- Cody Brocious
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Cody Brocious Born January 2, 1988
Waukegan, IllinoisResidence New York, NY Nationality United States Occupation Software engineer Employer Matasano Security Known for PyMusique, Alky Project, The Hardware Hacker Manifesto Website http://daeken.com/ Cody Brocious is an American software engineer best known for his work on PyMusique.
Contents
Biography
Cody William Brocious was born in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Naval Drug and Alcohol counselor. He moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania at the age of 3 and became interested in computing by the age of 4.[1] Brocious attended Chambersburg Area Senior High School and the Franklin County Career and Technology Center until the age of 17, at which point he decided to enter the work force by joining MP3Tunes in San Diego, California. Cody now resides in Manhattan.
Notable projects
PyMusique
Brocious first saw recognition as founder of the PyMusique project, where he worked with Jon Lech Johansen of DeCSS fame. PyMusique allowed Linux users to purchase music from the iTunes music store without the standard FairPlay DRM implementation in place.[2]
MP3Tunes
Upon dropping out of High School, Brocious moved to San Diego, California to work at MP3Tunes under the leadership of Michael Robertson. Cody began work as a contractor on the Oboe project where he implemented a now defunct iTunes plugin for accessing the MP3Tunes Music Locker service. He was hired as a full time employee of the company on his 18th birthday. During his employment, he continued his work on Oboe, where he worked on various other interfaces to the Music Locker service.
Falling Leaf Systems
During his employment with MP3Tunes, Brocious also joined forces with Brian Thomason, then an employee of another Michael Robertson company, Linspire Inc., to form Falling Leaf Systems LLC.[3][4] Falling Leaf Systems attempted to commercialize the Alky Project, which was started by Brocious to enable Microsoft Windows games to run on other platforms.
Falling Leaf Systems sold access to a membership site dubbed the Sapling Program, whereby users could access a build of Alky allowing them to demo the game Prey on either Linux or Mac OS X. Despite attempts to expand their stack by also supporting applications on disparate platforms, Falling Leaf Systems officially closed its doors in early 2008.[5][6]
iPhone hacking
Brocious, under the pseudonym Daeken, joined with a group of other hackers to reverse engineer the iPhone, granting users the ability to use their phones in ways not intended by Apple.[7] Using code developed by this project, George Hotz gained notoriety by performing the first successful hardware unlocking of a standard iPhone.
Emokit
In 2010, Brocious reverse-engineered the protocol used by the Emotiv EPOC EEG headset, publishing the AES key used for encrypting the sensor data.[8]
The Hardware Hacker Manifesto
The Hardware Hacker Manifesto was published on September 21, 2010. It gives some insight of the psychology of hardware hackers. Cody Brocious goes into an explanation of why it is important for owners have the right to utilize hardware the way they wish to use it.[9]
References
- ^ Michael's Minute on Cody Brocious
- ^ Forbes interview with Cody Brocious on PyMusique
- ^ DesktopLinux citing Thomason's role at Linspire
- ^ Falling Leaf Systems announces launch
- ^ Alky Project merges with Project VAIO
- ^ Falling Leaf Systems closes shop
- ^ Recognition of iPhone hackers
- ^ Interview with Cody Brocious on the Emokit
- ^ The Hardware Hacker Manifesto
Categories:- 1988 births
- Living people
- People from Illinois
- Software engineers
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