ericpardee/fire-hd-ownershipOwning a tablet Amazon kept shutting down — CVE-2022-38181 write-up, four AI models, and a blog
Owning the tablet I already bought.
In November 2022 I bought a Fire HD 10 (11th gen, 2021 model) on eBay for $114.26 to be a Home Assistant kiosk. It ran fine for years, then started powering itself off. The logs said why: Amazon's own software was issuing the shutdowns, and the packages responsible were protected from the device's owner. The only permanent fix was root — which nobody had ever achieved on this hardware.
Five months later, after a relay race between four AI models and $266.15 in API bills and subscriptions, the tablet is mine: root shell, SELinux permissive, and 100 Amazon packages removed (reversibly).
Read the story: blog.md
| Artifact | What it is |
|---|
blog.md | The story (served as the site homepage) |
HANDOFF.md | The full technical write-up (§9 = final exploit chain, §8 = GLM-5.2's addendum) |
REVIEW.md | GLM-5.2's audit that stopped a doomed 500-attempt grind |
original-history.txt | Sanitized transcripts of the Claude diagnosis months |
poc-28663/ | The CVE-2022-38181 proof-of-concept (Kimi K3's work) |
removed_manifest.txt | The 100 Amazon packages that were removed |
grind*.sh, root_grind.sh | The reboot-loop grinders |
hwparam.json, config.gz | Device parameter/config dumps |
ota_ps7326.bin) and extracted partitions — too big for git, and Amazon's firmware isn't mine to redistribute.The blog closes with a clip from the live show edition of LINUX Unplugged 680, "Go Hack Yourself" (Jupiter Broadcasting), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The clip is live-stream content, not part of the edited episode.