|
I keep my Kindle in airplane mode. When I very first got it, I allowed it to connect to the Amazon mothership briefly, to update to the newest firmware available at that time. And also to register it. Being registered I can see it in My Devices on Amazon's website, and "Download for USB Transfer" eBooks to it, which then go through Calibre and get de-DRM'ed, then sideloaded.
Immediately after this initial firmware update and registration, I turning on airplane mode and have left it on. A few years back I was thinking that in order to protect myself in case I accidentally turned off airplane mode, I would go in and delete the WiFi login/password from the Kindle. So it wouldn't know where to connect if all of a sudden it found itself with WiFi turned on. You could also possibly leave airplane mode accidentally with some flavor of system reset I suppose (I don't know that for sure, but it's potentially possible).
But Amazon is sneaky. In order to get to the network configuration, you have to FIRST turn on WiFi! If WiFi is turned off, you cannot get to your network configuration (all the options are grayed out). Very sneaky Amazon, very sneaky!
So instead of nuking the potential network connection from the Kindle end, I nuked it from my router. One thing you CAN see on the Kindle - without having to turn on WiFi - is it's MAC address. So I simply blacklisted that MAC address in my router. So if the Kindle ever accidentally gets switched out of Airplane Mode and tries to connect to my WiFi - my router won't give it the time of day, even though the Kindle may know the login/password. The problem here is that if I ever factory reset my router, or even just replace it with a new one, I have to remember to blacklist the MAC address again.
Yeah, if you don't want these things to automatically update themselves, you have to go out of your way to prevent that. Amazon wants the default to be auto-update so they can maintain control of your device, and they will do whatever is necessary to make it a hassle for you to deactivate that.
I just thought - I should just take the Kindle far from my house, thus far from my WiFi, and take it out of airplane mode and kill the remembered login credentials for my network (which it couldn't access anyway, from a far distance away). I don't know why I didn't think of that earlier. Sheesh - I must be brain damaged to have not thought of that until now. Oh well. This will work for me, but wouldn't work for others who have cellular connectivity available in their Kindles (I don't). You folks with this network feature would just have to never accidentally leave airplane mode since you don't have a cellular login/password that you could kill.
|