> The biggest barrier to hacking is often the fear that you’ll break something while poking around. But you have to break eggs to make an omelet; likewise, you have to be willing to sacrifice devices to hack a system. Fortunately, acquiring multiple copies of a mass-produced piece of hardware is easy. I often do a bit of dumpster diving or check classified advertisements to get sample units for research purposes. I generally try to start with three copies: one to tear apart and never put back together, one to probe, and one to keep relatively pristine.<p>I love learning this kind of stuff through this site. In the world of reverse engineering or hacking stuff together, it feels like such a fumbly exercise that there just isn’t any discipline to it, but experts definitely learned some tricks and learning from them is such a treat. I’ll have to download that book and give it a read sometime soon.