Reverse Engineering Issues

Yeserday, I posted about the efforts of Twyzen to emulate the look and feel of Apples new iPhone on a PocketPC. Apples legal department have swung in action again and had the video demonstrating this project removed due to copyright violation. I guess it was expected...

The sad thing is that Twyzen was doing what any programmer or engineer who is anywhere near half decent would have done anyways ... reverse engineering ... and all this without a hardware reference. All he has managed to do so far is create a cosmetic look which very loosely approximates the UI of this device. Even the scrolling test he demoed in the video was only partially functional.

In the early days of computing the concept of reverse engineering hardware was common. These days however much of this spirit has gone (at least openly anyways) due to litigious nature of most modern corporations. Much of this has come about as a result of the troubling and ill conceived DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). There is an interesting older article called Losing the right to tinker, which is worth a read over at Technology Review.