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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.
These authoritarians really need to go. At the same time, the fools who allow it need to go with them. Until that time comes, I'm not going to bend for either side.
I seem to remember this book called "The Republic" which talks about this very thing. I also read a whole lot of history about this Republic which was founded because of the same things.
History is always forgotten, so we continue to repeat it...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Only the Fire OS powered Kindle, which is a full fledged tablet with the Amazon android fork. Old fashioned e-ink kindle doesn't have encryption to start with.
Thats awesome!.....Darn that's not what TFA said at all.
So the rich people get to keep their encryption (DRM) and the rest of us get screwed again.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
to easily circumvented encryption. Seems more honest that way.
Within the arms of tragedy, there is little comfort in being right.
After I already ordered an Amazon Echo... so now there is nothing stopping the NSA from listening to everything said in my house? Man, they are really going to be bored!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That's like a car company disabling half the cylinders in your engine after you buy the car.
Reducing the functionality of a purchased product post-purchase is sleazy and probably should be considered illegal on some level.
What I hate is that Amazon was looking pretty good there for a while.
So if you want FDE on your device, you have to have the latest Android or one of the bulk of iOS devices which support FDE.
Guess that's clear - not buying an Echo or any of it's satellites anytime soon.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I buy their books on occasion, but I won't be buying any of their hardware.
But clearly the pressure is on. The FBI and other investigative and intelligence agencies worldwide want to make you safer by making your data more vulnerable.
This is what happens when you let idiots and sociopaths into positions of power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've been looking through TFA and related material, but I'm still trying to figure out what this actually means in practice. What data, on an e-book reader, is usefully encrypted anyway? This is a genuine question, as I don't have any sort of Kindle. Perhaps there is integration with payment services or personal accounts of some kind? If so, does this mean anyone who installs this "upgrade" and then has their device stolen would have some significant credentials compromised?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It doesn't just affect the sheeple, it sets a precedant. Now the three-letter agencies can say "look Apple, Amazon got rid of encryption and they're doing fine!"
Perhaps that might work for the average idiot, but someone with half a brain can easily argue that you could remove the locks from your front door and then turn a blind eye to anything bad that might happen. "Look, that citizen got rid of their locks, and they're doing just fine!"
Not for long applies to both idiotic "solutions".
or not.
Amazon wasn't exactly making inroads into the consumer market anyway.
now a stolen device will destroy your life they are worth less than nothing.
Actually, this is a good point. So if you have an Amazon phone (all four of you), you may well want to start shopping for a new one - probably today. No idea who would put sensitive info on their Kindle, though...
Now the fun question is, do they still have DRM/encryption on all their eBooks? I'm betting the answer to that is probably 'yes'.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If "doing fine" means being a third class player in the mobile market despite having a huge infrastructure ready to support it then sure...
The Kindle is kind of popular but that's just an eReader. Not something you put personal data on.
Reducing the functionality of a purchased product post-purchase is sleazy and probably should be considered illegal on some level.
I agree, but a more practical question might soon be: if upgrading to firmware that removes this feature is necessary in order to fix some other defect with the original product as purchased (broken functionality, security vulnerability, etc.) then would that already be illegal? Consumer protection laws are quite strong in some places, Europe for example, and even the biggest of tech firms can find themselves called out and penalised if they don't meet the required standards.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
It seems to me that it is a sort of preventative measure against bad press in the future. Take away any expectation of privacy when you are using a device and they explicitly state this, then you can't really be upset in a year when the police pick up your kindle plug it in and see you've been googling 'best way to cut up a body'.
Look at the Apple situation, there is no way for them to come out clean on this. Either they 1. already had a backdoor, 2. are going to lie about helping them get int 3. left some vulnerability that the FBI will exploit to read the phone anyway..you get the picture. I'm all for the fact that their initial reaction was to push back but the goodwill generated by that will only take them so far.
Now I don't agree with what Amazon did at all--I actually won't be happy until there is a smart-card adapter for every piece of communication/information system equipment in the world--but I can see how the move is beneficial for them. In 1 news cycle no one will care while Apple still has years and years of this tomfoolery to deal with.
OMG facts!
Actually, Trump has spent his own money - about $250K of it. Much more, however, he has "loaned" his campaign. Eventually, if/when he's the nominee and raises funds from other people, his campaign will pay him back with interest. Thus, Trump will profit off of running for President even if he doesn't win. (That, and the whole "free publicity" thing which he loves.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
When we talk about personal data, we mean the union of private personally identifiable information (name, address, phone number, SSN) and information that users create. A credit card number is neither.
You do enter your name when you buy something with a card, but that's the least private piece of PII, and is likely to be present on any device you own anyway, making that not personal data in any meaningful sense except when combined with other private data, such as browsing habits.
A credit card number is a disposable identifier. It identifies your account, not you, and is valid only until the card number is canceled due to theft or whatever. And your liability in the event of theft is zero. This makes CCN theft a problem for CC companies and vendors, but not really a concern for you as the user.
With that said, I do disagree with the original poster for different reasons. There is a definite privacy impact here. People's reading choices can be very personal, and there is enough PII to at least potentially identify the owner (name plus the location where the device was found/stolen). When you combine that with someone's penchant for reading stories about [insert regionally taboo topic here] and their copy of the Anarchist Cookbook, you suddenly know more than any third party rightfully should know about someone even without having what most people would think of as "personal data".
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Gee, it's a good thing Amazon only sells client machines, right? If anyone ran their servers/services on Amazon anything, they'd REALLY have to be worried...
Of course they have DRM still. They just made a decision that protecting the publisher's data is more important than protecting the customer's data.
He's raised about $7.5M and has a couple of donate buttons on his site.
Legally, he has to pay himself back before he accepts the nomination (I believe). Or funds raised after that don't count or something. It doesn't matter. He's raising enough money now to pay himself back by then.
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Let me fix that for you...
> They just made a decision that protecting the customer's data is more important than protecting consumer's data.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.