His e-mail address is more articles by Gregg Keizer.However, one feature that sets the Fire TV platform apart is the support of a fully-fledged browser. Follow Gregg on Twitter at on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. "This is ultimately like an ISP," he said, "but at the same time, ultimately more ambitious. "We'll definitely be following the developments, as browser history is very sensitive information, including data about your interests, your concerns, and your private life," the EFF spokeswoman said in an email Wednesday.īrauer-Rieke kept returning to the similarities between Silk's link to Amazon's servers and the traditional role of ISPs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), another digital privacy advocacy organization, declined to comment in detail on Silk, but a spokeswoman acknowledged that the group "think there are some worrisome privacy issues," including those revolving around browsing history. And how they do that will be where the privacy rubber meets the road.
"They're going to need to inform people about this fundamental change in their browsing," he said. What will be crucial, Brauer-Rieke continued, is how Amazon explains this new technology and its consequences to consumers. "It shows that they understand the privacy implications." "It was a great move to include that option," said Brauer-Rieke. Users will, however, be able to run Silk without the connection to Amazon's servers if they want, the company confirmed in its FAQ. "Amazon is familiar to consumers as an e-merchant, but is really drastically different," said Brauer-Rieke. "We generally do not keep this information for longer than 30 days," said Amazon.
#Silk browser mac#
In the Silk terms and conditions statement that Amazon has published on its website, it has acknowledged that it will temporarily log URLs for the pages it serves, as well as record the originating IP (Internet protocol) or MAC (media access control) addresses, which would identify the network used by the browser, or the individual Fire device. "I have a lot of questions, not about collecting personal information, because Amazon has said it will not do that, but about aggregate information collection," he said. "But there is a proxy under this, and that is something new." "This sounds like a potentially very smart proxy that uses the cloud service to make intelligent decisions, that can predict what site you'll visit," said Brauer-Rieke.
#Silk browser install#
Wisniewski interpreted that to mean that Amazon will install a trusted certificate in Silk that lets them provide a man-in-the-middle SSL proxy to accelerate users' SSL browsing.īrauer-Rieke, a former Web developer who is currently a Fellow at CDT, applauded the technology Amazon's described. "We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL," Amazon said. In a short FAQ about Silk, Amazon intimated that it will also handle the encrypted traffic between consumers and websites secured with SSL (secure socket layer), such as log-in pages, other shopping sites and online banking sessions. In other words, said Chet Wisniewski, a security researcher for Sophos, "Web connections from your tablet will connect directly to Amazon, rather than the destination web page." To do that, Amazon will maintain an open connection between Silk on the Fire and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, and will act as a middle-man proxy on all page requests. That, claimed Amazon, will speed up browsing and let low-powered processors like those in the Fire render sites faster than other mobile browsers and devices. The browser, which is based on the open-source WebKit engine - the same that is the foundation of both Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari - will by default connect to the company's cloud service, which will handle much of the work of composing Web pages, pre-rendering and pre-fetching content, and squeezing the size of page components.