Kindles have long had a history of gaolbreaks. I've scarcely seen a scene as dedicated as the folks over on the MobileRead Forums (https://www.mobileread.com/forums). I notice many of the names associated with this new break as people who were associated with hacking early Kindles back in the early 2010s.
For context, it's been a little while since we've had a fresh gaolbreak for new Kindles. Last one was LanguageBreak, which came out back in 2023 and required firmware 5.16.2.1.1 or lower.
I'm an American and I don't differentiate between jail and gaol; I just assumed the latter to just be a funny European spelling of the former.
But yes, we do differentiate between jail and prison - the former usually being for those with short sentences or for those awaiting trial, and the latter being for those with long sentences. Interesting that other countries don't maintain that distinction - but I guess most countries don't have such a sprawling prison-industrial complex to warrant separate short-term v. long-term detention classifications.
Jails do hold long term prisoners, and prisons get pre-trial prisoners too.
There’s literally a market for jail beds. So prisoners are often sent where there’s an open spot, with little distinction between “short term” and “long term”.
A better distinction is that jails are run by a law enforcement agency, while prisons are not.
Your distinction is probably a better one, but the one I've heard is lockups hold temporarily from hours-days, jails hold prisoners for sentences up to a year, prisons for over a year. People might end up in a jail for much longer, but normally they don't.
> A better distinction is that jails are run by a law enforcement agency, while prisons are not.
Depends on whether you count corrections agencies as law enforcement agencies. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure all states have distinct agencies for police v. prisons, but on the other hand, corrections officers are usually sworn peace officers and therefore would count as "law enforcement".
Another distinction, come to think of it, is that prisons are usually under federal or state agencies¹, while jails are usually under county or municipal agencies.
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¹ The only exception I've found is Chester County Prison in Pennsylvania, which is under the Chester County Dept. of Corrections. Wikipedia also has an article on a "Northampton County Prison" (also in PA), but that county's website calls it the "Northampton County Jail"; on a tangential note, if corrections agencies don't count as law enforcement agencies, then the Northampton County Jail would be an exception to the "jails are run by a law enforcement agency" rule.
It's true that prison is an industry in America, but it's also true that only a small minority of prisoners are held in private prisons; about 8% of federal and state prisoners are in private prisons.
The prison industry isn't limited to private prisons; there is substantial private industry financial interest in the operation of the public prisons, as well, whether its providing services to a literally captive market, benefiting from prison labor, etc.
Seeing your comment, and all the comments that follow, is reminding me of the "Misconceptions developers believe about X" posts that circulate on here occasionally.
It seems like there's a lot of beliefs that don't universally apply.
> Only Americans (to the extent I know) differentiate jail and gaol. Jail and prison.
You inhabit a very different reality than everybody else. Americans do not differentiate jail and gaol; Americans don't use the word "gaol" under any circumstances, ever. It is not a part of American English.
It's a common spelling in fantasy video games and books, but it feels kind of performative.
These same games will have voice actors pronounce "ye" as it's written, unaware that the y is a typographic substitute for Þ. "ye olde" is pronounced "the old". But likewise, there's some VAs that clearly only ever read a word, like in the newer God of War games where a character mangles "prescient".
Same had to actually look it up and at least Merriam-Webster lists the word as “chiefly British spellings of JAIL, JAILER”. Which at least hints that the dictionary writers thought it is less common out side of Britain.
I graduated from high school and even got a bachelor's degree. I've read several books written before last year, and have talked to dozens of people. I've never heard or seen the word gaol. And if I had, I'd probably assume it was "goal" misspelled. I make no assertions of being particularly smart or literate, but only typical.
Knowing the word exists is a different thing than using it in daily speech. I, and I'm sure most people, would be very surprised to hear there are populations of the USA where "gaol" is used regularly.
I apologise for mixing terms. Jail and Prison? Do you disagree this is a point of difference? Americans also don't seem to talk about being on remand. In police custody is unwieldy, I agree.
As int_19h notes, there are people (in the US) who believe that there is a difference between the meaning of the word "jail" and the meaning of the word "prison". And as int_19h also notes, those people are wrong; Americans will just be confused if you try to use the words differently. It's similar to the insistence of a group with near-perfect overlap that crimes for which jail time isn't a possible punishment can't be correctly referred to as "crimes".
British English as a language might, British people do not, and the physical facilities are the same. We say someone is “held on remand” if they are incarcerated pre-trial, and the part of the prison which holds prisoners pretrial is often referred to as the “remand wing”.
I feel like I've read, well not a lot, but a pretty decent amount. More than my average peer, probably.
I don't think I've ever once encountered "gaol" before today. Reading the parent comment, I believed it was a non-English language loanword, and probably a recent one at that, until I read the comments.
It's not like I avoid archaic works, either. It's possible I did come across the word at some point, but it was a one-off and without any repetition it faded quickly from my memory.
It is a very old jailbreak: Ye Olde Gaolbreak! One had to bribe the town constable with a ha’penny and a pint of mead just to install a third-party reading app. Dost thou even root, sir?
Gawdamn, whatever happened to a respectable old Mediatek vulnerability being exploited by a suspicious app on ya computer that called itself something funny like Kingoroot?
(Sidenote but I'm still impressed that thing would work without giving my computer half a dozen viruses)
"Tyre" is extremely common throughout most of the English speaking world. "Gaol" is used by attention-seeking Australians desperately hoping to kick off dumb threads like this.
Tyre is clearly the correct spelling. I quickly tire of anyone claiming otherwise. Gaol is an archaic spelling which I've found incredibly confusing ever since I was a small kid a long long time ago.
Prisons are where convicts go. Jails are where suspects awaiting trial go. People in prisons have been convicted and sentenced. People in jails might be proven guilty or not.
The simple rule you provide doesn't describe any real system; it seems to be an approximation drawn from how felony charges under state law in the US usually work, but more generally, in the US, Jails are local (usually county) facilities that both house suspects awaiting trial on state charges and convicts serving state misdemeanor sentences, while prisons are either state facilities that hold felony convicts or federal facilities that can house anyone from pre-trial detainees on federal charges to convicts on any kind of federal charges.
There are some variations among states, too; e.g., in California, some state felony convicts serve their sentence in county jails rather than state prisons.
I know, I lived in Australia for 5 years. That doesn't change the fact of my post - that in a thread about jailbreaking kindles, it's nothing but attention-seeking bait to use the term.
I have no problem with Australians, I think they're mostly great. Occasionally you'll get an obnoxious one who insists on inserting "gaol" into a conversation just to kick off an insanely stupid side thread.
I have to say, as an Australian, your reaction is making me want to use the spelling more often. We're generally culturally averse to people taking themselves too seriously!
Tbf as a Kiwi (currently in the UK) I see a lot of Australians, when interacting with other cultures, kick up their Australian-ness as much as they can; strengthening the accent, swearing way, _way_ more than they usually would, using "mate" "bloody" etc way more than they do just speaking to me.
I mean when two Australasians speak with each other in a foreign place I definitely hear the accent rise up a bit more outta the both of us but Aussies are something else when it comes to putting on a show, especially when Americans are involved (in my experience).
Pet peeve of mine but technically prison is for convicts, jail is for those yet awaiting a conviction but who aren't trusted to show up to court if allowed to roam freely. That the jail system (in the US especially) has essentially become a form of preemptive incarceration without the presumption of innocence is largely an artefact of the bond system, the overwhelmed courts and the perverse incentives in all of those systems from law enforcement to private prisons.
I realize the terms are often used interchangeably but I think the distinction is important especially because of the implications for presumption of innocence from conflating the two.
> Pet peeve of mine but technically prison is for convicts, jail is for those yet awaiting a conviction but who aren't trusted to show up to court if allowed to roam freely.
Pet peeve, but despite being a frequently claimed technical distinction, this is wrong both in terms of the strict definition of the terms and the way they are used as names of real institutions (though it is approximately true in most US state justice systems—but not the federal system—if you consider only felony crimes.)
> Merriam-Webster has it as "chiefly British spelling" of jail
It's odd that it doesn't mention it as archaic, because it's provably Just Not Used in the real world [0], but it's also an American dictionary, so all bets are off
If you click on the entry your search results give, it takes you to the entry for jail (eg: jail is the canonical noun it's using). Jail and gaol have slightly different routes into English, with gaol being via Northern French. Sez the OED:
> "remains as a written form in the archaic spelling gaol (chiefly due to statutory and official tradition); but this is obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is jail, repr. Old Parisian French and Middle English jaiole, jaile. Hence though both forms gaol, jail, are still written, only the latter is spoken. In U.S. jail is the official spelling."
Finally, though, "jail" as a noun is pretty infrequent compared to "prison", which are the same thing in the UK (unlike the US), but the latter is much more common. The verb form on the other hand is almost always "jail", so when you are "jailed", you're sent to a prison.
> I believe Collins is the standard dictionary that British people use
And you would be wrong. They've only been putting out a dictionary since 1979. OED[0] is The Dictionary in the UK, and I've quoted its take on it in an adjacent comment.
Well, come on, that's obviously false. Zero percent of British people own an OED or even have the resources necessary to consult one when they want to look something up. It costs over a thousand US dollars.
I suspect fewer than 1% of British people own any paper English-language dictionary, but the sort of people who need a dictionary beyond what dictionary.com can offer will have online access through their employer, their institution, their local UK public library, or for the princely sum of £8/m for a personal account when paying annually.
Regardless, the authority that the OED holds on British English is best understood through the criticism section of it on Wikipedia, with people decrying its absolutely overwhelming influence:
> criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution", one that "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle"
Many libraries in the UK and Commonwealth countries have the full volume set the first, second, or both editions of the OED.
I've routinely referenced it in both the university library and the local town library since 1980.
There's been a digital version of almost all of the second edition kicking about since just prior to the print release of the second edition - I have that on most computer images I own.
The OED offers digital subscription access to the second edition and to the in progress third edition which a good number of people, libraries, companies subscribe to.
It's the dictionary of reference for those serious about the English language.
I don't disagree that practically zero percent don't own a copy, but pretty much anyone in the UK can access the OED with a free library membership. It's pretty much the only thing I use my library card for these days.
If people do use a dictionary these days they most likely do use a Collins or Oxford Dictionaries (not the same as the OED). But I imagine that most people would just use a Google search and rely on the top box which itself is using Oxford Dictionaries for its definitions.
For context, it's been a little while since we've had a fresh gaolbreak for new Kindles. Last one was LanguageBreak, which came out back in 2023 and required firmware 5.16.2.1.1 or lower.