Rob Malda Casts a Jaded Eye at Amazon's Silk 143
m.ducharme writes "Slashdot's recently departed editor and Fearless Leader muses about the security implications of Amazon's Silk, which uses Amazon's massive cloud computing services to provide 'pre-caching' for the new Fire devices." Another potential downside to bear in mind (depending on exactly how much Silk relies on the AWS infrastructure) is that it provides a single point of failure, and sometimes cloud services go down.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Rob Malda
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rob Malda
Malda at LinuxWorld Boston 2006
Born May 10, 1976 (age 35)
Other names CmdrTaco
Known for founder of Slashdot
Slashdot
Rob Malda (CmdrTaco)
Jeff Bates (hemos)
Slashdot effect
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Rob Malda (born May 10, 1976. in Holland Michigan), also known as CmdrTaco, is founder and former editor-in-chief of the website Slashdot. He is a graduate of Hope College and Holland Christian High School.
In 1997 Rob Malda and Jeff Bates created Slashdot while undergraduates of Hope College.[1][dead link] After running the site for two years "on a shoestring",[2] they sold the site to Andover.net, which was later acquired by VA Linux Systems.[3] Malda ran the site out of the SourceForge, Inc. office in Dexter, Michigan.[4]
Rob Malda also wrote a monthly column for Computer Power User.[5][dead link] In 2002, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[6]
On August 25, 2011, Rob Malda announced his resignation from Slashdot.[7]
Yes, but (Score:5, Informative)
I agree about the security/privacy implications.
On SPOF though -
1. Amazon has a *huge* interest in keeping its cloud services up and running. Downtime is likely to be negligible.
2. From what I understand, the Silk browser can fall back to a more conventional mode of operation.
My stance on this is:
- Read and understand Amazon's privacy policy
- Decide how much you trust their security
- Put your Silk browser into client-only mode when you think it's appropriate -- e.g. when doing online banking.
It Can Be Turned Off (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon has stated that the split browsing mode is optional and can be turned off so that Silk is like a conventional browser accessing its content directly instead of from Amazon.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-adds-new-twist-to-old-idea.ars
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
His comment was correct, though. The first iPod WAS objectively inferior to the Nomad of the time. Note that the comment was a quality judgment of the product in question, not a prediction that it would fail in the marketplace.
Re:Good ol' Taco (Score:5, Informative)
I got as far as the fifth paragraph (fourth, if you don't count the obviously unintended break between 4 & 5) and realized the horrible truth: he DID have spellcheckers and editors going over his work while he was here and, God bless their tortured souls, they did as much as they could--they just couldn't completely contend with the torrent of spelling and grammatical errors he sent their way.
My favorite bit is this sentence in paragraph 2:
Silk is the tech amazon [not capitalized] has built to pre-render? [he uses two spaces after questions marks and periods; sometimes three] to pre-cache? web pages on the massive AWS/EC2/S3 network (the same network that Iâm [quotation marks instead of an apostrophe] using to actually host this very web page in fact. [Parentheses not closed]
Slashdot editors, I salute you. *wipes tear from eye*