Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss official Sony PS5 news, a DirecTV early termination bill for a person who passed away, ToysRUs.com and Target.com, Twitter using emails and phone number to target ads, parking assist tech and The Beatles, Samsung closing its last phone factory in China, and more.

Marcus in Sandusky, Ohio listens on AM800 CKLW and is calling via the brand new IT App and asked: “I’m looking into getting a Fire Stick from Amazon, maybe the Cube. I keep hearing about having them jailbroken. Can you explain this to me and how this works?”

Marcus, having a Fire Stick or a Fire Cube jailbroken means freeing it from the behaviors that Amazon will allow and setting it up in a way that will allow you to circumvent their restrictions and use software that isn’t allowed by default or use it in ways that aren’t allowed by default.

That means that by jailbreaking you could install apps that you otherwise can’t, or you can have an app do something that it otherwise couldn’t (like change a system setting).

That’s kind of the nice and innocent way to describe it, but here’s reality: when people recommend that you jailbreak your Fire device what they’re saying is “open it up to easy piracy”.

Most people don’t jailbreak because they really, really want to set an unsupported bright yellow background and set the font color to purple. They do it because they want to stream copyrighted content without paying for it, which is something that Amazon – a distributor of that content – doesn’t normally allow. Using a jailbroken device that way is obviously not legal, but whether you want to do it or not is up to you, just keep in mind that there are concerns beyond the legality of what you’re doing.

You’ll also be opening your device up to potential malware, since you’ll be removing some of the restrictions that make malware harder to succeed on a platform like the Fire devices. If that’s a concern, then you probably don’t want to do this, but the process is simple enough so the legal issues and malware are the two main things you’ll have to worry about if you choose to do it.

Obviously, our network legal department won’t let us tell you how to do it, so if you still want to jailbreak your device, you can probably to turn to your favorite search engine for the steps involved. But to be honest, we wouldn’t recommend it anyway.

Dustin in Longview, Texas listens on KTBB and asked: “I have a Galaxy Tab a 10.1. I am trying to figure out how to get data on the tablet itself. It has a SIM card tray, only it says “MicroSD”. It doesn’t have an actual SIM slot. Trying to figure that out.”

Dustin, it sounds like you can’t. That “SIM tray” that says MicroSD is not a SIM tray, it’s a MicroSD tray that you can use to expand your tablet’s memory.

Not all tablets can get mobile data, some are WiFi only and it sounds like that’s probably the kind you have. Your options are WiFi or some other mobile device to act as the access point while you’re on the go.

You can check your phone plan for hotspot functionality, if that won’t work in your case because of caps or other limitations you can still get a standalone MiFi type of device.

Unfortunately, those are external solutions, but if your tablet doesn’t have a built-in cellular connection there’s not much else you can do.