Kindle Touch Gets World's Simplest Jailbreak

Nate the greatest writes "Can you play an MP3 file? Then you can jailbreak the new Kindle Touch. A new hack was posted this morning that roots the Kindle Touch/K5 and opens the way for future hacks. The hacker also reveals that the K5 runs on HTML5, which should make it a lot easier to come up with new apps. Epub, anyone?"

Comments

Doubleplusgood!

[PopeAlien]

Could this hack be used to protect your ebook purchases so they can't be revoked after the fact 1984 style?

Re:Doubleplusgood!

[causality]

I'd like to see the argument you put up when a stolen car you buy gets taken away from you. Two consenting adults, right?

That scenario involves a quite unwilling third party. That's exactly the problem I have with Amazon's action -- the issue was between Amazon and the rightsholder. They chose to involve unwilling third parties (their own customers at that). You are only reinforcing my point here.

That isn't two consenting adults. That's two consenting adults, one of which is using fraud, and a third adult who's very much not consenting. It's a big difference.

As said already, this was ONE frigging book in the existence of their ebook store, and people got full refunds to purchase the very same book, word from word, from a source that was legally able to sell it.

That's a most amicable way to handle it. I appreciate you highlighting the goodwill that Amazon showed once the situation happened. That part is easy to underappreciate and was worth a reminder.

I still don't find it acceptable to make this your customers' problem. You didn't do your homework and vet the product you offered for sale, that's your fault, you get to sort it out on your own. There are records of how many copies were sold, so you remit payments to the actual rightsholder plus some negotiated fee for accidentally infringing on their copyright and you're done. To put it another way, if this happened with a physical paper book would you support them breaking into your home to take it back as long as they leave an envelope with the money on your kitchen table? After all, on page 37 of the EULA you clearly gave them that right...

Why is this so acceptable in the digital world? If it's intellectual _property_ let's treat it like property. If it's zeroes and ones, let's treat it like zeroes and ones. This is a desire to have one's cake and eat it too. It's not reasonable.

To make a more minor point ... instead of going through a refund process and all the transactions that involves... why not just overwrite the book on the device and replace it with the legal copy? Customers might not even notice it happened. Why inconvenience them if you're going to have such remote capabilities at all?

You decry the apologists. But quite the contrary, I think you just want to find fault in anything a "big evil corporation" does.

When they do things the hard way for no good reason, and cause problems that could have been prevented, then the fault is there whether I find it or not.

XSS

[Anonymous Coward]

So the Kindle was jailbroken by a XSS vulnerability?
That's cool

Re:World's simplest?

[ClioCJS]

That assumes you know jailbreakme is the right site with the right kind of jailbrake. I spent about 3-5 hours trying to figure out how to jailbrake my iPhone (given to me; I'd never buy one) and having gone through several different jailbrake methods before I got one that worked right. And I'm not somebody who doesn't know how to do things. I ultimately had to pop in an IRC channel and speak to actual people. There was a site - jailbrakematrix - which helped explain which jailbrakes work for which versions. Mine was a 2G/iPhone Original. And the jailbrake only worked with the latest firmware, which I had to update.

So uh, yeah. Playing an mp3 is easier than that.

Re:I would think that this was a major problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can stick album art in the id3 tag if you want; that could easily be several kb in size. Nowadays people put the cover art in every track: the redundant data isn't half as annoying as trying to manage it separately.

Re:World's simplest?

[sound vision]

There's no way they did this intentionally. The execution of arbitrary scripts from an MP3 file has far-ranging implications for normal users. Someone's going to end up using this exploit to write malware. If that becomes widespread, you'll get "Kindles get viruses" into the mind of the consumer. They did not want this bug/security flaw. Coincidentally, it's a "happy accident" for people who want to jailbreak their devices (which are a miniscule minority with no impact on Amazon's bottom line). But there's no reason why Amazon would want this type of vulnerability in their device.