Amazon announced the Kindle Fire touch screen tablet last week at a NYC press event.

My immediate reaction was I want one. Many people will have that reaction.

The $199, 7-inch (diagonal) color touchscreen device has built-in WiFi, weighs only 14.6 ozs, and has a reported battery life of 8 hours [...]]]> [Updated: 2011-10-22]

Amazon announced the Kindle Fire touch screen tablet last week at a NYC press event.

My immediate reaction was I want one. Many people will have that reaction.

The $199, 7-inch (diagonal) color touchscreen device has built-in WiFi, weighs only 14.6 ozs, and has a reported battery life of 8 hours of use. It is a tablet computer, ebook reader, media consumption, and gaming device. It is available for pre-order now but won’t ship until November 15 for the earliest customers who pre-ordered. The device has a sexy appearance and a low price, compared to comparable and not-so comparable touchscreen, tablet computers.

Before you commit to buying one you should be aware of the fantastic cloud resources and technology Amazon is bringing to the Fire. The two most prominent are:

• Unlimited cloud storage for all your Amazon digital content: books, magazines, movies/TV shows, apps, games, and music.
• Silk – Amazon’s “cloud-accelerated” web browser.

The device has only 8GB of storage. The least expensive iPad has twice that. Rather than adding more space and increasing the price, Amazon has “solved” the storage issue by keeping your data on their servers in the clouds and downloading it when you want or need it, if is not already on your Kindle Fire. If you are not connected by WiFi, the only radio inside the Kindle Fire, you are out of luck. There is no cellular model.

This means that Amazon will know a lot about you, even more than they currently do if you shop there. Perhaps even more than Apple knows about its iPhone and iPad customers, since they can add content from non-Apple sources. Consequently, if you value your privacy the Kindle Fire is not for you.

The Silk browser is both exciting in how it improves on the Kindle Fire user’s web experience and disquieting because it is what in security circles is known as a “man-in-the-middle attack” or MITM. Amazon is using its huge server business to accelerate web-browsing on the Kindle Fire. Unlike traditional web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer that directly download a website’s content, Silk will intervene on all websites and “optimize” their content to increase the speed with which pages are rendered. Amazon will shrink image sizes and attempt to predict your likely next webpage call and send that to your Kindle Fire in the background. The information is sketchy but it appears they will even do this with secure websites, like your bank or email. [Turns out my fears were unfounded. The Electronic Freedom Foundation announced that after discussions with Amazon's Silk developers, they are satisfied that Silk will not be a man-in-the-middle for secure (SSL/https) websites. https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-fire%E2%80%99s-new-browser-puts-spotlight-privacy-trade-offs]

The upside to this technology is that web surfing on the Kindle Fire should be as fast as possible. Pages should render faster than they would otherwise. Furthermore, Amazon will be in a position to stop malware from hijacking our private information. The downside to this is that we are being asked by Amazon to trust them in a way that not even Google expects today.

Good Internet security follows a Trust No One (TNO) model, which includes Amazon. Fortunately, Amazon says that we will be able to opt out of this feature from the Silk browser’s setting panel.