Amazon Reverses Course, Encryption Returning for Fire Devices

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-05/amazon-reverses-course-encryption-returning-for-fire-devices

by adventured • 10 years ago

110 35 10 years ago

ryao• 10 years ago

Amazon likely had been looking at Apple and felt extricating themselves from the potential to be in Apple's position was financially advantageous. Seeing them reverse course suggests to me that the PR backlash was more than Amazon could stand and made them think the situation they were trying to avoid was better.

resoluteteeth• 10 years ago

If they had done this earlier, nobody would have cared, because likely nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices. Their timing was really bad.

rpgmaker• 10 years ago

because likely nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices.

Not wittingly ;)

anonbanker• 10 years ago

Have an upvote for using a Clapper-ism. I imagined your hand against your forehead while you said it.

pfarnsworth• 10 years ago

This is really the dumbest, most unnecessary drama that Amazon has needed to face with absolutely zero gain. The entire chain of command who approved this decision should get fired, because who knows what other dumb decisions they will make.

danblick3• 10 years ago

FWIW, when the Kindle Fire launched, the major "breakthrough" feature was that it would pipe all your web traffic through Amazon's servers in EC2 (for browsing acceleration)...

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/28/amazon-silk/

ikeboy5• 10 years ago

Which is now a standard feature on chrome and elsewhere.

mabbo• 10 years ago

Bias note: I've been an Amazon SDE for the last few years, though no where near the devices division (I make warehouses and delivery systems work better, weee). Additional note: in no way do I speak for the company, I'm just a guy who writes code and likes working here.

Generally speaking, this isn't how Amazon operates.

Firing someone for making a bad call is silly. Mistakes were clearly made but firing people in situations like this is like cutting off your hand because you burned your finger. The person who made the call probably has made hundreds of good calls over the years, and will continue to make good calls in the future, given the chance. Sure, if this is a pattern of stupid mistakes then clearly this person is in the wrong role, but that's not nearly as likely to be the case.

Instead, I suspect a process will be put in place to help make these decisions better in the future- and process written in large part by the person who made the mistake. This way, not only will they not make a mistake like this again, but no one else will either.

Maybe I'm wrong, but from what I've seen of the Amazon culture that's how we generally react to mistakes.

JoBrad• 10 years ago

That is exactly the right culture. If someone makes a series of blunders, without the history of good choices, that's one thing (maybe they need to be in a different position?), but simply firing someone over one decision is usually very bad for morale, and doesn't really teach anyone anything.

jamez1• 10 years ago

It's better to lean on the side of consequences than freedom, given that their incentives are only partly aligned with the shareholders.

They'll do stupid M&A, plunder money on consultants and make up bullshit all for something to do. Management tends to be more of an autocracy than meritocracy and a good business needs to push against that.

If you are lenient and you give them time to figure it out - they just use that leniency on themselves instead of the company.

kordless• 10 years ago

Actually, the only drama I see is within your illogical statements. Question is, why are you making them?

rhizome• 10 years ago

Watch, it'll be some weak encryption no better than no encryption as far as the ICs are concerned.

serge2k2• 10 years ago

Someone must have a got a "?" email from Jeff /s

deanCommie• 10 years ago

Not sure, why you're downvoted, that's probably exactly what happened. It's a huge company, there are a lot of moving pieces, and the original decision probably didn't travel too far up the food chain. Some Dev Manager or Director was optimizing for device speed and figured it was a worthwhile tradeoff. When the rest of the company found out they probably quickly reacted and flipped out, much as the rest of the world did.

serge2k2• 10 years ago

I've seen exactly this happen at Amazon.

pasbesoin• 10 years ago

It's like when they take a book away -- only, your security!

WalterBright• 10 years ago

The only reason I didn't use encryption on my Fire is because I didn't know it supported it, until the news came out that they removed it.

danblick3• 10 years ago

This whole story seems overblown. Amazon removed a feature that nobody would ever use, and people imagined some conspiracy.

A Kindle Fire is not a desktop computer, it's somewhere between a television and a crappy web browser. Amazon Silk is so painful to use that you'll never browse the web with it for more than a minute or two anyway, why care about encrypting your browsing history? Would anybody care about encrypting the local storage on their TiVo?

My guess is that this went: "Oh, here's a feature that 0.5% of our users have tried, and 50% of them contacted support for help turning it off (because it slowed down video playback), let's kill it." (Mwahahaha?)

danblick3• 10 years ago

Don't take my word for it, read the article...

""" Also, the devices are mainly designed to deliver digital entertainment, instead of being used as communication tools. That suggests there’s less of a chance users will have any sensitive personal information stored on their Fire tablets. """

""" Amazon removed encryption from the devices in late 2015, possibly to reduce costs for its tablets and electronic readers. The devices aren’t intended for communication of sensitive data, although they can be used to access the Internet and e-mail. """

PhasmaFelis• 10 years ago

"Reduce costs"? How does having an encryption program installed add costs?

notatoad2• 10 years ago

It's especially overblown since encryption was dropped six months ago and nobody noticed until now.

ikeboy5• 10 years ago

Source? As far as I can tell it was released in 2016.

throwawayadke• 10 years ago

The most likely reason for encryption to be removed is simply that the two engineers on the Kindle Enterprise team who implemented the feature both left the company a year and a half ago. The remaining engineer on the device side portion of that team moved on to another project. The integration, security review, etc with the SoC vendor is fairly complex, and the expertise required to build out encryption was lost. The original integration took quite a while as well. Most of the speculation as to why Amazon removed it seems pretty out there.

jis• 10 years ago

I have a Kindle Fire HD 8 Tablet. Amazon has clearly optimized the software for it. For example it has three types of memory. Flash for storage, RAM for main memory and (presumably) slower RAM that is used as swap space. Most Android devices run a linux kernel without any swap space configured. But the Fire Tablet swaps (which is why it can run Android 5+ with only 1Gb of RAM I suspect). It has two processors. A slow processor that uses less battery, and a faster one which is switched on when needed.

My point is that Amazon tried really hard to give a good experience with lower end hardware then most Android devices. Encryption likely adds a significant performance cost.

Keep in mind, the iPhone has hardware support for its encrypted memory. It is my understanding that the main processor does not get involved in the actual encryption of the flash storage. Because Apple controls the hardware and the software, they can do this tight integration. Android is software and encryption on Android must be done in software unless and until a hardware vendor integrates bulk encryption into their memory system and provides an appropriate driver for Android to control it. If such a device exists, I haven’t seen it yet...

polarjoe• 10 years ago

No, Android works just fine on lower end hardware. I have a very old phone running 5.x smooth as butter (the 3" Xperia Mini, single core Cortex-A8, 384MB RAM, running LegacyXperia).

However, I could turn my phone into a pile of mud (and you could probably do this too with your kindle fire) by installing Google Apps, in particular google play services.

(created an account just to say this)

msh• 10 years ago

It's a 1 ghz a9 snapdragon cpu.

ComputerGuru• 10 years ago

Now that you know how high of a priority encryption is to Amazon, do you trust them to do it right?

Amazon Reverses Course, Encryption Returning for Fire Devices

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