Slashdot Mirror
Kindle Fire and Nook Upgrades Kill Root Access
jfruhlinger writes "The Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble Nook tablets are similar enough and close enough together in price that they ought to be fighting market share and one-upping each other in terms of features they offer users. But the latest OS upgrades to both gadgets claims to be an 'upgrade' while actually taking functionality away: both remove the ability to root the device."
A more balanced way of looking at it is that the updates fix known local privilege escalation vulnerabilities. This might be more of an issue for people wanting to hack on the Nook Tablet: its bootloader is confirmed locked, but reports lean toward the Kindle Fire having an unlocked bootloader letting anyone flash their own software without needing to gain root first.
I have several FlyTouch pads from China. The new ones are dual touch with 1ghz processors in a 7" format and are running around 80$ including shipping. They are google Android and they will send you the android image. Re-flashing is as easy as putting the image on an sd card and booting the unit with the sd card in it.
Not the greatest in the world but they are very good for around the house network access, book reading, hacking, etc.
No, the answer is that copyright doesn't grant all the privileges the publishers are claiming, at least in the USA. In particular, the Doctrine of First Sale pretty much says that you can legally do whatever you want with your copy once they've sold it to you (aside from using it to make more copies). That includes not only obvious things like transportation, but also lending—both free/personal loans and commercial rental.
Rental companies and retailers often do have special agreements with the publishers, but that's because the publishers are offering them a better deal, not because they need the agreement simply to resell or rent out the physical books/DVDs/etc.
Digital media falls into a rather gray area, which is how the publishers like it. They take advantage of the ephemeral nature of digital goods to undermine the First Sale doctrine, while simultaneously claiming that the content has been fixed in a tangible medium in order to gain copyright privileges over it. It should be one or the other, but they leverage the confusion to get their way on both counts.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
This does not impact the Nook Color in any significant way.
Both the Nook Color and Nook Tablet will try to boot off microSD first if they can. That's not part of the OS. However, the Nook Tablet requires a signed kernel to boot, and the Nook Color does not. So, this change results in a significant loss of hackability for the Nook Tablet, since you had to "jailbreak" it in some sense to do anything. It does not result in a significant loss of hackability for the older Nook Color, since you can still just write an unsigned kernel to a microSD card and you're off and running.
Disclaimer: this is my understanding from scouring the xda-dev forums for details and from hacking my own Nook Color. I've confirmed that 1.4.1 on the Nook Color does close the sideloading "hole", and that a 1.4.1 Nook Color will still boot stuff like CM7.1 from microSD card. The rest of it, I have not personally verified myself, but am summarizing my understanding from reading experts talking about it all.