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.
Game consoles are basically the top tier of locked-down-home-appliances, because they're sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up later. It's thus very important that the games be difficult to pirate for as long as possible.
Basically nothing else is like that. That does show the top tier of what companies can do if they try hard enough, but I don't think AI will get you there. I expect you still need someone to care _deeply_ to get everything just right to make it as difficult as possible, otherwise there's just so much room for one small mistake.
Inkjet printers and coffee pods machines are other home oriented devices that are normally sold at a loss where official consumables are crazy expensive
Also, there will always be things we can do to a device that no single piece of compiled software can stop. If someone make the ultimate bitchchip, impossible to alter, someone will make the ultimate fukuchip, which works the exact same but can be attached directly around it with minor soldering.
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.
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.
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.
When the solution becomes "you need a nanometer precision stepper and an electron beam to modify the SoC's circuitry and dismantle the 'root of trust' that's making your hardware betray you to the corporate interests", you've lost.
We can't rely on hardware staying hackable. We couldn't ever since "secure boot" became a thing.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno, I have a closed-loop insulin pump / CGM and it pisses me off that the algorithm on which my health and life depend is not available for me to look at, understand and evaluate. Likewise there are all sorts of artificial limits on getting even read-only access to my data, such as blood glucose. It feels wildly disempowering to me.
I imagine I would feel similarly about a pacemaker. How does it work? What algorithm does it use to determine what to do at any given moment? Does it have settings? Are they optimally chosen? Are there bugs? Security flaws?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
but how?... https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html it should take you a few minutes, maybe longer if you have to fill the system up with data to prevent updates but "hours" from a embedded engineer?
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.
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.
What's really fun is when you get halfway through a completely legitimate engineering problem and then any further attempts are permanently rejected - leaving you with a half-working (if you're lucky) codebase. Stunning UX.
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.
> We adapted the existing jailbreak from SpiderCat, released by sparklerfish and the KindleModding community, and built custom tools called KindleCTL around it.
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 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'm hesitant to say, since the "data format" was actually just a password-protected zip file. claude was actually able to find the password in the decompiled .exe to extract the data in the zip... but i'm worried if i'm public about it, they'll change the password!
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.
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.
> 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.
and
> 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.
I jailbroke my Kindle with GPT-5.5 Sol and turned it into an external e-paper display for the long batches of text AI models generate on a regular basis.
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
Yes, which is why I didn't post it to HN as a project. I posted this as an aside because I think it's an interesting way of showing that you can use AI in ways that other people just won't (i.e. I implemented the 3001 and FAA readability standards here). link https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled/blob/main/code/TYPO... (I added the link to the comment too!)
> 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's about raw environmental efficiency?
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Game consoles are basically the top tier of locked-down-home-appliances, because they're sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up later. It's thus very important that the games be difficult to pirate for as long as possible.
Basically nothing else is like that. That does show the top tier of what companies can do if they try hard enough, but I don't think AI will get you there. I expect you still need someone to care _deeply_ to get everything just right to make it as difficult as possible, otherwise there's just so much room for one small mistake.
Inkjet printers and coffee pods machines are other home oriented devices that are normally sold at a loss where official consumables are crazy expensive
The immediate question as to why someone is taking so long to break the Xbox One is "Why would anyone want to beak the Xbox One?"
It has very little in the way of exclusives, and it can run emulators on Dev Mode.
It's pointless. That's why no one did for a decade.
Also, there will always be things we can do to a device that no single piece of compiled software can stop. If someone make the ultimate bitchchip, impossible to alter, someone will make the ultimate fukuchip, which works the exact same but can be attached directly around it with minor soldering.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
So many people think literal computers get slower "due to age" as well, and not mal/bloat ware.
I think Apple was found to slow down old iPhones at some point no?
Edit: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-paying-113-million-law...
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.
When the solution becomes "you need a nanometer precision stepper and an electron beam to modify the SoC's circuitry and dismantle the 'root of trust' that's making your hardware betray you to the corporate interests", you've lost.
We can't rely on hardware staying hackable. We couldn't ever since "secure boot" became a thing.
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.
Fortunes weave doesn't even run at 60 frames. The hardware could be better.
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.
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.
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.
I'm all for allowing tinkering on a Kindle, but my pacemaker is off limits
I dunno, I have a closed-loop insulin pump / CGM and it pisses me off that the algorithm on which my health and life depend is not available for me to look at, understand and evaluate. Likewise there are all sorts of artificial limits on getting even read-only access to my data, such as blood glucose. It feels wildly disempowering to me.
I imagine I would feel similarly about a pacemaker. How does it work? What algorithm does it use to determine what to do at any given moment? Does it have settings? Are they optimally chosen? Are there bugs? Security flaws?
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.
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.
Basically Apple devices, which are becoming ubiquitous.
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.
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.
I doubt management will throw away margins to harden every device
Yes for most devices people care to jailbreak though.
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.
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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.
but how?... https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html it should take you a few minutes, maybe longer if you have to fill the system up with data to prevent updates but "hours" from a embedded engineer?
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.
why? https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html its dead simple there is no way it takes hours
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
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.
What's really fun is when you get halfway through a completely legitimate engineering problem and then any further attempts are permanently rejected - leaving you with a half-working (if you're lucky) codebase. Stunning UX.
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.
What’s the Spotify car thing jailbreak? The Spotify carplay UX is so abysmal that it needs a jailbreak and custom UI to be usable.
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.
You just have to get it in the mood.
One more reason why regulation/market capture shouldn't be happening and leave the world reliant on one or two actors
I had no prior kindle jailbreak experience.
I just went to the kindle modding website, followed the instructions, and jailbroke in like 5 minutes.
> 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?
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
But why ? Kindle have been jail broken for years and there are already many examples of using kindles as photo frames
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.
Hell yeah. What instrument?
i'm hesitant to say, since the "data format" was actually just a password-protected zip file. claude was actually able to find the password in the decompiled .exe to extract the data in the zip... but i'm worried if i'm public about it, they'll change the password!
curious too
I did the exact same project about a month ago with Opus4.8. No Asta required.
It will be curious how anti regulation all these execs are when they start losing money.
Turning Kindle into photo frame is not exciting, turning phot frame into Kindle would be!
yea especially when there exists already the code to do a photo frame https://github.com/aesuli/Kindle-Photo-Frame
I did the same couple years ago using Google. Should CNN run a story about me?
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 jailbroke my kindle with OpenCode's Big Pickle a few months ago.
Didn't I read this a year ago?
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...
and I jailbroke my Kindle with GPT-5.5 Sol and turned it into an external e-paper display for the long batches of text AI models generate on a regular basis.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.
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...
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.
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.
This is why I’ve gone all in on codex. I got tired of being patronized and coddled by Anthropic.
If only the hadn't cut my usage limits by 50%.
Sol 6.1 is ok
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.
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