Thread: Amazon is talking out both sides of its [edited]
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Old 12-17-2010, 04:05 PM   #95
Worldwalker
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird View Post
How would a Kindle receive a signal to turn on the wifi or 3g if the wifi is off? Are Kindles telepathic?
Simple: "off" does not, in fact, mean "off"; it means "not accessible to the user." It's not a physical switch; it's a software setting. And what software can set, software can un-set. It's like setting a file to "hidden" under Windows: the file is still there, and any program that wants to access it can do so, but you don't see it when you look. So, for example, the Kindle software might be set to check once a day to see if there's anything Amazon wants to update. It would turn itself on, check its network, and turn back off, without turning the screen on or reporting anything. Without a physical way of disabling that capability (perhaps making a Kindle-shaped tinfoil hat?) there is no way for the user to ensure that "off" really means "not available to the Kindle no matter how hard it tries."

Take my Wii as an example. It has an "on/off" switch, but that's really an "active/standby" switch. When it's nominally "off", so long as it has power anyway, it will periodically check to see if Nintendo wants to patch it, and flicker its little blue light if there's a patch waiting. That's the same kind of "off" that a network-capable ebook reader has.

Our ebook readers, by the way, are rarely actually "off". They go into sleep mode, but they're still awake down there, waiting for us to read them. Push the "on" button and the screen starts up instantly -- no fifteen minutes of boot sequence and library indexing. That's because it was never actually turned off in the first place. It was just in low-power mode, and if its software wants to reach out and touch someone, it can do so. Well, not mine, since mine doesn't have the hardware capability, but one that does have it.

Also, Amazon has gone into people's Kindles and taken books away from them. That's what the whole "1984" brouhaha was about (and what a book to do it with). They not only have the capability, they have demonstrated it.
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