Amazon Kindle Paperwhite can now be jailbroken

If you happened to get your hands on a Kindle Paperwhite before they eventually sold out, you’re definitely one of the lucky ones. You also might be happy to know that a jailbreak was discovered for the device, so if you’re feeling adventurous and enjoy taking risks, this might be something that you’re interested in.

The Kindle Paperwhite has only been available for a few days now, and there’s already a jailbreak for it. Then again, it seems that hackers were able to break into it pretty easily from the looks of things. It turns out the exploit is similar to the hack that was initiated on the Kindle Touch, so half the battle was already complete.

Installation is quite easy as well. It only requires you to upload a certain file to the root directory of the Kindle Paperwhite and then restart the device. When it boots up again, your Paperwhite should be completely jailbroken. From here, you can do a lot of cool things that you normally wouldn’t be able to do, including displaying different information like the weather, or hooking it up to a Raspberry Pi for some extended fun.

Despite how easy this certain jailbreak works, we obviously want to warn you that jailbreaking anything is not for the faint of heart, so if you’re not sure you have the capabilities or even the guts to do such a thing, it’s probably best to just let it be. If you’re giving yourself the green light, just be aware that there’s always a chance of bricking your device no matter how experienced you are — things just happen in mysterious ways. Good luck!

[via Hack A Day]