The founder of a hardware hacking group that helps scofflaw internet speed junkies "uncap" their cable modems has written a how-to book.
From the press release:
The publisher is NoStarch Press, which took in Andrew "bunnie" Huang's book Hacking the Xbox after Wiley spiked it out of an abundance of respect for the DMCA.
This book could be as controversial. Like the Xbox, cable modems are meant to be tamper resistant -- to only run code that's been digitally signed by the cable provider, even if you own the modem. This is to prevent you from doing things like sniff your neighbors' packets off the wire, get service before you've activated it, or uncap your modem to get extra bandwidth.
Author "DerEngel" and his gang, TCNiSO, have gotten around that several ways -- some of them very cool. They found a vestigial serial port on a modem's circuit board that, with a little soldering, lets you plug in a computer terminal and interact with a command prompt. Later they found a buffer overflow that allows you to soft-mod some modems without ever cracking the case.
They started off developing methods and software to allow amateurs to easily uncap their modems and wound up writing a complete firmware replacement for the Motorola Surfboard 5100 cable modem.
I don't know how much of that is in the book, but the table of contents looks fun. There's also a sample chapter (.pdf) online.
