Jailbreaking the Kindle(github.com) |
Jailbreaking the Kindle(github.com) |
There's also a Gargoyle [1] port for interactive fiction on the go. It's less practical due to the input lag on the Kindle keyboard, but I still pull it out every now and again.
Kindle's and PDFs goes together badly. This is common knowledge.
My solution is only using web-pages based formats like mobi or epub based books.
The rest... Let's say they don't get in my reading list.
Just like the web is nicer without flash, ebooks are just nicer without publishing formats like PDFs which natively can't support reflow or anything super basic required for easy reading.
Web is nice because of flash. The video tag in HTML5 happened only after successes of services like Youtube and Vimeo and hundreds of others after they set off on their paths with Macromedia flash. Stop fooling yourself with that kool-aid against flash in recent years.
It's dated for sure, but credit be given where credit is due.
My point was that KOReader makes them go together nicely. :)
I'm rather picky about ebook readers, mainly because many of them do not support hyphenation, which KOReader does. So I may give it a try.
https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/2040
It works great on Kindle, but I haven't tried the APK version so I can't really comment on that.
This was on the 3.1 firmware, so it's likely all completely obsolete on modern devices.
...the 3.1 firmware was terrible. It was all Java based, but Java 1.4. No generics! No autoboxing! No foreach! People forget just how awful early versions of Java were in comparison to what we have today. I ended up building a toolchain using RetroWeaver to convert modern Java bytecode into something that would run on the Kindle.
Also, the firmware was based on the Personal Basis Profile 1.1. Think back, way into the past, before there were smartphones and Android and iOS... back to the heyday of the downloadable Java applet for your T9-based phone. Yup, that. Kindle apps were midlets, and anyone who remembers writing programs for midlets will be shuddering by now.
And it gets worse! The Kindle ran the entire UI, third-party applications included, in a single Java VM. It was as fragile as hell, and it tended to silt up with un-garbagecollectable data until it crashed and rebooted. If you left a thread running on application exit, it would crash and reboot. If your app hung you had to power cycle the device. I believe that the reason why Amazon never really opened up the Kindle to large-scale third party apps was mainly embarrassment.
Good times. Good times...
I'm so, so sorry.
Old school Smalltalkers don't. Especially when the CEO of the major Smalltalk vendor at the time decided to try and turn the company into a Java company. (This basically resulted in revolt and implosion of the company.)
All the e-ink Kindles have basically the same architecture and run basically the same firmware, so the exploit should run on any device with that model of firmware.
Granted I may not be the target audience. Presumably some one looking to jailbreak their e-reader may have recognized this right off the bat. As someone who recently purchased a cheap kindle fire tablet, and was interested in the possibility of jail breaking, I was confused.
Edit: great post though! I researched previously in jail breaking kindle e-readers with not so much luck. Ever since I saw AWS use them as displays for snowball devices I started to see potential for other uses. Will have to try this out.
Why is that so hard?
I'm not sure what Amazon pays for identifying a security flaw, but I imagine it's somewhere between $5 and $15k.
Having success monthly might yield reasonable compensation, but companies only pay when a flaw is identified, which means you don't get paid for your work, you get paid for your successful work. And you don't get to define what is successful, nor is there usually a clear definition of what successful actually means.
I understand that many people do this to get a job in security / security research, but it just seems like the effort-to-payoff ratio still favors people using their found exploits for evil dramatically.
There really should be a different pricing model around security exploits - one that encourages responsible disclosure more heavily.
It's a neat project to talk about during interviews. Nothing more.
I've programmed and used Linux for a little while and I've done some simple things in assembly language (although not in much depth), but all the technical things past the CVE-2013-2842 section are impenetrable to me.
There's quite a few books on the subject. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation is a decent hello world introduction to the subject. Reading CTF practice problem writeups and then trying easier ones yourself are also good experiences.
For REing, http://crackmes.de is a blast. The entry level challenges should be easy to grasp after reading a few tutorials. Would recommend running everything in a Windows VM. ;)
Good luck!
Will keep an eye on this, even if am now using a Kobo H20.
"For the fix, Amazon did quite a few things. They sandboxed the browser, fixed the permissions issue, removed fc-cache.sh, and most likely patched Webkit. Webkit still crashes when executing the PoC. Unsure if that's because of the process running out of memory or some other issue."
However, I like Kindle hardware a bit more, so I would probably switch if it can be unstuck from using the Amazon default software choices.
As the guy who wrote this, I don't use any of the addons. Just did it for fun.
check out mobilereads forums if you want to know more about that, it's a vibrant community.
I use it for my own .mobi files from a variety of sources, including books I wrote myself. I purchased mine and paid to have no advertising on it.
I would roll back to the previous operating system, which did not have advertisements on the homescreen and did not make me navigate two levels deep just to get past subfolders and a 'downloaded' option hiding my own books from me by default, and I would remove its ability to update itself or do anything via wi-fi.
I would just connect it via USB for all file management, and that would be perfect for me.
Needless to say, I'm really frustrated with the 'update' I never asked for OR installed, which has screwed up these things. I am very, very interested in what can be done with this jailbreaking. All the more as I don't wish ever to purchase a book through Amazon again, if this is the direction they're going. And they are, they obviously are.
Once the books are there, they show in your cloud collection and are available for download, same as Amazon-purchased books. Better yet, you will also get cloud sync across devices for current location, bookmarks etc - probably the most enticing reason to go down this route.
(Not sure if this is helpful to you, if you really prefer to manage files directly via USB. But might be helpful to someone else.)
You can find tutorials for doing this all over the place, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oel08SDFyIY (not the particular one I used, but he's done a very similar job to mine).
I didn't find any information aimed at users of the Kindle about why they'd want to jailbreak.
Although I think this is what makes the (internet) world awesome at the moment. The author sounds like they were mucking around to see how far they could get. Put some thoughts down for others to read and who knows?
Whenever we're recruiting, we always look for interesting things a candidate has done. Something like this will easily get you a first interview...
I still plan to jailbrake when I get around to it
You can also use Calibre to have newspapers/magazines sent to your Kindle every morning. There's tons of recipes for scraping BBC, NYTimes, WaPo or $local_paper, rendering with custom CSS to get readable ad-free version, converting to MOBI and sending to Kindle. There has even been SaaS offerings running hosted Calibre cronjobs with user-provided recipes. Not sure if any still exist.
>The mobileread community has done a great job developing extended functionality of the readers. Some of the more popular packages involve an open-source alternative reader with ePub support, a plugin to change fonts, and another addon to enable custom screensaver images.
Given that it said "every Kindle with a 5.6.5" I would assume that most likely it was every kindle at the time the exploit was written.
While this exploit is obviously closed, Kindles can still be jailbroken via a new method. See the mobileread forums.
DVD's and Blueray disks have DRM, but I can buy one from any store and it will work with my player and my TV. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask for.
That's no good for me because I tend to do a lot of random edits of my epub collection to fix editing errors, replace cover images with better ones, etc. The reason I want Dropbox is to automatically propagate changes like that, not just to transfer files over.
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Screen_Saver_Hack_for...
Image format is grayscale 800x600 (bigger for Kindle DX) png or jpg. For best quality I recommend fiddling a bit with the color to grayscale work in Gimp or Photoshop, especially if the image has large areas with soft gradients. IIRC, running a selective Gaussian blur after grayscaling, and/or working the curves tool a bit before grayscaling, will improve problematic images quite a bit. Early models had only 4 grayscales, now they have 16. "Posterize" to 4 or 16 colors after grayscale in Gimp will give you a good idea of how the end result looks.
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Screen_Saver_Hack_for...
Some people add their contact details to the screensaver images, so if you lose your kindle your contact details are the first thing someone who finds it will see.
The better behavior would be to not flip the screen at all and keep it static, using no battery.
Or if there are any other e-ink tablets that run a full linux (cli) or Android?
[0]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/13-3-inch-android-e-reade...
In short: YouTube would have been a success even in the alternate universe where Flash never existed.
That's a hilarious mother of all assumptions. Kool-aid has taken a full effect on you! :-)
I suppose you could run VNC on your Android/Ubuntu phone, and just use the e-ink tablet as a thin client.
Maybe the slow redraw of e-ink would suck for real work, unless there are ways to make it more palatable for terminal work
I've been tempted to buy an eink dev kit and see how fast I can push the refresh rate without consideration for battery life. Alas, I can't justify the cost. Oh, and I've never done embedded programming or driver development before. I suspect that might be an issue. :D
[0]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e...
Well, I'd say even more - these days when usual attention span is like, I don't know, 5 seconds? having a device which is restrictive in this regard, might be a very positive experience.
It's funny you should say that. A guy I know hired some programmers to come up with custom software for a hacked Boox. It was a universal inbox for twitter, reddit, facebook and email conversations. The idea was that it purposely forced him to focus on only one thing at a time to increase his attention span and reduce the "instant thrill" of web browsing.
He has this entire theory of 'low reward lifestyle' I find intriguing.
Then again, he didn't try to do any programming on it. I'm a big fan of keeping the write -> compile loop as small as possible.
The 'universal conversation app' is would be great to have on its own merit.