George Schneeloch

Ops is a tool used to hack a specific kind of CVS disposable camcorder to be reusable. I don't remember how I learned about it but eventually I created a Linux port and it was added to the official SourceForge page. It's pretty much obsolete now that cheap digital cameras are so ubiquitous, which is especially funny given that the iPhone came out only a year or two later.

One thing that continually impresses me about computer science is how pretty much nothing is off limits, if you have the time and energy to find a solution. The amount of reverse engineering and insight that went into that project was astonishing. I learned so much with that project, how USB and cameras work at a low level and why people make the decisions they do when releasing a project. The camera hacking forums contain most of this conversation, most of it dating to 2006 or so.

These cameras were very similar to a commercially available camera which cost $99, but this camera was something like $10 because it was supposed to be disposable. (Later a slightly more expensive camcorder version was released.) There was a software authentication mechanism to prevent people from plugging in these disposable cameras, but it responded to a password of all zeros. The cameras had a proprietary-looking interface, but its wires were a direct mapping to USB. The socket fit neatly with PalmPilot cradles, which made the interface easy to solder together (although I managed to damage my laptop with a shorted connection.)

After this vulnerability was discovered, they fixed the hole in the authentication system, but another was quickly found. I think they booted it into some kind of reset mode, similar to how you root many Android phones. After a little while someone accidentally posted the authentication algorithm on a public FTP, lawsuits were threatened, etc. In the meantime people did some pretty interesting things with these cheap cameras, like using them in high altitude balloons.

From a code perspective I wrote it in C because that's what I knew back then and I didn't think to do it in Python. In hindsight I probably should have piggybacked on the Windows C++ implementation, to make it easier to keep feature parity. I also wish I knew about Glade, which would have made things much prettier. Some extra work was contributed by other people to fix endian issues for non-i386 platforms.