Weird coverage of Silk
Oct. 10th, 2011 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitouthttp://gigaom.com/2011/10/10/why-silk-wont-be-silky-smooth-for-amazon/
Om Malik got a quote from "Mathew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a hosted proxy service provider based in San Diego". Remember, this is a direct quote, and it's in an article at gigaom, and the guy does proxy service for a living so the general assumption would be that the guy knows what he is talking about and what he said was repeated accurately. Here's the quote:
"Technically, the biggest challenge will likely be cache invalidation. ... From the technical specifications, it appears that Amazon is only caching static resources such as images. While that will solve many of the cases, there will still be places that Silk could end up leaking private data (e.g., a stock photo or porn site that charges for access to its photos)."
_HOW_. Seriously. _HOW_ could that possibly happen? It _beggars_ the imagination that anyone could write a proxy server so fucked up it would serve up a photo normally embedded behind login/password/wtf screens to someone who hadn't jumped through those hoops (wait: I know people who would make that mistake. BUT THEY DIDN'T EVER WORK AT AMAZON. And they haven't been allowed to work on real browsers since the mid 1990s).
The other issues raised in the article get successively less unreasonable, but never really cross over a line to sensible. Copyright issues? You're allowed to render web pages for people who are allowed to access them. Whether that happens on a server or locally is completely irrelevant. "The more Amazon alters the content in order to increase performance, the more jeopardy they will put themselves in." But they aren't altering it, at least not altering it beyond what any web browser does in order to render it. This can happen at the server level in a shared way with Amazon's Silk mostly (not only, but mostly) because Amazon has a singular device they are rendering for (so they don't need to feed some general meta-representation through where the browser locally knows how to adapt it to the local hardware -- they can send the final, displayable result).
The article is right about the creepiness factor, and that the sales tax issues are a risk for Amazon. But I would point out that Amazon has been resolving sales tax issues that have been hanging fire for months if not years very rapidly lately.
We've got iPad 1 and 2 in this house and I use both versions for the rough equivalent of reading-the-newspaper. I've been _profoundly_ unhappy with the way the browser works in both versions -- if I leave a page and then come back to it (particularly google news) it insists on refreshing that page (which is largely unnecessary from my perspective, even if google news is serving a new version of it now. I just want the equivalent of hitting the back button). This is particularly provoking when I open up a browser window which already has a page showing, and just want to type in a new URL -- and it insists on refreshing the URL currently there.
I'm really hoping the kFire's browser is less obnoxious (I have no idea if this is normal for Safari on other Apple devices because I got converted to Firefox a while ago).
The creepiness factor is fascinating to me, however. Amazon is offering to let you "opt out" and just browse normally (but would you trust them to have implemented that right, if you don't trust them not to be creepy in the first place?). And you can get other browsers through the Amazon Appstore. They say they won't maintain personal information and they will expire information, but there is this whole issue of Mammoth Corporation knows what We Collectively Do/Like/Are Fascinated By -- and will then exploit that to sell us Ever More Crap.
I'm not too concerned about it, because I keep giving information to their recommendations service (by rating things and/or just by buying things). And their recommendations consistently Suck. I mean, _really_ the opposite of useful. I know they've gone through numerous versions of the innards (because I've known people from at least two of those iterations -- maybe as many as four, now that I think about it). I'm not convinced there's been improvement, altho I don't think it has gotten worse over time.
I guess I'd be a lot more worried about Mammoth Corporation Knowing What We Want if Mammoth Corporation displayed any real understanding of What I Want. YMMV. And I'm still a little creeped out by that bottleneck of information.
Also, I don't really believe Amazon intends to do anything with the information other than try to sell you more crap. Over a decade ago, the elf would get this manic look in his eyes as he explained that it really wasn't about being the biggest bookstore or having the most books: it was about having the _one book_ you wanted to buy, right then. This always annoyed me, because I almost never wanted to buy only one book.
Om Malik got a quote from "Mathew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a hosted proxy service provider based in San Diego". Remember, this is a direct quote, and it's in an article at gigaom, and the guy does proxy service for a living so the general assumption would be that the guy knows what he is talking about and what he said was repeated accurately. Here's the quote:
"Technically, the biggest challenge will likely be cache invalidation. ... From the technical specifications, it appears that Amazon is only caching static resources such as images. While that will solve many of the cases, there will still be places that Silk could end up leaking private data (e.g., a stock photo or porn site that charges for access to its photos)."
_HOW_. Seriously. _HOW_ could that possibly happen? It _beggars_ the imagination that anyone could write a proxy server so fucked up it would serve up a photo normally embedded behind login/password/wtf screens to someone who hadn't jumped through those hoops (wait: I know people who would make that mistake. BUT THEY DIDN'T EVER WORK AT AMAZON. And they haven't been allowed to work on real browsers since the mid 1990s).
The other issues raised in the article get successively less unreasonable, but never really cross over a line to sensible. Copyright issues? You're allowed to render web pages for people who are allowed to access them. Whether that happens on a server or locally is completely irrelevant. "The more Amazon alters the content in order to increase performance, the more jeopardy they will put themselves in." But they aren't altering it, at least not altering it beyond what any web browser does in order to render it. This can happen at the server level in a shared way with Amazon's Silk mostly (not only, but mostly) because Amazon has a singular device they are rendering for (so they don't need to feed some general meta-representation through where the browser locally knows how to adapt it to the local hardware -- they can send the final, displayable result).
The article is right about the creepiness factor, and that the sales tax issues are a risk for Amazon. But I would point out that Amazon has been resolving sales tax issues that have been hanging fire for months if not years very rapidly lately.
We've got iPad 1 and 2 in this house and I use both versions for the rough equivalent of reading-the-newspaper. I've been _profoundly_ unhappy with the way the browser works in both versions -- if I leave a page and then come back to it (particularly google news) it insists on refreshing that page (which is largely unnecessary from my perspective, even if google news is serving a new version of it now. I just want the equivalent of hitting the back button). This is particularly provoking when I open up a browser window which already has a page showing, and just want to type in a new URL -- and it insists on refreshing the URL currently there.
I'm really hoping the kFire's browser is less obnoxious (I have no idea if this is normal for Safari on other Apple devices because I got converted to Firefox a while ago).
The creepiness factor is fascinating to me, however. Amazon is offering to let you "opt out" and just browse normally (but would you trust them to have implemented that right, if you don't trust them not to be creepy in the first place?). And you can get other browsers through the Amazon Appstore. They say they won't maintain personal information and they will expire information, but there is this whole issue of Mammoth Corporation knows what We Collectively Do/Like/Are Fascinated By -- and will then exploit that to sell us Ever More Crap.
I'm not too concerned about it, because I keep giving information to their recommendations service (by rating things and/or just by buying things). And their recommendations consistently Suck. I mean, _really_ the opposite of useful. I know they've gone through numerous versions of the innards (because I've known people from at least two of those iterations -- maybe as many as four, now that I think about it). I'm not convinced there's been improvement, altho I don't think it has gotten worse over time.
I guess I'd be a lot more worried about Mammoth Corporation Knowing What We Want if Mammoth Corporation displayed any real understanding of What I Want. YMMV. And I'm still a little creeped out by that bottleneck of information.
Also, I don't really believe Amazon intends to do anything with the information other than try to sell you more crap. Over a decade ago, the elf would get this manic look in his eyes as he explained that it really wasn't about being the biggest bookstore or having the most books: it was about having the _one book_ you wanted to buy, right then. This always annoyed me, because I almost never wanted to buy only one book.
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Congress
Date: 2011-10-16 12:57 am (UTC)