Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
My interest is knowing which platforms the tech works on because technology is ethically neutral. The same tech that is openly used for product testing can be used for less ethical purposes. And where money is at stake whatever can happen probably *will* happen.
Knowing how it works and where it happens helps me know if I'm being exploited or not and decide if I'll play along or walk away.
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I'd say any epub device/app that uses the Adobe RMSDK rendering engine (but doesn't use the very latest and greatest RMSDK which supports EPUB3) has very little to worry about. And I suspect that even EPUB3-capable versions of RMSDK aren't going to allow internal (inside the ebook) scripts free reign to communicate to external servers. Worst case scenario, IMO, is that a script inside an ebook
might be able to save data to local storage. After that, it's going to need to rely on either 1) the user voluntarily sharing the saved data (through means entirely outside the scope of ebook rendering/managing devices and apps), or 2) the app/device manufacturer is going to need to update software/firmware to allow that local data to be transmitted. Either voluntarily through a menu interface, or silently--behind the scenes.
I don't expect Amazon to play--period. They track their own data. There's no way they're going to let 3rd-party scripts
inside ebooks access the internet willy-nilly.
I frankly don't see any major device/app manufacturer allowing scripts inside ebooks the kind of autonomy that would be requried to make this sort of thing work "silently" -- that is to say without user approval and/or user interaction. There may be security holes in some EPUB3 reading systems that will let people get away with it for a short time, but the outrage generated by things like this--when they hit the news--will close those holes rather quickly.