The motto of The Register is “Biting the Hand that Feeds It”, and in a recent posting the website took a big bite out of Amazon’s hand. It had posed a challenge to “make ebooks published in Amazon’s proprietary format display on competing readers.” A little more than a week later a participant working under the handle “Labba” claimed to score a victory. His technique, as explained on The Register‘s website, was to reverse-engineer the code.

“The hack” says The Register,” is the latest to show the futility of digital rights management schemes, which more often than not inconvenience paying customers more than they prevent unauthorized copying.”

RC