View Single Post
Old 05-08-2012, 08:22 AM   #3
geekmaster
Carpe diem, c'est la vie.
geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.geekmaster ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
geekmaster's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,433
Karma: 10773668
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Multiverse 6627A
Device: K1 to PW3
In our kindles, one protective talisman that shields (some of) us from seemingly arbitrary changes within closed source system software like the kindle framework, is direct framebuffer and /dev/input device access. The people who prefer "official" GUI framework code view low-level coders such as myself as computer anarchists, whilst the low-level coders view high-level coders as government cheese-eaters.

Personally, I do not want to forsake the framework completely -- I want code that uses and controls both methods, but these recent 5.1.0 changes attack both high-level AND low-level (unofficial) apps, via high-level changes like re-obfuscation, and the "Spanish device codes" breaking high-level custom apps, and low-level changes like making 5.1.x eink structures incompatible with 5.0.x eink structures without renaming them.

Perhaps amazon is taking some clues from Bill Gates here, in an effort to give preferential support to apps with their own official blessing (look up "Windows ain't done till Lotus won't run").

In my view, amazon's recent hacker-protection efforts have the real effect of making them less relevant, making me want to go to an even deeper level in the hardware (such as wanting my own loadable kernel module eink driver).

I gave the amazon tech's a "piece of my mind" on the 5.1.0 changes making it difficult to write apps that work on both 5.1.x and 5.0.x, and I requested that they release a new update that is compatible with 5.0.x so we can drop support for 5.1.0 and declare it "hopelessly broken". They said they will get back to me "in a couple of days". We shall see...
geekmaster is offline   Reply With Quote