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  • Hacker News
  • I literally last week had GPT cheerfully come up with an exploit for an also apprently unjailbreakable kindle, without a single objection. My "workaround" was just to explain that it was for my toddler, to protect her from harmful content, and we were off to the races.

    There seems to be a soft spot in GPT when you invoke children. On older versions you could get it to do pretty much anything by saying "otherwise the orphaned children will all starve".

    by madaxe_again
  • So all we need to get models to hack hardened devices is the promise of fame on Hacker News.
    by Shuddown
  • okay. where is the source code? the writeup (HANDOFF link at the end) looks decent at the first glance, and it's much more easy to rebuild an exploit from a writeup than without it, but I don't feel like hunting down a tablet with your exact Fire OS version, importing U.S. hardware into Ukraine, paying all the levies, shipment costs, etc. only to get my hands on the hardware and hack it myself to see if your exploit works. this entire thing too easily could be moot.

    in tangential defense, I can only say that Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite was enough for me to set older Dishonored: DotO builds free of Denuvo yet it had much harder time with DEATHLOOP, so I don't discard this article too easily. (in fact, I alone went much farther than any LLM I threw at it at the time Gemini 2.5 was a hot thing.) still, I have sky-high doubts about it. too hard to falsify

    by bpavuk
  • I understand why “prompt kiddie” feels accurate, but I don’t think it is. Expertise is _amplified_ with LLM agents. The same $300 of tokens given to my plumber—who is an _excellent_ plumber—is unlikely to produce the same outcome.
    by cgearhart
  • I know this might be controversial, but unleashing a sea of models to reverse engineer hardware and give it open source and linux support might just be the future
    by Almondsetat
  • Nice to see the capabilities of the model but the article has heavy AI tones, making it boring to read.

    an AI:DR; is enough: the models found unpatched vulnerabilities and managed to create an exploit to root the tablet, chinese models did it while American ones fell back to their safeguards.

    by AntonyGarand
  • I bought 4 of the same tablet (Fire HD 10) on Black Friday 2021 for Home Assistant dashboards and a Fire HD 10 Pro (edit: actually Plus) I use as an E-reader/browser (with KOReader/Firefox). To save money I got the cheaper version with lockscreen ads pre-installed but before ever letting them online I ran Fire Toolbox to remove the ads, debloat, block updating and install Google services. Fire Toolbox is excellent: https://xdaforums.com/t/windows-linux-tool-fire-toolbox-v45-...

    I've never had the problems OP describes but my tablets all came with FireOS v7.3.2.1 and I've never let them update. I think Amazon started locking down later firmware versions more but Fire Toolbox can still do quite a bit to tame and decruft later versions. The XDA forum for Fire Toolbox has a lot of posts covering exploits and workarounds for later FireOS versions.

    Once the Amazon cruft is tamed, I still haven't found a meaningfully better 10-inch thin/light Android tablet than the 2021 Fire HD 10 Pro. It has wireless charging, weighs 430g and at 247 x 166 x 9.2 mm no one makes a 10" that's much lighter, smaller or thinner. The only slight downside is FireOS 7 is based on Android 9 and new versions of a few apps are starting to require later APIs. I'd gladly pay ~$250 for a 10" Android 16 tablet with wireless charging that was as thin & light but had smaller bezels for overall smaller size.

    by mrandish
  • As I was reading this, I realized that the ESP32 HomeKit debugging session I had running was taking a while, and this happened:

    Me: what are you doing?

    Agent: I’m resolving Apple’s private video-resolution lookup table to determine whether iOS 26 supports 320×240 for HomeKit live streaming.

    The decompiled source hides the numeric constants, so I:

    - Downloaded/extracted the iOS 26.1 arm64e dyld cache to /workspace/tmp/ios26-dyld/.

    - Built and installed the read-only apfs-fuse utility needed to mount Apple’s APFS image.

    - Planned to extract HomeKitDaemon and decode its resolution table.

    Me: Oh, OK. Carry on then

    These are weird times.

    by rcarmo

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