I turned my unused Kindle into a photo frame with GPT-6 Astra
nirajrajgor.com126 points by nirajrajgor 4 hours ago
126 points by nirajrajgor 4 hours ago
While everyone has been worried about it becoming too easy to hack into things, something I've been worried about for the last few years is it becoming too hard to hack into things. Right now, all of these things are being broken into to be jailbroken and such, but the companies building these hardware devices have access to the models too.
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.
I don’t think it’s symmetrical. As a company, in a lot of cases, you get one shot to secure the thing. And then all owners collectively then get infinite time to jailbreak it.
Tell that to the people trying to break the Xbox One. Took 12 years. As far as I know the latest console still isn't cracked fully. In the past a lot of security holes were due to a supplier not having their security game up to snuff. AI will help B tier security people become A tier so I suspect these Microsoft scenarios will be more common.
OTA updates?
Only until consumers get fed up with everything from their TV to their coffee maker spying on them and start demanding IOT products that don't actually connect to the Internet and instead interact with a local gateway device. That may never happen, but the barriers to making all your gadgets cooperate and speak the same protocol instead of requiring vendor-specific apps are definitely getting lower.
My 2016 Kindle has been in airplane mode since 2018 and I don't plan on ever changing that.
Mod chips may help there, or UART debugging. You can’t OTA update the PCB inside.
Why the fuck is it normal for a device bought and owned by you to be inaccessible to you?
Companies say "security" and mean "security of our business model".
So many consumers are convinced that their phone or device got slower “due to age” as though it’s not a literal computer.
I think Apple was found to slow down old iPhones at some point no?
Edit: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-paying-113-million-law...
I think this is true, but on the flip side it could become common to buy "blank" hardware where the user provides their own OS or firmware. In the past it was just too burdensome to do this so we expected the hardware vendor to provide the software, but we could enter an era where providing the software is relatively easy.
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.
Even better, there's all sorts of e-waste tier devices that can get a second life now. One of my many projects right now is bringing up my own software stack on the Echo Dot 2nd gen, there's tons of hardware that can be bought for almost nothing (or already sitting in a box :P) just waiting to be liberated.
The next generation of products may be much more aggressively locked down however. Even old stuff like the xbox 360 is still quite difficult to hack.
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.
Nah, we just start opening the phones, cutting off some PBC patches, soldering some wires, and intercepting/synthesizing signals live. Keeping phones locked is just a zero sum game.
Not to tempt fate here, but this is why eFuses were adopted at the SOC-level.
Yes, and bus encryption. I used to think "if a human made it, a human can break it" but that may no longer be true with disparate access to frontier models.
The path of the hacking skill just changes locations. There will always be a solution to break into systems you physically own.
You can’t encrypt everything in a way where I can’t hack my devices. Sure difficulty and risk will increase once you start hacking in the hardware, but it’s the hardware itself that will be the final vector. This was just the destination we were always headed toward anyways.
If by "secure" you mean keep owners from using a device in whatever way they wish, then I hope whoever made that decision fails, and I wish them discomfort and inconvenience as karma for the attempt.
Is it just entirely unprofitable to sell hardware devices unsubsidized without locking it all into restrictive ecosystems & services?
Nintendo manages to squeak out a margin on hardware unlike the other big players. However, this is only because they trail behind in specs, and their devices are simply cheaper.
My weird take: I wish Nintendo would ship an even less powerful system.
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.
Very few non first party game where worth playing on the ds if you had access to anything else to be honest, at least when I was a kid. I do wish we had actually pocketable ish consoles from the big 3, but it seems like this market is covered by android devices.
Normal profit is not enough any more. It must be 1000x return, infinite growth, monopolize an entire industry style profit.
erm since when was normal profit considered enough?
Normal profit is what an investor demands at the absolute bare minimum. They dont 'feel' better off if its not being beaten.
I would think the more viable path (in the US) would be the legal system. i.e. Amazon pressuring frontier labs to add "safeguards" to protect their IP.
At least for now, they have to build the hardware with the old shitty AI, and then we get to... let's just say "utilize", the hardware we own using the new and much smarter AIs.
I'm all for allowing tinkering on a Kindle, but my pacemaker is off limits
There should be no need for hacking. If there is a right to repair, there should be a right to reprogram any computer - and penalty for implementing measures to prevent re-programming. Right to reprogram also means that the consumer gets a choice of firmware instead of being forced to use inferior factory firmware with limited capabilities and creates a possibility for firmwares market. Also reduces electronic waste.
Everybody except capitalists wins with right to reprogram.
Well, before they do, can someone jailbreak various cars?I am too scared to brick mine.
In Russia car mechanics "unlock" Chinese cars that are locked to be operated in China only (such cars are much cheaper than over-priced international versions having the same hardware).
if so that seems to make 'right to repair' all that more of an imperative.
It’s also very easy to get esp32 thingies today and run everything open source.
If anything apples closeness in the age of disposable software is going to kill it.
What you’re essentially saying is right now we have weak human written code that might have some vulnerabilities, but something written by a frontier LLM may not have those.
More like companies can spend the money to have AI scan everything and pick off all the low hanging fruit. I work on a legacy codebase and these new AI tools are finding mountains of very stupid very serious security issues. After we finally get through them we will have a codebase that has no easily found exploits left.
Not exactly imo, you could spend a crapton of money with white box pen testing with a bunch of frontier llms, and it might become a bunch harder to break into (it generally costs more to attack than it does to defend). Not to mention formal verification might become possible for more devices which might make it nearly impossible to find exploits.
The write up says it used an existing jailbreak.
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.
Reading this causes embarassment from author's helplessness.
> 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.
It's unfortunate because like... in theory if you apply the right kind of debugging philosophy you can use this tooling to help you move through the work a bit more easily.
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'm a seasoned embedded engineer and it took me hours to figure what the "right" jailbreak was and how it worked. In the end it was easy to accomplish but as usual the documentation is abysmal.
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.
I dunno, I'm a kinda-dumb web developer who's spent the past 9 months deep-frying my brain with LLM model output, and it also took me multiple hours (but, less than a day) to figure out the right jailbreak for my kindle and how to run it. I think that's probably just how long it takes to find what you need on the kindle jailbreaking wiki and carefully follow the instructions, regardless of what other skills and preexisting knowledge you may have.
Opus 5.5 has built Lineage ROMs for me for 3 different devices in the last couple of weeks, that do not have official Lineage support or any one else working on them.
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.
This is what I used to jailbreak mine: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html
> We adapted the existing jailbreak from SpiderCat, released by sparklerfish and the KindleModding community, and built custom tools called KindleCTL around it.
So it's not a solution originated from Astra?
I was able to do something pretty similar w Claude Code 4 months ago w Opus 4.8 (https://github.com/brunomarinho/labs-kindle-artframe). It took a few attempts as Claude understands that jailbreaking is not legal.
Me too, hacked into my old fitness tracker, but using grok, because gpt6 refused. Interesting times we live in. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49714479
I find that fascinating because I was able to get Claude to jailbreak my Kindles and add them to my tech ecosystem at home. I also was able to get it to use jailbreaking hacks on my Spotify car thing and implement some alternative ways for my raspberry pi to drive it.
In the US, jailbreaking is generally legal.
Claude is just a lil bitch.
Yes! I had it refuse on a similar claim of legality and when challenged to say what law forbids it it proceeded. Lil bitch.
One more reason why regulation/market capture shouldn't be happening and leave the world reliant on one or two actors
This is one reason why I think the AI revolution may not in the short term be a huge stock-market boom. By breaking down anti-competitive walls it could in the near term hurt incumbents (amazon, google, reddit, etc).
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.
You overestimate just how little pirating actually goes on relative to the entire populace
You forget that the share of uBlock and Morphe users are like 0.2% of the whole userbase. And I am afraid that if it was more, it would be completely locked down and a massive focus from the companies.
Most people don't give a shit and don't want to spend time with this shit
I wanted to do this with a google home hub so i can run my own fully local "home assisant", but claude rejected it... instead i ordered a used lenovo thinkview device which appetently has a community around custom bootloading...
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.
claude code helped me get access to the raw files from a scientific instrument we use in the lab all the time, but which won't give us raw data (only PDF reports). claude asked me for the .exe, which it promptly decompiled and reverse engineered the data format, and then helped me write my own analysis suite for the raw data. super cool.
I can't get GPT-6 models to do any work with compilers or anything deemed hacky, so I'm surprised it completed this without any refusals. I guess since it was just off-the-shelf stuff, it went through.
I did the same couple years ago using Google. Should CNN run a story about me?
It will be curious how anti regulation all these execs are when they start losing money.
I jailbroke my kindle with OpenCode's Big Pickle a few months ago.
Didn't I read this a year ago?
It helped me flash my router with openwrt last week - including running some exploit itself via codex and instructing me how to connect to it via uart (its a multi step process) to load bin permanently.
anthropic loses customers when they constantly tell you no it wont help you solve a problem that most other models have no problem solving at this point. I dont even bother asking opus those kind of questions when I know deepseek-4.1-flash or glm-5.3* or mistral-large-4 will give the proper solution. It has a tendancy of creating bugs in your code, but wont help in the resolution of those bugs. Pretty sad.
Just a quick reminder, you have the legal right to "jailbreak" devices that you own. This is a recognized exemption and a right that has been fought over in court.
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.
> 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 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?
the ai can just read the code? when your prompt is 'jailbreak my kindle' (example) and it takes X hours, obviously the working code that jailbreaks the kindle is worth more than the 3 word prompt.
come on man, it has significantly reduced value, but your comment assumes that if any two people input the same prompt (or sequence of prompts) they would get the same working answer, where its very much possible he had some sequence of guiding, and the thing he is sharing is a working product. which has more value than a prompt that may produce a working product some of the time...
Meanwhile Opus 5.5 didn't even answer my question about reading user memory in a linux die notifier, a question which had nothing to do with security, just low-level system programming..
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 :)
I have the opposite experience.
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.
I only keep an OpenAI sub for Daybreak Blue at this point. It's pretty easy to get access to, but requires a Yubikey.
I don't know the "magic" which goes into prompts which allows them to continue, but I've been using Opus+Fable 5+ for reverse engineering games and adding mods to games which weren't meant to support them. For some reason, I've not run into the "safe guards" around hacking despite Anthropic models happily de-compiling and examining applications at my request.
This is why I’ve gone all in on codex. I got tired of being patronized and coddled by Anthropic.
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