Thousands of sleep apnea sufferers rely on a lone Australian CPAP hacker to stay healthy

An Australian developer named Mark Watkins painstakingly reverse-engineered the proprietary data generated by Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines and created Sleepyhead, a free/open piece of software that has become the go-to tool for thousands of sleep apnea sufferers around the world who want to tune their machines to stay healthy.

CPAP machines can require extensive tinkering to deliver exactly the right amount of air to their users; too little air and the patient can become chronically oxygen-deprived, leading to very serious health risks including early mortality. Too much air pressure can also kill you.

CPAP machine manufacturers like Resmed scramble the data generated by the machines and expect patients to physically transport the data on SD cards to their doctors' offices, which doctors use to tune the machines. This process is slow, expensive, and cumbersome, and time-starved docs are unreliable CPAP mechanics (there is a real shortage of sleep specialists).

Enter Mark Watkins and Sleepytime, whose existence is spread by word of mouth on forums for apnea sufferers, and these communities help one another interpret the data generated by the machines and make small adjustments to dial in the right settings.

However, Sleepytime may be illegal. CPAP machines -- like many other medical devices -- use digital rights management (DRM) to restrict access to their internals, which are a mix of copyrighted software and uncopyrightable data. Section 1201 of the DMCA bans bypassing access controls for copyrighted works, for any purpose, on penalty of 5 year prison sentences and $500,000 fines (for a first offense!). Read the rest