Firmware update 5.12.4

[Sol Arkite]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

You wish it was true? It is true, the jailbreak community is just a blip. If you are part of a fringe group, it always appears more important, because to almost every member of that group it is important. Same with the fringe group that requires no DRM on their books.

Arguably the ability to remove DRM group is bigger. And yet both groups combined are only making up a very small portion of total users.

Clearly, you are right I’m I’m wrong. Your ability to dismiss, discount, and ignore evidence, combined with verbally flailing about trying to make other people involved in the discussion seem less important has persuaded me in way that evidence could not. Congratulations! You should apply for a position with the Trump administration.

[Sol Arkite]

Originally Posted by NullNix

It's normal for all firms running large clouds these days -- it means you can trickle changes out, then easily roll them back if they break. Trickling firmware updates out allows you to do the latter, but unless the new features can be switched on *and off* independently of the upgrade, there's no easy way to revert broken changes fast without rapidly releasing a new bugfix firmware to everyone who received the broken one, which presumably Amazon can't really do due to bandwidth constraints. Flipping a feature on or off only takes a few hundred bytes.

They're just treating Kindles the same way as big fleets of remotely-administered servers, which seems sensible to me: Amazon do, after all, have a lot of experience with that sort of thing.

You make a sound argument how amazon becomes even more powerful over our devices and our user experience.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Sol Arkite

Clearly, you are right I’m I’m wrong. Your ability to dismiss, discount, and ignore evidence, combined with verbally flailing about trying to make other people involved in the discussion seem less important has persuaded me in way that evidence could not.

I jailbreak my Kindles. I've actually helped provide factory firmware for PW3, PW4 and KT4. However, it's safe to say that jailbreakers are a very small portion of the Kindle's user base.

Right now, there's no publicly published method for jailbreaking > 5.11firmware. Pretty much anyone who wants to JB the PW4 has to PM either me or hius07 on the 4pda.ru forums.

Consider that Amazon likely sells hundreds or even thousands of Kindles every day. Know how many PMs I get requesting JB instructions? Maybe 10 a week.

NiLuJe likely has better statistics based on his snapshots page but really, we jailbreakers are a minority.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Sol Arkite

You make a sound argument how amazon becomes even more powerful over our devices and our user experience.

Um... they have exactly the same power they always did. They control the hardware and (modulo jailbreaking) the software. I don't see how remotely enabling features after upgrade as opposed to doing so at upgrade time changes anything at all.

[Sol Arkite]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

I jailbreak my Kindles. I've actually helped provide factory firmware for PW3, PW4 and KT4. However, it's safe to say that jailbreakers are a very small portion of the Kindle's user base.

Right now, there's no publicly published method for jailbreaking > 5.11firmware. Pretty much anyone who wants to JB the PW4 has to PM either me or hius07 on the 4pda.ru forums.

Consider that Amazon likely sells hundreds or even thousands of Kindles every day. Know how many PMs I get requesting JB instructions? Maybe 10 a week.

NiLuJe likely has better statistics based on his snapshots page but really, we jailbreakers are a minority.

I don’t dispute the community being small. I dispute amazon’s role in discouraging jailbreaking. I Asked him to look at the evidence and he responded with, “ what’s the point. Jailbreaking is insignificant because not a lot of people do it. “ You yourself have pointed out that amazon has been reeding up on the previous jailbreak methodologies, leaving behind evidence of their presence. They clearly care about what is going on.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Sol Arkite

I don’t dispute the community being small. I dispute amazon’s role in discouraging jailbreaking. I Asked him to look at the evidence and he responded with, “ what’s the point. Jailbreaking is insignificant because not a lot of people do it. “ You yourself have pointed out that amazon has been reeding up on the previous jailbreak methodologies, leaving behind evidence of their presence. They clearly care about what is going on.

Ah, yes. Amazon has started to care more about preventing jailbreaks in recent times.

From January 29, 2019:

Originally Posted by Branch Delay

Looks like Amazon is finally going to fix the ;installHtml issue. Over the last few days, one of my articles has been getting a lot of hits from lab126. (hi SBR-6729!) (Note to Amazon, might want to hide your referrers from your lab126 domain.)

Guessing they'll fix both vectors soon, finally wiping these in the factory as well as updating busybox etc.

Sort of weird it lasted this long. I assumed they were tacitly supporting the community by leaving that in, but I'm now thinking it was just lack of time.

All right, good luck everyone! Grab a jail-breakable Kindle before yet another hole closes.

In all fairness though, jailbreaking takes advantage of a security vulnerability.

We use it to add functionality to our devices not present in native firmware but others might use it for nefarious ends.

I don't know anything valuable that hackers can steal from a Kindle, though. Maybe Amazon login credentials or session tokens? I'd expect that info to be encrypted, though.

[luele]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Just a new version number so far for me on my Oasis2.

Then we are 2 - Amazon

[hius07]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Consider that Amazon likely sells hundreds or even thousands of Kindles every day. Know how many PMs I get requesting JB instructions? Maybe 10 a week.

Have a little bit more: about one hundred per month (because of fb2 popularity in Cyrillic segment).

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

I don't know anything valuable that hackers can steal from a Kindle, though. Maybe Amazon login credentials or session tokens? I'd expect that info to be encrypted, though.

Maybe they're worrying about stuff from the other direction, when the kindle sends usage, reading, etc. information back to amazon the virus writers could try sending a virus back to amazon.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by hius07

Have a little bit more: about one hundred per month (because of fb2 popularity in Cyrillic segment).

That’s still a very small population compared to how many Kindles Amazon sells.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Maybe they're worrying about stuff from the other direction, when the kindle sends usage, reading, etc. information back to amazon the virus writers could try sending a virus back to amazon.

Extremely unlikely, also if you knew how to do it, you don't need a kindle at all.

One imagines all input is well sanitised anyway.
Part of a series
https://xkcd.com/327/
Beware the mom of little Bobby Tables.

Edit more Mrs Roberts, who is an elite hacker.
https://xkcd.com/341/
Mrs. Roberts' daughter is named "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory"
The daughter "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory Elaine Roberts", known simply as Elaine or Elaine Roberts, is the world's best hacker.
She wouldn't need a Kindle to do mischief to Amazon if Amazon did have exploitable flaws on their information gathering.

[Deskisamess]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Just a new version number so far for me on my Oasis2.

Same here on my Oasis 2.

[rcentros]

Any of the expected new features showing up yet? With the issues I've had with recent releases I'm a little reluctant to upgrade "blind" into this 5.12.4.

[Dee Q]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Any of the expected new features showing up yet? With the issues I've had with recent releases I'm a little reluctant to upgrade "blind" into this 5.12.4.

Not yet. But I suspect it'd be similar to the latest update for Kindle iOS, which has an updated Aa menu too.

[jhowell]

Someone on reddit is claiming to have the new cover screensaver feature working on their Kindle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comm..._mode_exactly/

Edit: Apparently a hoax using a jailbroken Kindle.