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Amazon's Silk: SaaS Is Closing the Net
jfruhlinger writes "Much of the initial reaction to Amazon's Silk browser was interest in how it uses the cloud to speed up browsing. But at what cost? There are privacy concerns, of course, as Amazon will have a record of your browsing; but in a larger philosophical sense, Silk is of a piece with Facebook and Apple's iOS walled garden, an intermediary between you and the Internet."
Except that Silk is supposed to leverage Amazon's EC2 to greatly speed up the browsing experience. Facebook just pilfers your data because they can.
I wonder how this automatic man in the middle handles SSL connections? Does it pass that traffic though? Does it open a new connection and handle the SSL handshake in the cloud?
Sniffing people's bank accounts is a great service, would bring 1 click buy to a new level.
Ok I have not actually read the article, but the intro make me think that we are entering a updated phase of AOL. When the net was new most people had their internet experience filtered through AOL. Now are we returning to a time where people want their experience filtered through amazon, or facebook?
The comparison to AOL is probably more apt than the one to Apple. I get that Apple walls its garden when it comes to available apps for the iPhone, but that doesn't limit the ways you can access the internet. (Though I think it bears exploring about the ways those apps limit, for good and for bad, limit access.) Amazon is also repeating Apple's play in this regard. Does that mean Amazon has more walls? Taller ones? Ah, the limits of metaphor.
... Amazon starts selling premium space on its servers to those sites who want to provide fast access to their viewers? Good-bye akamai....
this is a catch-all argument for just about any product with a high potential for nefarious purposes or something which is a complete POS. a cluster computer for internet browsing? are you friggin serious?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Enough with the paranoia.
ObAnalogy: an elevator does not "close" the stairwell. And they often even have cameras in them.
Good-bye akamai....
Sorry I don't have mod points for you.
More generally, Amazon is showing some seriously large gonads in all of this.
They are simultaneously treading on various different territories which were [separately] once the exclusive province of Google, Apple, Facebook, Blackberry, Akamai, and many, many others [anyone remember the Sears & Roebuck catalog?!?].
It will be very, very interesting to see how all of this plays out.
It certainly shows that, if nothing else, they aren't satisified with standing still.
Steve Ballmer, are you paying attention?!?
PS: In honor of the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, it should be noted that Akamai lost at least one top executive on American Airlines Flight 11.
[I don't know whether he was flying alone, or whether he had any Akamai assistants with him.]
Before I get accused panicking, let me emphasize that I am fully aware that Silk will let you opt out of this feature, and use the browser without EC2 participation.
By the end of TFA, The Fine Author forgot it:
Rather than try to contain the Internet, SaaS providers are trying to get between us and the Internet. And they're doing it with slick and catchy ways that slowly ensnare us before we even know what's going on.
Privacy, security, and unlimited access to data are all at risk here. This is why efforts the Open Knowledge Foundation and Open Cloud Initiative are so important. These and other similar organizations represent different ways to keep access to our data limited to just who we want to have it, and no one else.
It comes down to this: will these SaaS vendors be our partners in using the Internet, or our captors?
Oddly, there wasn't so much fuss over Opera's compression service, which is opt-in for Opera Mobile and always on for Opera Mini.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
The same sort of scenario might be imagined for a lot of "delivery systems".
A lot of these systems where the "paper is free" are trying to suck in users so they earn advertising dollars. Physical books and libraries are normally an exception, but even author's sites and libraries seem to have at least one ad on them.
It seems to be the price of progress that people are exposed to seductive forms of content with the intention of separating them from their cash. Sort of like the old yearly "Carnival" that arrived in town once a year. But it was obvious that the Carnival was out to get as much of our money as possible.
Call them what they are, attempts to completely control your access to content such as "they" had back when it was just TV, and the music/film/media companies controlled every aspect of the industry with an iron fist, that is what "they" want again, complete control.
The Internet took that away from them, so with tireless lobbying, copyright laws, and campaigns of terror (suing children and single mothers) they have sought this control again, and they are beginning to see how to turn the Internet into a Television set so people go back to drooling.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
that Amazon can see what I'm shopping for online and at what locations and adjust their pricing accordingly? For example, they can make me the highest possible counter-offer based on what other shops I've checked out, that is still equal or lower to the prices I'm already aware of. Totally sounds feasible to me, and totally anti-competitive as well...
Looks quite similar to the Opera Turbo feature.
Many embrace having their lives managed for them. The sense of security it provides is an essential ingredient of many social institutions. Corporations, by means of a carefully manipulated public image, have taken on the mantle of such institutions. The predictable result is a public confused as to what is in their interest and what is at their expense.
"Privacy is dead. Get over it" -Steve Rambam
Back in the day, people on AOL weren't surfing the internet, they were surfing AOL's cached crap. This is just AOL again, what's old is new again. I prefer to interact with the internet in real time and have the content I see under my control as it were.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Does a proxy server really speed things up much?
Instead of going to, say, the NY Time website you are going to the proxy. You still have to fetch the content to your device.
How exactly is Safari in iOS an intermediary between you and the internet? It's just a browser. A normal, full-featured(*) browser. Now when we talk about iOS apps, clearly Apple has built a walled garden. But for web access, iOS is wide open.
*Flash support is a bug, not a feature.
I can see the equatable defense.
Jeez your honor, it's not like I'm a school teacher.
I only had access to my sisters kid.
yeah, that should make it ok.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Now this is something Slashdot readers need. Slashdot, with its incredibly inefficient Javascript that sometimes goes into a compute loop, can now be outsourced to an Amazon server. Not that this benefits anyone; Slashdot's code isn't doing anything useful with all those cycles.
This is a generic problem. Since everybody went "Web 2.0", page bloat has become insane. I've seen pages from major news sources with over 4000 lines of HTML, only 70 of which had anything to do with the story. CSS was supposed to make pages shorter. It didn't. With some "content management" systems, every page has its very own page of CSS. So there's no gain in caching.
Entire companies have gone out of business because of this. "RushmoreDrive.com" (a search engine, part of the Barry Diller media empire) had a 7-second page load time for their home page. They'd loaded it up with so much "social" stuff that it became useless.
...but I was distracted by the real-time sidebar panel listing the usernames of people who were joining the site and had commented on the article.
What were they saying about privacy on the internet again...?
There are privacy concerns, of course, as Amazon will have a record of your browsing; but in a larger philosophical sense, Silk is of a piece with Facebook and Apple's iOS walled garden, an intermediary between you and the Internet.
OK, sure, we all know that Facebook's business is to collect & sell your personal info & connections.
iOS? That makes no sense. I suppose you could say that specific apps are "intermediating", but the apps are not the OS. Also, every iOS device has a generic web browser. If you're concerned about intermediation, it should be from your service provider...AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc...not from the os.
What really surprises me here...is that Google is rarely mentioned in these lists of "intermediaries". Google has been collecting most folks' search histories for the last decade. And indexing your email if you use Gmail. And recording your news habits if you use Google News. Etc, etc. For example: Recently a friend send me a Gmail about her fight against breast cancer, and I suddenly had lots of cancer-related links in Google news & advertising.
If you use any data services, someone is going to track it. If you care, you can take (often very inconvienent) measures to reduce tracking. But most people don't care enough to bother.
Given that a majority of internet users using a home router and NAT, the Internet was "broken" a while back.
Having read the article, and the comments I have noticed that people love to drag "insert company name here" into arguments based on what they provide. Android is, above all, a method of getting Google a market position on all mobile devices (yes, Google's motivation isn't about just making your life better). It does this by giving handset manufactures an OS that they can 'freely' use and modify (of course, that is another can of worms) Apple provide, in their words "A user experience" and their approach reflects that. Sure, they limit what can be installed in their environment, but they have not made a move (as yet) to track everything that their users do. but Google, Apple, Microsoft have fallen afoul of lot of users of late, and you know what, of course they have.
We do need to be aware of EVERYTHING that is going on. So much of what is out there for mobile access is convenient, but that always comes at a cost. I had a friend rave last week about how awesome this Kindle Fire was going to be and how it will break out of Apple's walled garden approach...
Yeah, sure it will. Here is a news flash everyone, these companies are out to make profit, that's all. They will do so by providing the user with what they want in the most cost effective way possible, and that will usually involve data collection to better market and understand what the user is doing. It's not malicious, it just is. Amazon are just the latest addition to the club
Leg Godt!
But for web access, iOS is wide open.
Does Safari for iOS provide bindings for a JavaScript program on a web page to request the user's permission to use a device's camera and microphone yet?
I agree. There's whole sections of the web I won't visit anymore as it's just too great a risk to the browser (spinning beach balls, crashes) and too great a loss of time. I don't think Slashdot is on the very bad list here but there is room to lean down.
Don't much care for Google dictating the terms of the web, but at least the penalties on slow pages are pushing web development back onto a diet.