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Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews

19 points by suninwinter 12y ago

drewcrawford 12y ago
Hang on a minute. I've reverse-engineered icloud and I have personally verified that it is hosted, in significant part, on AWS and Azure. Is Apple buying some kind of carbon offset? Or has Greenpeace gotten the information wrong? Or did things change in the year or so since I looked at this?
- api 12y ago
  ... or does Greenpeace have a clue what they're talking about?
- gress 12y ago
  When did you perform that verification? I know they started out by hosting storage chunks on AWS and Azure in 2011, but they have massively increased their own data center capacity since then. Have you reverified recently?
  - wcchandler 12y ago
    And "how" was it verified? When Apple was building a large datacenter in North Carolina[1], a lot of local techies were saying it was for 2 purposes -- Siri and iCloud. Granted, that was the popular technology at the time for Apple, so it may have been inferred knowledge, and not directly stated... I also wouldn't be surprised if they used AWS/Azure for load balancing, geodns, routing and simple filtering before actually being tunneled in to their datacenter. [1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reigning-over-the-greenest-data-centers-on-the-planet http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reig...
  - tehwebguy 12y ago
    Images sent to me through iMessage come to my computer via AWS (verified when someone sent me an image like 10 minutes ago)
umeshunni 12y ago
Slacktivism at its finest
jstanek 12y ago
I can't see how this makes Greenpeace look good and Amazon look bad. After reading this, Greenpeace looks like a bunch of ignorant thugs, and Amazon seems victimized. How could this possibly be more effective than a boycott?
DigitalSea 12y ago
Once upon a time I used to think Greenpeace stood for something, wanted to make a real change in the world and then they go and pull crap like this. Sorry Greenpeace, but this is just plain childish and in the end, does very little to bring attention to your plight and just makes you look bad. There are worse things happening in the world than Amazon not running green data centres...
pkulak 12y ago
Nuclear is dirty now?
- cbd1984 12y ago
  If you're being generous, it's a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good: "We wouldn't need nuclear if we went all-in with renewables!" is the cry, even if it's not necessarily the case in every environment. But if that's your cry, and you ignore all the waste renewables create (what, are solar panel factories 100% efficient now?), then doing anything other than 100% renewable all the time is unjustifiable. If you're being less generous, it's all about fear-mongering and the people who bought into the fear. Nuclear Is Evil is pretty axiomatic to them, and it takes little to convince them that power plants will explode like bombs and waste is just being dumped at random and everything else you can imagine if you don't let facts get in the way of a good Righteous Indignation. So, yes, to some people nuclear is "dirty" in the sense of "ritually unclean", and they will not be convinced otherwise.
  - 7952 12y ago
    It is fascinating how difficult it is to find a good argument for opposing nuclear power. The discussion usually turns into an endless round of meaningless comparison that pretends that we only need one perfect choice instead several imperfect ones. The best argument I have been able to come up with is that whilst it could be the perfect energy source humans are fundamentally incapable of designing or operating nuclear plants perfectly. You end up with designs that are tightly coupled and massively complicated, which is always risky from an engineering perspective. To make them safe you have to spend huge amounts of money on staff to maintain and operate. Fukushima was designed and run by highly trained people but it still went wrong. Several stations in the UK were designed by brilliant scientists and still needed flood defenses built in response to Fukushima. There is a real threat and it is entirely due to the normal fallibility of humans. I personally think that nuclear is a necessary choice, but it is hardly a good choice. We need a new generation of generators that are very small, needs minimal maintenance, and have negligible risk even if they are completely destroyed.
icecreampain 12y ago
It should surprise no one that Greenpeace, also, is an ideologically corrupt organisation only interested in filling the pockets of those at the top via fake promises of rainbows and the voluntary work of those at the bottom.

19 points by suninwinter 12y ago

Hang on a minute. I've reverse-engineered icloud and I have personally verified that it is hosted, in significant part, on AWS and Azure. Is Apple buying some kind of carbon offset? Or has Greenpeace gotten the information wrong? Or did things change in the year or so since I looked at this?

api 12y ago
... or does Greenpeace have a clue what they're talking about?
gress 12y ago
When did you perform that verification? I know they started out by hosting storage chunks on AWS and Azure in 2011, but they have massively increased their own data center capacity since then. Have you reverified recently?
- wcchandler 12y ago
  And "how" was it verified? When Apple was building a large datacenter in North Carolina[1], a lot of local techies were saying it was for 2 purposes -- Siri and iCloud. Granted, that was the popular technology at the time for Apple, so it may have been inferred knowledge, and not directly stated... I also wouldn't be surprised if they used AWS/Azure for load balancing, geodns, routing and simple filtering before actually being tunneled in to their datacenter. [1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reigning-over-the-greenest-data-centers-on-the-planet http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reig...
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  Images sent to me through iMessage come to my computer via AWS (verified when someone sent me an image like 10 minutes ago)

umeshunni 12y ago

Slacktivism at its finest

jstanek 12y ago

I can't see how this makes Greenpeace look good and Amazon look bad. After reading this, Greenpeace looks like a bunch of ignorant thugs, and Amazon seems victimized. How could this possibly be more effective than a boycott?

DigitalSea 12y ago

Once upon a time I used to think Greenpeace stood for something, wanted to make a real change in the world and then they go and pull crap like this. Sorry Greenpeace, but this is just plain childish and in the end, does very little to bring attention to your plight and just makes you look bad. There are worse things happening in the world than Amazon not running green data centres...

pkulak 12y ago

Nuclear is dirty now?

cbd1984 12y ago
If you're being generous, it's a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good: "We wouldn't need nuclear if we went all-in with renewables!" is the cry, even if it's not necessarily the case in every environment. But if that's your cry, and you ignore all the waste renewables create (what, are solar panel factories 100% efficient now?), then doing anything other than 100% renewable all the time is unjustifiable. If you're being less generous, it's all about fear-mongering and the people who bought into the fear. Nuclear Is Evil is pretty axiomatic to them, and it takes little to convince them that power plants will explode like bombs and waste is just being dumped at random and everything else you can imagine if you don't let facts get in the way of a good Righteous Indignation. So, yes, to some people nuclear is "dirty" in the sense of "ritually unclean", and they will not be convinced otherwise.
- 7952 12y ago
  It is fascinating how difficult it is to find a good argument for opposing nuclear power. The discussion usually turns into an endless round of meaningless comparison that pretends that we only need one perfect choice instead several imperfect ones. The best argument I have been able to come up with is that whilst it could be the perfect energy source humans are fundamentally incapable of designing or operating nuclear plants perfectly. You end up with designs that are tightly coupled and massively complicated, which is always risky from an engineering perspective. To make them safe you have to spend huge amounts of money on staff to maintain and operate. Fukushima was designed and run by highly trained people but it still went wrong. Several stations in the UK were designed by brilliant scientists and still needed flood defenses built in response to Fukushima. There is a real threat and it is entirely due to the normal fallibility of humans. I personally think that nuclear is a necessary choice, but it is hardly a good choice. We need a new generation of generators that are very small, needs minimal maintenance, and have negligible risk even if they are completely destroyed.

icecreampain 12y ago

It should surprise no one that Greenpeace, also, is an ideologically corrupt organisation only interested in filling the pockets of those at the top via fake promises of rainbows and the voluntary work of those at the bottom.