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Man Hacks Skylanders, Gets Nasty Letter From Activision

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To pass the time, hacker Brandon Wilson - who normally messes around with graphics calculators - decided a few months back he'd take a look under the hood of Activision's Skylanders action figures, see what makes them tick.

After playing around with the figure's RFID bases, he collected his research and stored it in a .zip file on his personal website. And thought nothing of it.

Then one day Wilson comes home from work to find someone waiting at his door to hand him a legal notice from Activision, accusing him of all kinds of nefarious hacking deeds and demanding he take down all his work at once.

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Wilson claims that the majority of accusations levelled against him by Activision are completely inaccurate. Many of them allege he is reverse-engineering the Skylanders RFID code, is working with others to hack the game, and collaborating those efforts on a messageboard.

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He reckons Activision's lawyers seem to be unable to tell the difference between the original creator of a thread, who makes the boasts that have attracted their attention, and Wilson, who leaves a single message and says nothing of hacking or reverse-engineering.

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You can read Activision's letter here, while Wilson has made his response public here.

skylanders portal documentation [brandonw, via Geek]