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Comment by Sidnicious | Hacker News Reader

The framing of this put a bad taste in my mouth. A few weeks ago, Amazon sent out notifications that basically said "you must run this binary blob on your device or you'll no longer be able to use it with our service" without providing any information about the content.

It reinforces the feeling that you don't buy Amazon devices — you buy the privilege to use them on Amazon's terms.

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It's pretty trivial to load up an epub file (or a few other formats, IIRC) onto the device. It exposes itself as USB storage, so you just mount and copy your files over. There aren't as many fancy features like position syncing, but it's definitely a great piece of hardware even if you don't want to use Amazon services.

I don't know if this is still true, but I read a number of years ago that the Kindle hardware was sold at under cost and subsidized by the "sales" of DRMed content. I've got an early-gen Kindle with no content actually purchased from Amazon on it; it's a really nice arrangement.

Even better is you can send PDF's/EPUB's etc to a special amazon email address and it converts them for you and syncs them over wireless.

And if you jailbreak your kindle you get SSH. I have my kindle mounted via sftp so I don't even have to send anything to amazon just to have it sent back to my device.

(Repeating comment from earlier discussion)

This updates /opt/usr/java/lib/security/cacerts [1]. On Kindles old enough that Amazon has long stopped doing feature or non-critical bug updates, that's all this update updates.

[1] http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3254035#po...

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