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Rob Malda Casts a Jaded Eye at Amazon's Silk
m.ducharme writes "Slashdot's recently departed editor and Fearless Leader muses about the security implications of Amazon's Silk, which uses Amazon's massive cloud computing services to provide 'pre-caching' for the new Fire devices." Another potential downside to bear in mind (depending on exactly how much Silk relies on the AWS infrastructure) is that it provides a single point of failure, and sometimes cloud services go down.
Who's Rob Malda?
I had much the same thoughts, but then I realized that I wouldn't use a seven inch tablet for work or anything else important. It would just be for when I'm too lazy to get off the couch to look up the name of a movie thats rattling around in my head. Frankly, this goes for all tablets. The mobile browsers have simply not been around long enough for me to say that they are secure, so if security is an issue, dont use them.
And finally, it is assumed that you will be able to install other web browsers at some point. While there are none to speak of on Amazons App Store I have little doubt that someone will figure out how to get Firefox Mobile etc installed.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Just like Battle.net, Xbox LIVE, Office 365, netflix (which uses AWS btw), etc etc so on and so forth. There are plenty of services out now with single points of failure.
Good-bye
Carrying on the proud Slashdot tradition of not giving a whit about copy editing by mangling the very first sentence. We're gonna miss ya, Rob.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I agree about the security/privacy implications.
On SPOF though -
1. Amazon has a *huge* interest in keeping its cloud services up and running. Downtime is likely to be negligible.
2. From what I understand, the Silk browser can fall back to a more conventional mode of operation.
My stance on this is:
- Read and understand Amazon's privacy policy
- Decide how much you trust their security
- Put your Silk browser into client-only mode when you think it's appropriate -- e.g. when doing online banking.
Well depending on how Amazon is using EC2, they could be doing the pre-caching in multiple zones so there may not be a single point of failure. But seriously, is this really a concern when:
1. The Kindle Fire screen, battery, PCB, etc are all a single point of failure
2. Your WiFi base station is probably a single point of failure
3. Your home cable/DSL modem is a single point of failure
4. The wires running between your home and the network POP is single point of failure
5. The DSLAM/whatever it's called in cable-speak is a single point of failure
6. etc etc etc
Yes, I know if you're using it at work you prolly have multiple WiFi access points and possibly redundant routers/connections to the internet, but why are you watching movies and playing angry birds at work?
Hell, the whole internet has gone down for large segments of the US due to construction workers/etc indiscriminately using backhoes to create huge fiber cuts, not to mention under sea cables being cut for various reasons.
I mean there's a lot of valid reasons why you may not want a Kindle Fire (I'm personally not interested in tablets at all), but I find this to be one of the weakest arguments out there.
This sort of structure for a web browser has huge potential latency savings.
Web pages consist of lots of pieces, from lots of places, and lots of dependencies. (Open up Firebug, open the HTTP console, and open up the New York Times to see). Latency is the huge limiting factor on page loads, and is why it takes 1.7 seconds for the NY Times to load for me, even though it only transfered 300 kB of data (which is only .12s on my Internet connection).
The Silk-style structure beats the latency bottleneck in two ways.
For NEW content, the Silk proxy is much closer to the content itself. If its just 20ms closer, that will still save 40ms for each dependent fetch from a different site, 20ms for each dependent fetch from an existing site.
And for content that Silk has CACHED, its even faster, shaving basically ALL latency off the fetch.
IT doesn't hurt that the Fire probably has too small a processor and too little memory to run a real browser, but the latency wins make this structure attractive even for real browsers.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Is this what we are in for? Hardware dependent on cloud services, essentially a dumb terminal with content pushed to it, an item relatively useless if there are no supporting cloud services.
I realize at this point that description doesn't fully fit Fire, but mobile tech seems to be headed that way, seemingly turning the Internet into TV.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
No, parent is right.
All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.
The server can preprocess the web page for you, but it's not required.
Dilbert RSS feed
So, cloud services sometimes go down? My local browser client crashes occasionally too.
The point being that if it's a system that will allow (generally) faster/smoother delivery of content to mobile endusers, that's a great thing. Yes, the 'cloud' might fail occasionally, but I don't know if you've ever browsed through your phone before but it's a fairly shitty experience anyway, and you'd ostensibly have a current-standard client browser available as a backup if the cloud-failure is persistent, no?
-Styopa
Amazon has stated that the split browsing mode is optional and can be turned off so that Silk is like a conventional browser accessing its content directly instead of from Amazon.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-adds-new-twist-to-old-idea.ars
Opera Mini has the same problem.
Instead of avoiding the issue like Amazon though, they admit it openly: http://www.opera.com/mobile/help/faq/#security
I remember reading that FAQ few years ago, and they were even more candid about it. It used to say something along the lines of:
"Yes, technically we have access to every website you visit, even if it's encrypted. We promise, however to respect our user's privacy and never look, but ultimately it's up to you if you trust us. If you don't, please do not use Opera Mini to access sensitive websites".
Unfortunately I can't find that quote anymore. I guess some MBA must've found it "unprofessional" or something.
He's some guy that wants the cloud kids to get off his lawn. It's Android, if you don't want to use Silk (and I'm sure it will work fine without using AWS), there are like 50 other webkit browsers you can download for free, so this is not an important point. The larger issue is privacy in my mind but the public doesn't seem to care (the market has spoken).