, i♥cabbages, in the blog post 'Circumventing Kindle For PC DRM (updated)', claims that Unswindle can circumvent it.

"The K4PC update may not actually have been targeted at unswindle, as Amazon seems to have done nothing in particular to make the basic approach more difficult. In any case, I've updated unswindle to handle the 20091222 version of the executable," says the update on December 22. The original blog was posted on December 17.

So, is it that we are having a 'hacker's holiday out'?