Quote:
Originally Posted by pghaworth
thankfully, no. it is 4.18.13737. even the desktop forced the update. I connected and setup a fake reg on the device. nothing more I could do.
eta: affiliate is kobo so I left it alone for now
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I don't know if this works when you connect it to the desktop app (but it definitely works when connecting by wifi), but if you change the affiliate name to a non-existing affiliate (like nobody or hfhfkdj), the firmware update check will always fail, essentially disabling automatic updates and allowing you to control when it gets to update (which is probably safer to do than using the patch that's supposed to do the same thing).
And I think you're like me who values privacy, so if you didn't know, you can also implement hosts file blocking to block it from talking to Google Analytics and even the Kobo servers if you want (say for example, you only wanted to use Pocket or Dropbox but not the Kobo store, or just run an SSH server, etc.).
Someone discovered a commented-out hosts file in an older firmware version that listed a bunch of Google Analytics domains, and in 2018,
someone ran Wireshark to see what kind of traffic went out over TCP (but they didn't test Pocket and Dropbox functionality, so someone would need to update the list to block stuff like that too if people wanted that).
Anyway, here's the hosts entries I use. I would suggest adding them to one of the many
adblock/malware/anti-tracker hosts files you can find on the internet.
You can use kobopatch to flash it to /etc/hosts along with all the other patches you may use (look at the bottom of the kobopatch.yaml file for examples on how to do so).
But again, it'd be nice if someone could run Wireshark on a stock newer firmware version and trying the various other services like Overdrive and Pocket so the list could be updated. Any volunteers?