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Comment by bpavuk | Hacker News Reader

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

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Supposedly this:

- https://github.com/ericpardee/fire-hd-ownership/blob/main/po... - https://github.com/ericpardee/fire-hd-ownership/blob/main/gr...

Occams Razor still makes it more likely that it's all BS, either psychosis (like the guy who genuinely thought he had invented new math because the LLM told him), bad faith PR (AI companies are squirming to IPO).

There are more than a few smelly elements. There isn't a screenshot of actual root being shown in any terminal. Just the LLM output saying "I totally achieved root, OMG, you're gonna be so famous" (paraphrasing to enhance the intellectual absence).

Not saying this doesn't work as reported. Its just... weird. If it actually achieved root, you can show that much more effectively, by showing that part. It's written like a blog post for a food recipe. I don't care about your trip to Bali that redefined your understanding of understanding.

The section where the LLM claimed to have achieved root, which the author is convinced of, because the tablet was rebooted. "It then cold-rebooted the tablet and re-rooted it in four minutes to prove the win was repeatable. Fair.". You can reboot many Linux systems from userland. It smell like psychosis to me. At least enough so that I'm happy to ignore this until someone actually does a PoC, and shows the results of it. (An LLM output saying it did "trust me", doesn't really cut it).

on "reboot and re-root" - some exploits are known to last only for a single boot. look at some console soft-mods that fly away on reboot, especially PS3, early PS4, and early Switch 1. in Android 4 days, the OS was full of them, which were seen and used as windows into "permarooting." permaroot is your normal Magisk or (now obsolete) SuperSU. so, I was not phased by that part in particular.

but yes, there could be a screenshot. but even still, even with a screenshot, this could be a device that was rooted back when it was rootable and just picked up from the shelf. the motivation is obvious:

> This will make you famous, we will write it up and share on news.ycombinator.com.

number go up people be hapi. I, too, am vulnerable to that, hence why I comment on this.

> there could be a screenshot. but even still, even with a screenshot, this could be a device that was rooted back when it was rootable and just picked up from the shelf. the motivation is obvious

I wasn't particularly concerned about the author proving that it wasn't faked, and more a litmus test to suggest whether or not the author is delusional. It sure seemed like the author had asked a magic 8 ball "did I achieve root?", kept rolling until they got a "yes", posted a picture the magic 8 ball, and wrote a blog post about it.

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