When you said
Amazon drops Kindle encryption
I was hoping that they had dropped their ebook encryption, not the device encryption. Not that it is hard to bypass it, but it would be nice.
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I just bought the entry-level Fire during the recent sale. I havenāt used it much, but itās okay so far. Why Kindle? Iāve fallen into the bad habit of cruising free book sites (my current favorite is Centsless Books ) and grabbing anything that suits my fancy. As a result, Iāve got several thousand Kindle ebooks. Thatās an awful lot of books to convert to another format and with the deal I figured, why not try the Fire?
I donāt intend to do any sensitive browsing on the Kindle, so the lack of encryption isnāt a huge worry (though Iād probably be a little embarrassed if just anyone could view some of my moreā¦ adventurous choices. --What?!? They were free.) What bugs me is, the OS wonāt let me load books onto the microSD card. It only stores books on the built-in storage. And now itās almost full. Why promise us all this potential storage capacity and then not let us use it as we wish? Not cool, Amazon.
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The funny thing is, you donāt have to; the Kindle app is available on Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, and Android, and you can just transfer over your purchases ā no conversion necessary. Kindles are still best at reading Kindle ebooks, but Iāve got several friends who buy Kindle books for their iPads.
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I do have the Kindle app for my laptop and my phone (I do most of my ebook reading on my Samsung Galaxy s4.) I was hoping the larger screen would make reading more comfortable, and for $40 (minus $20 for picking up an Amazon store card) I figured, why not try a Kindle?
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Apparently Amazon has already done a 180 on encryption: http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/04/amazon-will-bring-encryption-back-to-FireOS/
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The disturbing question that I think caused the 180:
If this was going to be Amazonās position on the Kindle/Fire OS, then could similar policies on AWS be far behind?
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Err, one is a massive corporate/enterprise solution designed for managing sensitive data, and the other is a handheld tablet? You might as well ask if they are planning on stopping sales of books by the esteemed author Neil Stephenson because he mentions cryptography; itās just as analogous.
Except businesses run in AWS, and encryption is kind of a big deal. It may be different teams, but they all take their marching orders from Bezos.
If you canāt trust Amazon to encrypt the little things, can you trust them with the transparent or other encryption on other products? (The answer is no even if Amazon provides strong encryptionā¦ but thatās a whole other security fight)
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Thatās exactly my point - that they are business focused systems and so have a totally different use case than a tablet.
Even if Bezos was personally behind the switch to decrypt the Fire Tablets (which he may or may not have been), that doesnāt mean that heās going to apply that same thought process to something like AWS, which could have direct legal implications beyond that.
Not offering full disk encryption on a tablet is a failure to provide a consumer product. Somehow dropped the idea of encryption on business services could open them up to significant legal action due to the idea of exposing PII data, etc.
Again, Iām saying theyāre on totally different pages, lumping them together is crazy.
One thing to add here about the Paperwhite (and other Kindles, minus the Fire): the ad-supported cheaper version is worthwhile. It only really pops up ads on the lock screen, so for me anyway, it wasnāt intrusive or bothersome at all, and saved me $50.
And you can root it and remove the ads, too.
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