Saturday, February 4, 2012

Parental Controls and the Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire is Amazon's first foray into the world of tablets running the Google Android operating system. Many tech people have classified the Fire as an e-reader device, but that's not strictly true. Most of today's e-reader devices (such as all of the other Kindles, all of the Sony devices, the original Nook and the Simple Touch, and most of the others) use some form of electronic ink display, while the Fire uses a tablet-standard LED-backlit LCD screen. To me, that difference, coupled with the Fire's faster dual-core CPU and multimedia capabilities, makes the Fire a tablet, not an e-reader.

Esoterica aside, the Fire is by all accounts a great device for just $200. It certainly isn't the fastest tablet, nor does it have the most memory or storage or the largest screen of all the tablets, but you get a lot more bang for your tech dollar than you get from a lot of other devices.

Amazon's main marketing ploy with the Fire has been to extol the virtues of the tablet's Silk web browser. It uses AWS, Amazon Web Services, which runs on Amazon's gargantuan Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. EC2 is a huge distributed server cluster which can be used as a supercomputer for scientific computations, or as a high-availability host for business or personal services with practically zero downtime. Anyone can purchase time and space on EC2 and use it for practically anything legal.

Silk uses AWS as an enormous caching web proxy system. A Fire using the Silk browser sends a request for a web page to AWS, which then downloads all of the page's content, converts it to a form more easily digested by the Fire's somewhat limited hardware capabilities, and sends that rendered data to the requesting Fire for display. AWS also keeps a copy of all of the resources used (images, ad content, etc.) so that other Fires browsing that same page later are served those cached items, which dramatically increases browser performance. This sounds great on paper, but there is, I believe, a significant problem with this approach which may be of interest to those parents who have purchased Fires for their children as Christmas or birthday gifts. However, describing the nature of this problem will first require some explanation on the inner workings of DNS.

(Note: this will be a fairly long article, but stick with me; I think it'll be worth it.)

I've been away too long...

You know how it goes; you start something new, life gets in the way, and one day you realize it has been weeks (or months) since you did anything on that project. Clearly that has happened here. Well, I'm pleased to say I have a new post coming out later today. It's already written, and I'll be posting it shortly to auto-publish this afternoon.