I turned my unused Kindle into a photo frame with GPT-6 Astra(nirajrajgor.com) |
I turned my unused Kindle into a photo frame with GPT-6 Astra(nirajrajgor.com) |
It seems like a distinctly possible and sad world that they might get so much better at keeping their devices locked down by hardening them with the support of LLMs that future devices become an absolute bitch to jailbreak, even moreso than they were before.
Companies say "security" and mean "security of our business model".
I think one area we are seeing this is the flood of hand held emulator gaming machines. Companies in China pump these things out and the community has provided numerous custom firmwares to the point a new one seems to come out every week. All vibe coded in Rust but who cares, if it plays the games and looks nice that's all you need.
Everybody except capitalists wins with right to reprogram.
If anything apples closeness in the age of disposable software is going to kill it.
It sounds like most of the work went into getting the slideshow to work, setting up a feedback loop so Astra could work out / blunder into a solution with the desired characteristics.
> I first tried GPT-5.6 Sol with reasoning effort set to Extra High. It wrote code to connect to the Kindle but couldn't resolve an error that prevented it from storing data on the device. Then I tried Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, but Anthropic's cybersecurity safeguards blocked each attempt after two prompts. Finally, I tried GPT-6 Astra with reasoning effort set to High. We were able to jailbreak the Kindle.
"We were able to".
It takes a modern AI human and 4 LLMs to do something that could be done by googling "kindle jailbreak" and following instructions - they have to be performed on Kindle anyway.
But just kinda randomly trying at various reasoning efforts reminds me a lot of hearing people just randomly replacing various libraries or code snippets with stuff found on stack overflow. No real theory of the system.
There's not even much of an excuse, cuz you can "just" sit there and type "why?" or "why not?" over and over into an agentic chat session and probably get things working quite quickly. Principled debugging is state space elimination for the most part!
I sometimes catch myself saying "we" when prompting AI so it really doesn't bother me to see this language being used. But I concede it can sound jarring or hubristic.
https://github.com/9cb14c1ec0/android_device_lenovo_sycamore...
https://github.com/9cb14c1ec0/android_device_tcl_selene_vzw
https://github.com/9cb14c1ec0/android_device_lenovo_clove_ro...
Quite impressive what these models are capable of.
So it's not a solution originated from Astra?
Claude is just a lil bitch.
How soon until we all have jailbroken our TV ads out of existence? What next, jailbreaking the adds off our netflix accounts? To be clear I think this is an excellent development for everyone, however evenly distributed good doesn't usually positively correlate with share price.
Most people don't give a shit and don't want to spend time with this shit
But it does make you think there might be a real market for unlocked devices like this now that it is trivial to build your own software to do exactly what you want.
It is your device. It is your money. You own it.
From the Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...
> 9. Computer Programs—Jailbreaking [47]
>
> Multiple organizations petitioned to renew the four exemptions for computer programs that enable electronic devices to interoperate with or to remove software applications (“jailbreaking”). These exemptions permit circumvention for the purpose of jailbreaking (1) smartphones and other portable all-purpose computing devices, (2) smart televisions, (3) voice assistant devices, and (4) routers and dedicated networking devices. No oppositions were filed against renewal. The petitions demonstrated the continuing need and justification for the exemption and that petitioners have personal knowledge and experience with regard to this exemption. Petitioners described how users of a variety products in each of these categories rely on this exemption to maintain functionality and security of older devices, to install alternative operation systems, and to customize software applications on electronic devices. Collectively, the petitions demonstrated that without this exemption, TPMs installed on the enumerated products would have an adverse effect on various noninfringing uses.
> 11. Computer Programs—Repairs of Devices Designed Primarily for Use by Consumers [51]
>
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) petitioned to renew the exemption for computer programs that control devices designed primarily for use by consumers for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of the device. The Office did not receive meaningful opposition to renewal.[52]
>
> The petitioners demonstrated the continuing need and justification for the exemption. For example, EFF asserted that “[m]anufacturers of these devices continue to implement technological protection measures that inhibit lawful repairs, maintenance, and diagnostics, and they show no sign of changing course.” [53]
>
> EFF has personal knowledge of this exemption, as it has been involved with the section 1201 rulemaking process since its inception and has specifically advocated for device repair exemptions.
Here's the project! I MIT licensed it. https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled
Please note, I say so in the human note on top, but "The project code was written by GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh. It has not been verified by a human for correctness, efficiency, or speed; i.e. ymmv and use this at your personal risk."
In case you're wondering why I didn't write the code myself... I needed this as a tool to read long sequences of AI text output for work. Including code. Spending time making this tool would be counter-productive to that goal.
I do plan on writing a text rendering engine some day. Hopefully, soon.
Machine assistance also allows me to do things that would've been otherwise impossible.
For example, I'm aware of NASA's 3001 standard for human-rated spaceflight systems has very specific findings related to readability of labels. There are also other standards for checklist and document readability. Asking software to support the standards wouldn't work. Most people just aren't going to use NASA's human rating checklist to design websites and terminal outputs. They either don't know about it, or don't care enough to do so.
But machine intelligence makes it possible for me to extract NASA's learnings, turn them into requirements, and then have the machine custom build software that embeds it into my day-to-day life. https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled/blob/main/code/TYPO...
I'm very grateful for that. The world is built to a very different tune, but with machine intelligence I can make tools that fit for me.
Oh wait, the author said:
> The attempts with Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 were both blocked by Anthropic's cybersecurity safeguards after two prompts.
How unsurprising :)
Whenever I start checking a dump, the conversation with Sol won't last five rounds before it flags the work as cybersecurity-related. No matter what I do, the conversation gets cut off in the middle.
Astra is even worse. It starts saying nonsense and even refuses to run a test that we know will cause an AV (as a repro for a nullptr case).
Whenever that happens, I just switch to Opus to continue my work.
In an age where everyone has access to AI, AI-written code has zero value. You should share the prompt or ask your agent to write a document other people’s agents can use to reimplement the code from scratch and/or customize to their specific needs.
> In an age where everyone has access to AI, AI-written code has zero value
> You should share the prompt or ask your agent to write a document other people’s agents can use to reimplement the code from scratch and/or customize to their specific needs.
It took more than 40+ hours of iterations to get this right. Let's say 10 people check this out because of the HN post. That's now 400+ hours to get to the same end point.
I am not sure how large the model is, but let's say it takes roughly 16 B200s to serve, then the total load is ~14kWhr. 5,600KWhr, which is roughly half the energy a house uses in a year.
If a 100 people try it. That becomes 5 houses...
This isn't a single-shot prompt. It's more energy efficient to do it this way. Why do you want to burn 40+ hours of compute to get to the same end when you can extend from working code?
I’d even argue sharing today’s vibe coded solution has negative value - unless it’s a total throwaway thing, agents in 3 months will be able to code a much better solution to the problem.
I used to be kind of indifferent to devices that let you flash your own firmware because I knew there was no way I'd ever bother writing firmware. But now the community is generating decent quality alternative firmwares for everything, devices having an unlocked bootloader could be a requirement going forward. If I buy an ereader in the future it will have to be fully unlocked so I can load whatever the latest community built firmware is.
Normal profit is what an investor demands at the absolute bare minimum. They dont 'feel' better off if its not being beaten.
Edit: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-paying-113-million-law...
The switch and switch 2 are both just powerful enough that developers can release straight ports of their AAA titles that were developed for other systems, but at the cost of significantly degrading framerate/framepacing, visuals, nothing ever running at native resolution etc.
I would much rather it was more like the Wii and all their previous handhelds where the performance gap between it and the other contemporaneous systems was so big that developers had to develop bespoke games for the system, and ports had to be ground up rewrites.
Everything was so much more playable, and by buying those systems you had access to an entirely different library of games to choose from, rather than the current situation where it's just the first party Nintendo titles that differ from what's available on all the other more powerful systems.