Amazon Reverses Course, Encryption Returning for Fire Devices
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Generally speaking, this isn't how Amazon operates.
Firing someone for making a bad call is silly. Mistakes were clearly made but firing people in situations like this is like cutting off your hand because you burned your finger. The person who made the call probably has made hundreds of good calls over the years, and will continue to make good calls in the future, given the chance. Sure, if this is a pattern of stupid mistakes then clearly this person is in the wrong role, but that's not nearly as likely to be the case.
Instead, I suspect a process will be put in place to help make these decisions better in the future- and process written in large part by the person who made the mistake. This way, not only will they not make a mistake like this again, but no one else will either.
Maybe I'm wrong, but from what I've seen of the Amazon culture that's how we generally react to mistakes.
They'll do stupid M&A, plunder money on consultants and make up bullshit all for something to do. Management tends to be more of an autocracy than meritocracy and a good business needs to push against that.
If you are lenient and you give them time to figure it out - they just use that leniency on themselves instead of the company.
This feature is actually pretty cool. It only hijacks http traffic (leaving https the same) but pushes that traffic over an encrypted channel to google. This has some pretty positive benefits if you're the type of person who connects to random wifi, although there's apparently a simple way for network admins to disable the feature (if they block a certain webpage form loading chrome will go back to working like normal).
The other major thing- and the reason I looked into this to begin with- is that it's opt in. So if you're like me and freaked out that google was spying on you after reading ikeboy's comment then you can relax now.
[1] https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...
Note that they removed it from iOS because of constraints, see https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6323113
http://www.addictivetips.com/internet-tips/what-is-opera-tur...
My point is that Amazon tried really hard to give a good experience with lower end hardware then most Android devices. Encryption likely adds a significant performance cost.
Keep in mind, the iPhone has hardware support for its encrypted memory. It is my understanding that the main processor does not get involved in the actual encryption of the flash storage. Because Apple controls the hardware and the software, they can do this tight integration. Android is software and encryption on Android must be done in software unless and until a hardware vendor integrates bulk encryption into their memory system and provides an appropriate driver for Android to control it. If such a device exists, I haven’t seen it yet...
However, I could turn my phone into a pile of mud (and you could probably do this too with your kindle fire) by installing Google Apps, in particular google play services.
(created an account just to say this)
A Kindle Fire is not a desktop computer, it's somewhere between a television and a crappy web browser. Amazon Silk is so painful to use that you'll never browse the web with it for more than a minute or two anyway, why care about encrypting your browsing history? Would anybody care about encrypting the local storage on their TiVo?
My guess is that this went: "Oh, here's a feature that 0.5% of our users have tried, and 50% of them contacted support for help turning it off (because it slowed down video playback), let's kill it." (Mwahahaha?)
""" Also, the devices are mainly designed to deliver digital entertainment, instead of being used as communication tools. That suggests there’s less of a chance users will have any sensitive personal information stored on their Fire tablets. """
""" Amazon removed encryption from the devices in late 2015, possibly to reduce costs for its tablets and electronic readers. The devices aren’t intended for communication of sensitive data, although they can be used to access the Internet and e-mail. """
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/135336-what-s-new-in-amazon-...
Not wittingly ;)