Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
Is Amazon intentionally attempting to lock down the device?
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Yes, they are. It's not always for the reasons folks think, but it still isn't what many would consider a
good reason.
Security is a tricky business, especially when we have more networked devices than ever before. The Kindle itself is a networked device. The same security holes that enable jailbreaking, are security holes that can be used for malicious reasons as well. So a developer who is security minded needs to close remote execution holes at a minimum.
DRM is another issue, as insecurities in the device give other avenues of attack on the DRM scheme. Many companies have service agreements with content owners saying how quickly the manufacturer will fix security flaws in their devices and/or DRM. Usually if they don't, there is some sort of penalty (Apple's agreement with music providers seemed to indicate they could pull their entire catalogs from iTunes if Apple didn't fix certain types of holes in X days). So there's contractual obligations to secure their devices in many cases.
There's definitely an interesting topic here beneath the surface though. But that's more for another thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AZImmortal
I'm guessing that it has to be intentional by design since even if they unintentionally disabled the jailbreak, they still have to go out of their way to wipe out your homebrew. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that if they just simply disabled the jailbreak, then the homebrew that you already have installed should still work. As far as the Sony readers go, I forgot that they also run Android, but yeah, the Nooks are definitely the golden child as far as the Android community is concerned.
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It's simpler than that: updates are messy. Say I release a patch that only changes what needs to be changed to go from 1.0 to 1.1. But wait, my users made their own modifications to 1.0 so that it isn't really 1.0 anymore. What happens when my patch collides with those other modifications? Who knows. And it could be bad.
The very real reason why this could be bad is actually the very old 1.1 update Apple pushed out for the iPhone. The SIM unlock of the time collided badly with the delta patch of 1.1 and resulted in phones that no longer worked correctly (the baseband was essentially turned into gibberish by having both the unlock and the 1.1 patch applied).
So these days, many devices don't do delta updates anymore, or they do limited deltas. There just is no real way to test out all the possible hacks and how they can interfere with an update, so developers have gotten into the habit of making sure hacks/etc can't interfere with the update. The usual result is that it disables all the hacks as part of the upgrade, as a side-effect.