The IT Nerd

Amazon appears to be coming under the microscope of the FTC this holiday season via anti-trust scrutiny of Amazon Web Services:

Lina Khan, the head of the agency and a vocal critic of the online retailer, is advancing a probe started several years ago by her predecessor. FTC investigators have contacted companies in the past few months to gather information about competition issues related to Amazon Web Services, said the people, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the outreach. At least one of the contacts was as recent as the past few weeks, said one of the people.

So, what could be the FTC be looking for. How about this for starters?:

One issue the FTC could look at is whether Amazon has an incentive to discriminate against software companies that sell their products to clients of AWS, while at the same time competing with Amazon. The fear is that Amazon could punish the companies that work with other cloud providers and favor those that it works with exclusively.

Well. At the moment, Amazon is co-operating with the FTC. But we’ll see if that continues if the pressure ratchets upwards. Which given the fact that Lina Khan is no fan of Amazon, I fully expect it to.

Bad news. The AWS Health Dashboard is showing that one of its Elastic Cloud Compute systems is down, specifically in Northern Virginia. The problems started at 4:35 am ET and is affecting the following sites among others:

• Amazon
• Hulu
• Slack
• Grindr
• Epic Games Store
• Samsung Smarthings
• Rocket League

The cause was apparently a power outage. Amazon is bringing power back online and things should get back to normal soon. But this is the second major outage for AWS in a short amount of time. Thus Amazon will have some explaining to do.

On Tuesday, AWS had a massive outage that took down a lot of the Internet in the process. Amazon has published a post-event summary that details why they went down. It’s a very detailed explanation that is very technical:

To explain this event, we need to share a little about the internals of the AWS network. While the majority of AWS services and all customer applications run within the main AWS network, AWS makes use of an internal network to host foundational services including monitoring, internal DNS, authorization services, and parts of the EC2 control plane. Because of the importance of these services in this internal network, we connect this network with multiple geographically isolated networking devices and scale the capacity of this network significantly to ensure high availability of this network connection. These networking devices provide additional routing and network address translation that allow AWS services to communicate between the internal network and the main AWS network. At 7:30 AM PST, an automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network. This resulted in a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the internal network and the main AWS network, resulting in delays for communication between these networks. These delays increased latency and errors for services communicating between these networks, resulting in even more connection attempts and retries. This led to persistent congestion and performance issues on the devices connecting the two networks.

Hopefully Amazon addresses this so that this doesn’t happen again. Though I am not hopeful given that AWS doesn’t exactly have a good track record in terms of stability.

Amazon has launched the much-anticipated Echo Buds in Canada, featuring premium audio architecture for crisp, balanced sound, custom-designed Active Noise Cancellation technology, wireless charging capabilities, microphones for strong call quality, and hands-free access to Alexa. 

It’s never been easier for customers to bring Alexa with them throughout their day—whether at home, walking the neighbourhood, or commuting to work. All you have to do is ask Alexa to play music, call to check in on a loved one, try out a new recipe, and so much more. 

The all-new Echo Buds will be available in Black or Glacier White and customers can pre-order on amazon.ca – the price is $154.99.

Amazon released a new robot yesterday for your home yesterday. And to nobody’s surprise, it tracks literally everything you do, and it’s far from perfect:

Amazon’s new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system’s person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project. The documents, which largely use Astro’s internal codename “Vesta” for the device, give extensive insight into the robot’s design, Amazon’s philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a “stranger” is and whether it should take any sort of “investigation activity” against them. 

The meeting document spells out the process in a much blunter way than Amazon’s cutesy marketing suggests. “[Astro] slowly and intelligently patrols the home when unfamiliar person are around, moving from scan point to scan point (the best location and pose in any given space to look around) looking and listening for unusual activity,” one of the files reads. “Vesta moves to a predetermined scan point and pose to scan any given room, looking past and over obstacles in its way. Vesta completes one complete patrol when it completes scanning all the scan point on the floorplan.” […] 

Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well. “Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable,” a source who worked on the project said. “The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended or retracted position, and there’s no way to ship it to Amazon when that happens.” “They’re also pushing it as an accessibility device but with the masts breaking and the possibility that at any given moment it’ll commit suicide on a flight of stairs, it’s, at best, absurdist nonsense and marketing and, at worst, potentially dangerous for anyone who’d actually rely on it for accessibility purposes,” the source said.

So we should really spend $1000 for this? I don’t think so. Amazon should really shelve this and go back to the drawing board. This robot is a #Fail.

Amazon can likely afford this. Though they won’t be happy about cutting this cheque. Amazon has been issued with a fine of 746 million euros ($887 million) by a European privacy watchdog for breaching the bloc’s data protection laws:

The fine, disclosed by Amazon on Friday in a securities filing, was issued two weeks ago by Luxembourg’s privacy regulator. The Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection said Amazon’s processing of personal data did not comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. It has ordered Amazon to revise certain undisclosed business practices.

Amazon, which has its European headquarters in Luxembourg, denied that there had been any kind of breach that would violate the GDPR rules. “Maintaining the security of our customers’ information and their trust are top priorities,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. “There has been no data breach, and no customer data has been exposed to any third party,” they added.

When I see any of these words:

• maintaining
• protecting
• upholding

In a sentence with any of these words:

• our customers’
• clients’
• users’

That includes any of these words:

• trust
• safety
• information

Combined with any of these words:

• is our top priority
• duty
• first thought

My first thought is they must have done something really bad. And the company knows it. Thus while nobody is saying what Amazon did to get slapped with this fine, you can bet that it wasn’t trivial.

Amazon is a pretty invasive company when it comes to monitoring your activities. And it looks like they’re going next level on that front. They have won U.S. permission to use radar to monitor consumers’ sleep habits:

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday granted Amazon.com Inc. approval to use a radar sensor to sense motion and “enable contactless sleep tracing functionalities.” Amazon on June 22 asked the FCC, which regulates airwave uses, for permission to market a device that uses radar. The technology captures movement in three dimensions, enabling a user to control its features through simple gestures and movements, the company said in a filing. The capability, according to Amazon, could help people with “with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments,” and it could monitor sleep with a high degree of precision.

Do I really want Amazon monitoring my sleep? Yes there is sleep monitoring from Apple for example. But I know that my sleep data from my Apple Watch stays with me. Where is the data that Amazon is gathering going? What is Amazon going to do with it? It’s likely too early to answer that question. But I think we should be asking that question now seeing as you are likely to be seeing products with this tech coming soon from Amazon. And by that point it may be too late to have that conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about Tile signing a deal to utilize Amazon’s ‘Sidewalk’ network so that it could better compete agains Apple’s Find My network. At the time I didn’t think it was going to do much for Tile. But it now appears that I might have wrong about that as more details about Amazon’s ‘Sidewalk’ network are starting to surface. And not all of those details are good:

The idea behind is actually really smart–make it possible for smart home devices to serve as a sort of bridge between your WiFi connection and one another. That way, if your Ring doorbell, for example, isn’t located close to your WiFi router, but it happens to near an Echo Dot, it can use Sidewalk to stay connected.

The same is true if your internet connection is down. Your smart devices can connect to other smart devices, even if they aren’t in your home. The big news on this front is that Tile is joining the Sidewalk network on June 14. That means that if you lose a Tile tracker, it can connect to any of the millions of Echo or Ring devices in your neighborhood and send its location back to you.

That’s definitely a nice benefit, but it’s also where things get a little murky from a privacy standpoint. That’s because other people’s devices, like your neighbor’s, can also connect to your network.

Amazon is pretty clear that Sidewalk uses three layers of encryption so that no data is shared between say, someone’s Tile tracker and your network. The signal from the Tile is encrypted all the way back to the Tile app on your iPhone or Android smartphone.

Still, a feature like this seems like the type of thing you’d want some control over. If suddenly my devices are going to start connecting to my neighbor’s WiFi, or theirs to mine, it seems like you’d have to opt-in, right?

Nope.

That’s because Amazon has enabled Sidewalk on every capable device by default. Whether or not you want your device connecting to other devices, or want your neighbors connecting to your WiFi, Amazon went ahead and made Sidewalk opt-out.

I can see why Amazon went this route. It needs all the devices that it can to make ‘Sidewalk’ work. But options like this should be opt-in rather than opt-out. Especially since I don’t exactly trust Amazon with my data. So if this bothers you, here’s how you can opt-out using the Alexa app’s More tab (at the bottom): Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk > Enabled.

So this will lead to the inevitable question about whether Apple’s Find My functionality is on by default. From what I recall it isn’t and during the setup process of an iDevice you have to turn it on. But I would love confirmation of that. If you happen to know for sure, drop me a comment or leave a note and let me know.