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Rob Malda Casts a Jaded Eye at Amazon's Silk

Posted by timothy on from the healthy-skepticism dept.

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.

10 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by wsxyz · · Score: 4, Funny

    Who's Rob Malda?

    1. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I couldn't tell if the gp was being sincere or just trolling.

      Isn't that the goal of every slashdot commenter?

    2. Re:Huh? by bonch · · Score: 5, Funny

      The guy who infamously responded to the announcement of the original iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." So I'm sure we're all interested in his opinion about Silk.

    3. Re:Huh? by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But this only follows the /. standard response to any new device. There is not enough space, it's underpowered, it's overpriced, it doesn't render 3D models, it can't control the space shuttle, it can't beat Kasparov in chess, it can't even construct Kelly LeBrock for us - therefore, /. neckbeards have no use for it. Lame. Fail. Insertmeme

  2. Good ol' Taco by multisync · · Score: 4, Funny

    At $199, the Amazon Fire stands to be shift the whole tablet market into a new (cheaper) place.

    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
    1. Re:Good ol' Taco by sootman · · Score: 4, Informative

      I got as far as the fifth paragraph (fourth, if you don't count the obviously unintended break between 4 & 5) and realized the horrible truth: he DID have spellcheckers and editors going over his work while he was here and, God bless their tortured souls, they did as much as they could--they just couldn't completely contend with the torrent of spelling and grammatical errors he sent their way.

      My favorite bit is this sentence in paragraph 2:

      Silk is the tech amazon [not capitalized] has built to pre-render? [he uses two spaces after questions marks and periods; sometimes three] to pre-cache? web pages on the massive AWS/EC2/S3 network (the same network that Iâm [quotation marks instead of an apostrophe] using to actually host this very web page in fact. [Parentheses not closed]

      Slashdot editors, I salute you. *wipes tear from eye*

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    2. Re:Good ol' Taco by ediron2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      To be fair, two spaces after a sentence close is normal

      Flat-out wrong. Two spaces after a period only if you're using an actual, physical typewriter or a monospaced font.

      Meh, I'll toss in a token 'get over yourself, kid' for all of us grumpy oldsters that were taught to touch-type with 2 spaces after each sentence (. or ? or !). Doublespacing periods isn't a sin. It's not 'flat out wrong'. It's an innocuous habit I still have due to decades of typing and an edge case: I go back and forth between monospace code and publishable material like this post. I could do a lot worse. For starters, I could be a grammar nazi while (squints at screen) typing 2 sentence fragments and a -- sweet web-formatting jesus, did you really use just 12 words to anchor a link while telling us 2 *INVISIBLE* spaces is bad juju?! Get the Hell. Off. My. Lawn.

      tl;dr: parent = grammar nazi post that has mistakes. There ought to be a meme for this...

  3. Yes, but by slim · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Its all about the latency... by nweaver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  5. It Can Be Turned Off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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