Biography

Cody William Brocious was born in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Naval Drug and Alcohol counselor. He moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

Chambersburg is a borough in the South Central region of Pennsylvania, United States. It is miles north of Maryland and the Mason-Dixon line and southwest of Harrisburg in the Cumberland Valley, which is part of the Great Appalachian Valley. Chambersburg is the county seat of Franklin County...

 at the age of 3 and became interested in computing by the age of 4. 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

San Diego, California

San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...

. Cody now resides in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

.

PyMusique

Brocious first saw recognition as founder of the PyMusique project, where he worked with Jon Lech Johansen

Jon Lech Johansen

Jon Lech Johansen , also known as DVD Jon, is a Norwegian programmer famous for his work on reverse engineering data formats....

 of DeCSS

DeCSS

DeCSS is a computer program capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc. Before the release of DeCSS, there was no way for computers running a Linux-based operating system to play video DVDs....

 fame. PyMusique allowed Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 users to purchase music from the iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

 music store without the standard FairPlay

FairPlay

FairPlay is a digital rights management technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Formerly, all songs in...

 DRM

Digital rights management

Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...

 implementation in place.

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

Linspire

Linspire, previously known as LindowsOS, was a commercial operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and later Ubuntu. Linspire was published by Linspire, Inc. and focused on ease-of-use, targeting home PC users...

 Inc., to form Falling Leaf Systems LLC. Falling Leaf Systems attempted to commercialize the Alky Project, which was started by Brocious to enable Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 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

Prey (video game)

Prey is a first-person shooter video game developed by Human Head Studios , and published by 2K Games. The Xbox 360 version was ported by Venom Games. The game was initially released in North America and Europe on 11 July 2006...

 on either Linux or Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. Despite attempts to expand their stack by also supporting applications on disparate platforms, Falling Leaf Systems officially closed its doors in early 2008.

iPhone hacking

Brocious, under the pseudonym Daeken, joined with a group of other hackers to reverse engineer the iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

, granting users the ability to use their phones in ways not intended by Apple. Using code developed by this project, George Hotz

George Hotz

George Francis Hotz , alias geohot, million75 or simply mil, is an American hacker known for unlocking the iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers, contrary to AT&T and Apple's intent...

 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.

The Hardware Hacker Manifesto

The Hardware Hacker Manifesto was published on September 21, 2010. It gives some insight of the psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 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.