Amazon Just Removed Encryption From the Software Powering Kindles, Smartphones, Tablets (dailydot.com)

Patrick O'Neill writes: While Apple continues to resist a court order requiring it to help the FBI access a terrorist's phone, another major tech company took a strange and unexpected step away from encryption. Amazon has removed device encryption from the operating system that powers its Kindle e-reader, Fire Phone, Fire Tablet, and Fire TV devices. The change, which took effect in Fire OS 5, affects millions of users.

Comments

Apple support is unacceptable

[fyngyrz]

That would still be better than what Apple did to me. I wrote an integrated, dual-language point-of-sale system for a Chinese restaurant, friends of the family. They had a Mac Mini, perfect for this kind of low-cpu-load app; I designed and built the app on my mac pro, under the exact same level of OS X, got it working 100%, installed it on the mini... and it wouldn't print. Debugged a bit, and found that CUPS was going nipples north every time UTF-8 data (Chinese text, perfectly normal use of UTF-8) got sent to it. Only on the mini. Mac pro continued to print the Chinese text perfectly. Receipts, kitchen order printouts, reports, etc. So, I called Apple.

me: "I found a 100% repeatable bug in the CUPS printing engine that prevents output via the shell of UTF-8 text"
them: "um, yeah, we confirm that, turns out there was a bug in the object generation for Intel core 2 duos."
me: "So, a fix, when?"
them: Oh, already fixed, just upgrade OS X. Was only a bug in the code generator.
me: ok [buys upgrade on USB stick] [tries to upgrade the mini]
quoth the upgrade: "your computer cannot be upgraded, core 2 duo not supported"
me: "Hey, I can't upgrade, core 2 duo here"
them: "time for a new computer!"
me: "computer isn't broken. The OS is broken. Your OS. You told me so. It doesn't do what you said it would."
them: "...time for a new computer"
me: [ATH0] [buys used mini of later vintage for my friends out of my pocket - it certainly wasn't their fault - got all that working.]

Since then, they have tried to push many upgrades of the Apple app store and iTunes to the same machine. So they're definitely still building for the architecture.

Never bought another computer from them. I don't plan to, either. I still use OS X, but I only buy used machines, I don't buy apps or music or anything from the Apple store, and I now have an Android phone and my brand new S7 will be here in 8 days.

Apple isn't to be trusted. Period.