Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
No-one's said that reverse engineering it would be easy. It wouldn't be "within seconds". But believing that such reverse engineering will happen if it's required is not "magical thinking".
You do remember Topaz format, don't you? The format for which only Amazon has the creation tools? That only Amazon software could render? That was completely opaque?
Reverse engineered. Now freely convertible to SVG images and HTML.
"magical thinking" refuted.
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First, magical thinking is actually a descriptive term in this case, so we can use it without quotes..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking
Second - afaik we still don't have any software that would read .kfx books on platforms we can run reverse engineering toolkits on. How do you solve that?
Also - Topaz was not designed with obfuscation in mind from the get go (only the header currently is readable on .kfx..?)
Third - I have to admit, I actually hate the deus ex machina moment of "hacker will swing by and fix this". Why is it always the people that are under risk of being detained at your borders (this little story:
http://www.cnet.com/news/russian-cry...ed-at-def-con/ ) that in the end should be responsible for making key parts of your society work.
Like the balance of power argument at the "no, you are not allowed to own all aspects of the book that reads better" stage.
Wouldn't it be better to have this discussion about "what Amazon cant make proprietary ("better readability features" for starters) out in the open and actually have a reasonable dialog with the company as such?
We are now already almost a year (didn't recheck) into the .kfx cycle. At some point Amazon can just iterate on demand ("new features/formats, whenever the new format gets cracked", or change its obfuscation, whenever they want to sell a new "feature" (costly, but possible)). Then there is the circumstance, that we just saw the first format transition that wasn't even communicated properly ("More bookerly, new font").
The people in here might be one of the last groups still caring about actual file formats - so in my opinion, prolonging the "format wars" might not be the best option - in the medium term. Thats the "who still uses an USB cable with their Kindles" issue - and that we would have to always encourage people to actively use the latest "reverse engineered format" regardless of what gets auto delivered by Amazon.
Another discussion that we actually didn't have in here. For most people this came just as a result of how Calibre positioned itself in the past.
edit: There is a fourth reason, and it concerns that publishers have given up "being able to create their books" so from a commercial standpoint, almost no one still has a vested interest in understanding .kfx (or future Kindle formats), as Amazon doesnt allow you to sell or distribute the format.