6 ms·

Silk, Fire and Another Loss For Privacy

51 points by jnorthrop 15y ago

RexRollman 15y ago
According to Ars Technica's article on Silk, it is possible to turn off the split browsing mode and use Silk as a regular web browser, so people who have privacy issues with this can turn it off.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - CodeMage 15y ago
    People don't have to be technical enough to understand or circumvent, that's why there are experts out there pointing these things out and helping people configure their stuff. The only valid point here is that most people aren't informed of the privacy issues and this really needs to stop being a valid excuse once and for all.
- metamatt 15y ago
  Yup. Also pointed out here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051585 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051585), sourced to the official terms and conditions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...).
Nate75Sanders 15y ago
Just playing devil's advocate here: They mention "aggregate user behavior", so they could be building a large, aggregated Markov chain that stores no user data whatsoever -- just site transition data for the world. I haven't read in-depth analysis of how they do their stuff, though.
ck2 15y ago
It's worse than that for webservers. I block all Amazon AWS/EC2 on my servers because it's never humans and I've yet to see a useful bot from there - they just suck bandwidth and cpu time. Since they have free, unlimited inbound, there's a bunch of nonsense going on. Now I suspect silk is going to use the same IP range as amazon aws, so if you block aws, you block silk? So no more using iptables to stop the traffic - maybe I can do it on another layer, allowing the ip via user-agent but of course bots will start spoofing that too. Anyone know if silk will cache and serve content that is not fresh while ignoring no-cache headers? Bonus points if anyone as access to a Fire and can test the ip range and header obedience (as well as pre-fetching aggressiveness).
- ScottWhigham 15y ago
  Good question and I haven't seen a response yet. This may be a serious problem for Amazon since you aren't alone in your blocking of AWS/EC2 IP ranges. If users use the tablet and find that the Silk browser doesn't show them all the sites they want, then people will be disappointed in Amazon. Hopefully they'll separate/segment IPs to prevent users from not using the browser.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    More likely, if AWS fails to fetch a page it will fallback on the browser to do the work. So the user will still get to the page they want, and your site will be blamed for being "slow" due to blocking AWS caching.
    - ck2 15y ago
      Why would they assume local connect would work when AWS times out or notices it was never able to fetch a page? I think it will only be available via a buried setting that most users will never touch. Fire seems to discourage any kind of advanced user, it's the king of "no" Bluetooth? No HDMI? No Camera? No Microphone? No micro/SD slot? No GPS? No 3G? No Android Market? No (only amazon's market) It also brings yet another browser to worry about for website compatibility and will require simulation to test.
talmand 15y ago
There is no such thing as privacy on the internet. Only the illusion of privacy exists.
- esrauch 15y ago
  I don't think this is quite accurate; it's actually somewhat similar to say that there is no privacy in the real world because you have to travel through public property to get anywhere. Anyone could follow you to any store, keep ultimate tabs on where you go and who you meet. Except that isn't a problem, it doesn't happen. And it's not that people don't see you go places; it's very unlikely that you can make it from your house to the grocery store without a bunch of people seeing your car and its unique identifier of a license plate. The thing is that it is almost always different people that see your car on each trip, and those people would be hard pressed to connect your license plate back to your name or your house address. This is true on the internet when your mail, your news source, your social network all are separate entities that have no real way to link between each other. Many people knowing a tiny portion of your identity is very nearly the same thing as none of them knowing anything; and with only the smallest amount of effort that is easily possible to achieve on the internet.
  - talmand 15y ago
    Imagine your ISP is some guy that goes wherever you go and sees whatever you see and hears whatever you hear and so on. Now imagine that the guy is willing to share that information with others due to court order or a nominal fee. Your analogy works if you imagine the privacy issue is other internet users seeing what you are doing while they are going about doing whatever it is they are doing. Unless you have a direct connection to the Internet that does not go through a third party everything you do on the Internet is open to the possibility of being tracked. You use a gateway to get to the Internet and you are not the gatekeeper.
    - esrauch 15y ago
      Even still, the ISP only keeps logs of what URLs you visit and as far as I know they are almost never mined in any way that correlates to your identity. At the worst it is like someone knows all of the addresses I go to in real life, which is still way way less knowledge than private messages to friends and colleagues or the contents of my email, or even what friends and colleagues I am contacting. Actually, it's even less than that because going to gmail or secure.google.com indicates exactly nothing to the ISP about your behavior, for pages like that it would be like someone having knowledge that you are a member at the local library without knowing what books you have checked out; hardly the most privacy infringing knowledge possible. Additionally I naturally access the internet from at least 3 different ISPs on any given day, so even then it is still less concentrated than a single monolithic entity like Facebook. With regards to court order; literally anything can happen with a court order. You can claim that phone calls or paper letters aren't private because a court order could allow police to read their contents, but I think that is really stretching the truth.
mustpax 15y ago
When intercepting a regular HTTP session Silk is no more of a MITM attack than any ISP out there. I trust Amazon more than I trust AT&T or Verizon. What disturbs me is that Amazon Silk will terminate SSL on their end by default.* This is the break from the past that's worrisome. * Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_cn?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200775440 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l...
- jonknee 15y ago
  "Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist." Between your device and that site doesn't sound like terminating at AWS. Also, the SPDY connection to AWS is secure which gets you a leg up on sites that aren't using SSL.
  - ryankshaw 15y ago
    read the sentence right above that: "We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://example.com https://example.com)." that means that the SSL is terminated at amazon's servers, they see it in plaintext, then they send it via SPDY (re-encrypted) to your device. so it is always secure over the wire, but is plaintext readable by amazon. if you are worried about what someone on the wire can see, you are good. if you are worried about what amazon can see, you're not.
    - srdev 15y ago
      Let's not forget that this decryption and re-encryption[1] is going on in the AWS cloud, which is ostensibly shared infrastructure. Its not just what Amazon can see, but what other people who happen to be running on the boxes doing this re-encryption can see (through security vulnerabilities). [1] I'm making the assumption here that re-encryption is actually occurring. It could be the case that its not and the phrasing was simply poor.
eslaught 15y ago
There are alternative browsers available: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_kk_1?rh=i%3Amobile-apps%2Ck%3Abrowser&keywords=browser&ie=UTF8&qid=1317321315 http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_kk_1?rh=i%3Amobile-ap... That doesn't fix the problem for unaware users, but at least the option to use other browsers still exists.
WoodyAnderson 15y ago
I work for a bank. If Silk does indeed terminate SSL, we will block this browser from accessing online banking. We block OperaMini browsers, which also terminate SSL, for exactly the same reason - your sign-on credentials will be IN THE CLEAR on a 3rd party site. As the bank is the one offering the security guarantee and talking the risk, we cannot afford to have credentials in the clear on some else's site -- ever.

51 points by jnorthrop 15y ago

According to Ars Technica's article on Silk, it is possible to turn off the split browsing mode and use Silk as a regular web browser, so people who have privacy issues with this can turn it off.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- CodeMage 15y ago
  People don't have to be technical enough to understand or circumvent, that's why there are experts out there pointing these things out and helping people configure their stuff. The only valid point here is that most people aren't informed of the privacy issues and this really needs to stop being a valid excuse once and for all.
metamatt 15y ago
Yup. Also pointed out here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051585 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051585), sourced to the official terms and conditions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...).

Nate75Sanders 15y ago

Just playing devil's advocate here: They mention "aggregate user behavior", so they could be building a large, aggregated Markov chain that stores no user data whatsoever -- just site transition data for the world. I haven't read in-depth analysis of how they do their stuff, though.

ck2 15y ago

It's worse than that for webservers. I block all Amazon AWS/EC2 on my servers because it's never humans and I've yet to see a useful bot from there - they just suck bandwidth and cpu time. Since they have free, unlimited inbound, there's a bunch of nonsense going on. Now I suspect silk is going to use the same IP range as amazon aws, so if you block aws, you block silk? So no more using iptables to stop the traffic - maybe I can do it on another layer, allowing the ip via user-agent but of course bots will start spoofing that too. Anyone know if silk will cache and serve content that is not fresh while ignoring no-cache headers? Bonus points if anyone as access to a Fire and can test the ip range and header obedience (as well as pre-fetching aggressiveness).

ScottWhigham 15y ago
Good question and I haven't seen a response yet. This may be a serious problem for Amazon since you aren't alone in your blocking of AWS/EC2 IP ranges. If users use the tablet and find that the Silk browser doesn't show them all the sites they want, then people will be disappointed in Amazon. Hopefully they'll separate/segment IPs to prevent users from not using the browser.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  More likely, if AWS fails to fetch a page it will fallback on the browser to do the work. So the user will still get to the page they want, and your site will be blamed for being "slow" due to blocking AWS caching.
  - ck2 15y ago
    Why would they assume local connect would work when AWS times out or notices it was never able to fetch a page? I think it will only be available via a buried setting that most users will never touch. Fire seems to discourage any kind of advanced user, it's the king of "no" Bluetooth? No HDMI? No Camera? No Microphone? No micro/SD slot? No GPS? No 3G? No Android Market? No (only amazon's market) It also brings yet another browser to worry about for website compatibility and will require simulation to test.

talmand 15y ago

There is no such thing as privacy on the internet. Only the illusion of privacy exists.

esrauch 15y ago
I don't think this is quite accurate; it's actually somewhat similar to say that there is no privacy in the real world because you have to travel through public property to get anywhere. Anyone could follow you to any store, keep ultimate tabs on where you go and who you meet. Except that isn't a problem, it doesn't happen. And it's not that people don't see you go places; it's very unlikely that you can make it from your house to the grocery store without a bunch of people seeing your car and its unique identifier of a license plate. The thing is that it is almost always different people that see your car on each trip, and those people would be hard pressed to connect your license plate back to your name or your house address. This is true on the internet when your mail, your news source, your social network all are separate entities that have no real way to link between each other. Many people knowing a tiny portion of your identity is very nearly the same thing as none of them knowing anything; and with only the smallest amount of effort that is easily possible to achieve on the internet.
- talmand 15y ago
  Imagine your ISP is some guy that goes wherever you go and sees whatever you see and hears whatever you hear and so on. Now imagine that the guy is willing to share that information with others due to court order or a nominal fee. Your analogy works if you imagine the privacy issue is other internet users seeing what you are doing while they are going about doing whatever it is they are doing. Unless you have a direct connection to the Internet that does not go through a third party everything you do on the Internet is open to the possibility of being tracked. You use a gateway to get to the Internet and you are not the gatekeeper.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    Even still, the ISP only keeps logs of what URLs you visit and as far as I know they are almost never mined in any way that correlates to your identity. At the worst it is like someone knows all of the addresses I go to in real life, which is still way way less knowledge than private messages to friends and colleagues or the contents of my email, or even what friends and colleagues I am contacting. Actually, it's even less than that because going to gmail or secure.google.com indicates exactly nothing to the ISP about your behavior, for pages like that it would be like someone having knowledge that you are a member at the local library without knowing what books you have checked out; hardly the most privacy infringing knowledge possible. Additionally I naturally access the internet from at least 3 different ISPs on any given day, so even then it is still less concentrated than a single monolithic entity like Facebook. With regards to court order; literally anything can happen with a court order. You can claim that phone calls or paper letters aren't private because a court order could allow police to read their contents, but I think that is really stretching the truth.

mustpax 15y ago

When intercepting a regular HTTP session Silk is no more of a MITM attack than any ISP out there. I trust Amazon more than I trust AT&T or Verizon. What disturbs me is that Amazon Silk will terminate SSL on their end by default.* This is the break from the past that's worrisome. * Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_cn?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200775440 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l...

jonknee 15y ago
"Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist." Between your device and that site doesn't sound like terminating at AWS. Also, the SPDY connection to AWS is secure which gets you a leg up on sites that aren't using SSL.
- ryankshaw 15y ago
  read the sentence right above that: "We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://example.com https://example.com)." that means that the SSL is terminated at amazon's servers, they see it in plaintext, then they send it via SPDY (re-encrypted) to your device. so it is always secure over the wire, but is plaintext readable by amazon. if you are worried about what someone on the wire can see, you are good. if you are worried about what amazon can see, you're not.
  - srdev 15y ago
    Let's not forget that this decryption and re-encryption[1] is going on in the AWS cloud, which is ostensibly shared infrastructure. Its not just what Amazon can see, but what other people who happen to be running on the boxes doing this re-encryption can see (through security vulnerabilities). [1] I'm making the assumption here that re-encryption is actually occurring. It could be the case that its not and the phrasing was simply poor.

eslaught 15y ago

There are alternative browsers available: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_kk_1?rh=i%3Amobile-apps%2Ck%3Abrowser&keywords=browser&ie=UTF8&qid=1317321315 http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_kk_1?rh=i%3Amobile-ap... That doesn't fix the problem for unaware users, but at least the option to use other browsers still exists.

WoodyAnderson 15y ago

I work for a bank. If Silk does indeed terminate SSL, we will block this browser from accessing online banking. We block OperaMini browsers, which also terminate SSL, for exactly the same reason - your sign-on credentials will be IN THE CLEAR on a 3rd party site. As the bank is the one offering the security guarantee and talking the risk, we cannot afford to have credentials in the clear on some else's site -- ever.