Technical details about the internal components were publicly posted on the Internet,[3] along with instructions for creating various compatible link cables that connected the Dakota Digital to home personal computers.
[5] So Ritz began pulling the Dakota Digital out of its stores after learning of the hack, and the original camera soon became difficult to find.
In July 2004, a group of hackers made available methods to further improve the original Dakota Digital by upgrading the camera's firmware, or internal programming.
John Maushammer removed and read the flash memory chip, wrote a disassembler, and commented significant portions of the firmware.
Others figured out how to download the images using modified versions of software for SMaL's other cameras, and other people are reverse-engineering the proprietary RAW file format.
Theoretically, the response could not be mathematically related to the challenge and the only correlation between the two could be a record saved in the manufacturer's database (which authorized processing systems would have to access to read pictures from the camera).