Sounds like it. They kept emailing me and I kept ignoring it, thinking it was just a routine update. Had no idea that you had to update in the next couple of days.
iirc, they're dropping support for SSLv3 which was used on older firmwares.
There's some discussion about this on the mobileread forums [0]. Thought that was discussed, but can't find the post so I might not be remembering correctly.
No worries. As the page states, if you don't automatically update your device by March 22, you can still do so manually. This is very easy -- connect via USB cable and then drag and drop the update onto the device.
I'm pretty surprised that the Kindle 1st Generation is from 2007. It's pretty cool that Amazon is still supporting a product from 9 years ago. I would have expected support to drop off or at least not issue any new updates period.
I'm not surprised at all...the whole point for Amazon is ebook sales, they want install base, it's nice if you upgrade your device but many people will keep paying for books regardless of device version.
Throwing a few engineering headcount at keeping updates going as needed is more than worth it, and a more exact "when do we stop supporting this" trade-off can easily be calculated against usage and purchasing data since they have vertical integration to that degree.
observe the free falling sales of ereaders in more recent years (any public market research will do), and you'd understand that Amazons ebooks business needs these old devices more and more.
With phones getting bigger there's less need for dedicated ereaders. I mostly read on my phone, and I know other people who do too. The convenience of having books in your pocket outweighs the small screen size. From a 2015 article on phone reading ( http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-reading-143939... ):
"The number of people who read [e-books] primarily on phones has risen to 14% in the first quarter of 2015 from 9% in 2012."
I can't find more recent statistics but I expect it's continuing to rise. Convenience always beats quality, eg. MP3 vs CDs, early LCDs vs CRTs.
They haven't done any feature or bug fix updates in a long time for that Kindle, and this update contains no features or bug fixes. All this updated does is install new Java certificates, presumably to match new certificates on Amazon's servers.
I wonder if this will undo a jailbreak? I mainly use CoolReader to read ePub books on my trusty Kindle Keyboard, because of its better kerning and hyphenation.
Generally jailbreaks can be saved across kindle updates, but you should update to the latest version of the jailbreak and hotfix first. Some extensions might require reinstalling.
Of course, if you have an old device, it's probably jail breakable even on the newest supported version. Latest jailbreak is for 5.6.5, and it's been confirmed that you can update to the latest version after jailbreaking and keep it.
Had an interesting experience with this - we haven't updated my wife's older Kindle and Amazon mailed us a paper postcard warning about this. Losing the ability to OTA update puts them in a tough situation...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost missed this. Hadn't used my kindle in a long time and then I turned it back on. Apparently they keep a list of the people who recently used a kindle. The moment I turned mine on it sent me emails about it.
I never did see an email. I only found out by this thread. But I get so much spam from Amazon (and now Amazon.uk, since I gifted an open source dev in the UK from his wish list) that everything from them goes straight to junk. I even communicated directly with Amazon.uk and asked them to remove me, but the emails keep showing up.
Totally screwed. Battery completely dead on an older generation model I hadn't used for some time. I can't even get the charging light to come on despite trying all the tricks. Too late to get any kind of battery replacement and still get the update.
If it's a first generation, I have some tips for you, since I had the same problem. If not, I have no help for you but I'll go ahead and describe what I did anyway in case there are any first generation owners having the problem.
The first thing to check is that you actually are trying to charge it. I had completely forgotten that the first generation Kindle does not charge via the USB cable. It only charges via a small barrel jack. So of course when I plugged it into a USB charger, the charging light did not come on.
I took it out and checked it out on my multimeter. It was down to 2.3 volts. That's bad, and many chargers will not try to charge a lithium polymer battery that has been discharged that far. I assumed that this was why mine was not charging (I still thought at this point that it was supposed to charge via USB).
I had done some reading on recovering over-discharged lithium polymer batteries. It turns out there is quite a bit on the web about that, largely at sites in the radio controlled model vehicle communities. Apparently, those people have somewhat of a habit of accidentally running their batteries into the ground (all puns intended).
The danger in trying to recharge an over-discharged battery seems to be that the internal resistance goes up the more overly discharged the battery is. Chargers will push current appropriate for a regular battery through them, and the over-discharged battery will heat up much more than a regular battery because of the increased resistance (and also produce gases at a higher rate). The result is that you can cause the battery to burst into flames.
You can actually buy special pouches to put your lithium batteries in while they are charging that are designed to contain lithium battery fires and explosions...the very existence of these is scary [1] [2] [3].
Based on my reading, it seemed that as long as I kept the current low it would be safe to try to recharge the battery. I kludged together something on a breadboard to try this: http://i.imgur.com/UMW7EH2.jpg
The power supply on the write is producing 3.3 volts. Normally you would charge a lithium polymer at 4.3 volts, but my goal wasn't to fully charge the thing. I just wanted to get its voltage up to where the Kindle would be willing to charge it (at this point I still thought it charged via USB and so was assuming the reason it would not charge was the battery being so low that the kindle considered it unsafe to try).
The resistor was chosen so that (3.3v - Vbattery)/R was around 10 mA. The hope was that this was sufficiently below the normal charging current (probably around 150-300 mA) that even if the resistance was high it would not heat the battery too much, and I intended to frequently feel the battery and stop if I detected any heating. (The two leads going out of the picture go to the multimeter, which is monitoring the current).
When I started this going, I got the current I expected, and detected no heating of the battery. As I watched, the current started falling off, and the battery continued showing no signs of heating. I took this as a sign that the battery voltage was actually going up, and so the current was going down. I cut power and measured the battery voltage, and it was indeed up to around 2.5 volts!
I switched out the resistor for one that would give about 50 mA, and started charging again. The battery did not show any signs of heating, and the current again started going down as the voltage came up.
I kept doing this, lowing the resistance (aiming now for around 60-70 mA) and running until the current had fallen significantly, and then repeating, until finally I was using no resistor.
I got the battery up to about 3.2 volts this way, and actually got a some...
28 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 76.6 ms ] threadThere's some discussion about this on the mobileread forums [0]. Thought that was discussed, but can't find the post so I might not be remembering correctly.
[0]: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=150
Throwing a few engineering headcount at keeping updates going as needed is more than worth it, and a more exact "when do we stop supporting this" trade-off can easily be calculated against usage and purchasing data since they have vertical integration to that degree.
"The number of people who read [e-books] primarily on phones has risen to 14% in the first quarter of 2015 from 9% in 2012."
I can't find more recent statistics but I expect it's continuing to rise. Convenience always beats quality, eg. MP3 vs CDs, early LCDs vs CRTs.
Of course, if you have an old device, it's probably jail breakable even on the newest supported version. Latest jailbreak is for 5.6.5, and it's been confirmed that you can update to the latest version after jailbreaking and keep it.
It reinforces the feeling that you don't buy Amazon devices — you buy the privilege to use them on Amazon's terms.
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...
Bricked by the cloud.
The first thing to check is that you actually are trying to charge it. I had completely forgotten that the first generation Kindle does not charge via the USB cable. It only charges via a small barrel jack. So of course when I plugged it into a USB charger, the charging light did not come on.
The first generation has a removable battery, which looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/5Bv0EA3.jpg
I took it out and checked it out on my multimeter. It was down to 2.3 volts. That's bad, and many chargers will not try to charge a lithium polymer battery that has been discharged that far. I assumed that this was why mine was not charging (I still thought at this point that it was supposed to charge via USB).
I had done some reading on recovering over-discharged lithium polymer batteries. It turns out there is quite a bit on the web about that, largely at sites in the radio controlled model vehicle communities. Apparently, those people have somewhat of a habit of accidentally running their batteries into the ground (all puns intended).
The danger in trying to recharge an over-discharged battery seems to be that the internal resistance goes up the more overly discharged the battery is. Chargers will push current appropriate for a regular battery through them, and the over-discharged battery will heat up much more than a regular battery because of the increased resistance (and also produce gases at a higher rate). The result is that you can cause the battery to burst into flames.
You can actually buy special pouches to put your lithium batteries in while they are charging that are designed to contain lithium battery fires and explosions...the very existence of these is scary [1] [2] [3].
Based on my reading, it seemed that as long as I kept the current low it would be safe to try to recharge the battery. I kludged together something on a breadboard to try this: http://i.imgur.com/UMW7EH2.jpg
The power supply on the write is producing 3.3 volts. Normally you would charge a lithium polymer at 4.3 volts, but my goal wasn't to fully charge the thing. I just wanted to get its voltage up to where the Kindle would be willing to charge it (at this point I still thought it charged via USB and so was assuming the reason it would not charge was the battery being so low that the kindle considered it unsafe to try).
The resistor was chosen so that (3.3v - Vbattery)/R was around 10 mA. The hope was that this was sufficiently below the normal charging current (probably around 150-300 mA) that even if the resistance was high it would not heat the battery too much, and I intended to frequently feel the battery and stop if I detected any heating. (The two leads going out of the picture go to the multimeter, which is monitoring the current).
When I started this going, I got the current I expected, and detected no heating of the battery. As I watched, the current started falling off, and the battery continued showing no signs of heating. I took this as a sign that the battery voltage was actually going up, and so the current was going down. I cut power and measured the battery voltage, and it was indeed up to around 2.5 volts!
I switched out the resistor for one that would give about 50 mA, and started charging again. The battery did not show any signs of heating, and the current again started going down as the voltage came up.
I kept doing this, lowing the resistance (aiming now for around 60-70 mA) and running until the current had fallen significantly, and then repeating, until finally I was using no resistor.
I got the battery up to about 3.2 volts this way, and actually got a some...