
Amazon Reverses Course, Encryption Returning for Fire Devices - adventured
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-05/amazon-reverses-course-encryption-returning-for-fire-devices
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pfarnsworth
This is really the dumbest, most unnecessary drama that Amazon has needed to
face with absolutely zero gain. The entire chain of command who approved this
decision should get fired, because who knows what other dumb decisions they
will make.

~~~
mabbo
Bias note: I've been an Amazon SDE for the last few years, though no where
near the devices division (I make warehouses and delivery systems work better,
weee). Additional note: in no way do I speak for the company, I'm just a guy
who writes code and likes working here.

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.

~~~
JoBrad
That is exactly the right culture. If someone makes a series of blunders,
without the history of good choices, that's one thing (maybe they need to be
in a different position?), but simply firing someone over one decision is
usually very bad for morale, and doesn't really teach anyone anything.

~~~
ikeboy
Hm, remember [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/apple-fires-maps-
ma...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/apple-fires-maps-manager/)?

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jis
I have a Kindle Fire HD 8 Tablet. Amazon has clearly optimized the software
for it. For example it has three types of memory. Flash for storage, RAM for
main memory and (presumably) slower RAM that is used as swap space. Most
Android devices run a linux kernel without any swap space configured. But the
Fire Tablet swaps (which is why it can run Android 5+ with only 1Gb of RAM I
suspect). It has two processors. A slow processor that uses less battery, and
a faster one which is switched on when needed.

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...

~~~
polarjoe
No, Android works just fine on lower end hardware. I have a very old phone
running 5.x smooth as butter (the 3" Xperia Mini, single core Cortex-A8, 384MB
RAM, running LegacyXperia).

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)

~~~
msh
It's a 1 ghz a9 snapdragon cpu.

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danblick
This whole story seems overblown. Amazon removed a feature that nobody would
ever use, and people imagined some conspiracy.

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?)

~~~
danblick
Don't take my word for it, read the article...

""" 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. """

~~~
PhasmaFelis
"Reduce costs"? How does having an encryption program installed add costs?

~~~
jonathankoren
Chips and Help Desk Support?

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throwawayadke
The most likely reason for encryption to be removed is simply that the two
engineers on the Kindle Enterprise team who implemented the feature both left
the company a year and a half ago. The remaining engineer on the device side
portion of that team moved on to another project. The integration, security
review, etc with the SoC vendor is fairly complex, and the expertise required
to build out encryption was lost. The original integration took quite a while
as well. Most of the speculation as to why Amazon removed it seems pretty out
there.

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WalterBright
The only reason I didn't use encryption on my Fire is because I didn't know it
supported it, until the news came out that they removed it.

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resoluteteeth
If they had done this earlier, nobody would have cared, because likely
nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices. Their timing was
really bad.

~~~
rpgmaker
> because likely nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices.

Not wittingly ;)

~~~
anonbanker
Have an upvote for using a Clapper-ism. I imagined your hand against your
forehead while you said it.

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ryao
Amazon likely had been looking at Apple and felt extricating themselves from
the potential to be in Apple's position was financially advantageous. Seeing
them reverse course suggests to me that the PR backlash was more than Amazon
could stand and made them think the situation they were trying to avoid was
better.

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serge2k
Someone must have a got a "?" email from Jeff /s

~~~
deanCommie
Not sure, why you're downvoted, that's probably exactly what happened. It's a
huge company, there are a lot of moving pieces, and the original decision
probably didn't travel too far up the food chain. Some Dev Manager or Director
was optimizing for device speed and figured it was a worthwhile tradeoff. When
the rest of the company found out they probably quickly reacted and flipped
out, much as the rest of the world did.

~~~
serge2k
I've seen exactly this happen at Amazon.

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ComputerGuru
Now that you know how high of a priority encryption is to Amazon, do you trust
them to do it right?

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pasbesoin
It's like when they take a book away -- only, your security!

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rhizome
Watch, it'll be some weak encryption no better than no encryption as far as
the ICs are concerned.

