Amazon has been locked in a game of cat and mouse with the Kindle modding community for years, with new jailbreaks popping up as fast as Amazon can put out new firmware to shut them down. Amazon’s latest round of firmware, 5.18.x, has completely shut down WinterBreak, the last big jailbreak to hit the e-readers. But the Kindle modding community has struck again, this time with a jailbreak that only works on ad-supported Kindle’s: AdBreak.
The poetic justice of ads as a vector
AdBreak is exploiting a weakness in the way Amazon delivers ads to its Kindles, so if your Kindle doesn’t receive ads, this jailbreak won’t work for you (via eReadersForum). However, if you have an ad-free Kindle, you can subscribe to “Special Offers” via your Content page on the Amazon website to open the door for this exploit. We haven’t tried it on our Kindles, but reports online indicate that the jailbreak doesn’t work on Scribe and Colorsoft models.
If you want to give this a shot, and you’re on the 5.18.x firmware, you can follow the quick guide posted over at MobileRead or go more in depth at kindlemodding.org. It’s worth mentioning that AdBreak is still in the experimental stages. If you manage to get it working (and there are a fair number of success stories already posted), you’ll be able to enjoy the seedy world of underground Kindle apps, in particular KOReader, a document viewer infinitely more customizable than what Kindle offers.
Get AdBreak while you still can
There are rumors that AdBreak could be used to undo the more-restrictive DRM Amazon has recently put in place, but that doesn’t appear to be the case as of yet. Still, the timing is a little embarrassing for Amazon since it has a big Kindle hardware announcement in just a few days. As always with these jailbreaks, you only have a limited time to make use of it, because if we know, then Amazon definitely knows, and that means it’s already working on a way to block it.
