No Devs Allowed? Kindle Fire HD Family Locked Down

As is customary with most devices from major manufacturers, the new Kindle Fire HD brothers are coming out of Amazon’s womb very much locked down. Well, not just locked down—that would be a bit of an understatement. The KFHD family is beyond being locked, and according to Amazon’s engineers, the new system is impossible to crack. XDA Recognized Contributor kinfauns has started a discussion thread in the newly added forum to talk about and discuss the possible cracks available (if any) on these devices.

The original KF was a rather tough cookie to crack, as Amazon tried to prevent people from using these devices to do things outside of the intended usage (which in this case was their digital “store front”). Since the original (or first generation) was cracked with root and custom ROMs  flying all over the web, the designers of the device were tasked with preventing this from happening again. From Amazon’s perspective, it makes perfect sense to protect the devices from rooting and general hackery due to quite a few obvious points:

• Services used in an unintended manner such as tethering
• Direct access to tons of media content that could be hacked and transferred to others (piracy)
• Warranty claims (the previous hacking method on the original KF actually ended up bricking quite a few devices)

 The MLO (xloader, 1st stage bootloader) is signed and the boot header is the type used for HS (high security) OMAP devices with the M-Shield turned on. If the setup is comparable to the Nook Tablet, this is not good news for those hoping to modify these devices in one way or another. The Nook Tablet’s exploit was to utilize the external sdcard as an alternate boot device and that doesn’t really help with these 2nd generation KFs.

You can find more information in the original thread.

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[Thanks willverduzco for the tip!]