Camera hackers put on (Hassel)blast, as lawyers shut down jailbreaking project

You know all those vibe coders who have been hacking cameras to add new features and crack firmware? Well, Hasselblad literally isn't playing that game: its legal team has shut down the recent jailbreaking project that reverse-engineered its medium format cameras.

Headlines were made by the efforts of the Hasselblad Refinement & Augmentation Project (HRAP) after its achievements were shared on Reddit.

Some of them were innocent fun, such as getting Doom to run on a Hasselblad X2D (continuing the tradition of running the legendary videogame on everything from calculator to Canon DSLRs) and even installing ChatGPT on a Hasselblad X2D II.

However, the hackers started getting a little bolder when they started adding actual camera features that weren't previously available – such as making it possible to record video on an X2D II and even unlocking new autofocus features.

This was apparently too bold for Hasselblad, whose lawyers got in touch with one of the people behind the HRAP efforts and demanded that they shut it down.

"I didn't plan to post this, but Hasselblad sent a legal letter to silence HRAP. Resources will no longer be available starting today," they posted on Reddit, before not only deleting the project's github but also zapping their Reddit account.

For what it's worth, Redditor rrRadium – who posted many of the jailbreaking videos – still seems to be active.

While it's certainly been fun seeing vibe coders add things like film simulations to DSLRs, it was starting to feel inevitable that manufacturers would push back – especially after AI was used to clone Adobe's entire Creative Suite, not to mention Claude cracking the entire videogame industry open.

Coders have been soft-hacking Canon cameras for years in the form of Magic Lantern (which is side-loaded via a memory card), but directly reverse-engineering a company's proprietary software code is incredibly legally perilous.

And of course, loading unofficial software or firmware to your camera is almost guaranteed to invalidate the warranty – definitely something you don't want to do with an $8,000 Hasselblad.

It's probably only a matter of time before other brands take similar steps against their respective hackers, so we probably haven't heard the last about vibe coders being put on blast.

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