Monthly Archives: December 2007

The Amazon Kindle is a Practical & Excellent Reading Device (Product Review)

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Amazon KindleThe Amazon Kindle is an excellent reading device. It is a good example of a product that serves its purpose well. Like a paper book, it you can use it in bed, bathroom, bus and boondocks.

The E Ink display presents an experience quite close to that of reading a book on paper: It is easy on the eyes and can be read indoors or outdoors in sunlight. It is lightweight, about the size of a paperback book and simple to use. It has excellent battery-life so you can enjoying read without worrying about recharging it often.

In some reviews people have criticized the Kindle as a Web browser and email client. As a satisfied user of the Kindle, I respectfully disagree with those criticisms: It is not meant to be a general purpose notebook computer or tablet PC nor a web browsing or email client. It is for reading books and documents, allowing you to focus on the content while providing you an experience equal to or better than reading on printed paper.

In fact, if Amazon had made web browsing too easy with it, it might end up being counter to the purpose of the Kindle, which is to read books: to learn or for the enjoyment of being engrossed in reading. Many of us prefer our book readers to not offer distractions like web browsing or email while reading. While I love the Web and its hypertext links, there are times I just want to focus and read a book or a document.

The Kindle enables you to be more environment-friendly by saving trees. Many books, newspapers, magazines and blogs are already available on it. You can also transfer your own documents to it for convenient reading without printouts. (You email your document to a special automated email address for conversion. Amazon gives you two options to have it on your Kindle: One for a small fee where your document is wirelessly sent back to your Kindle, the other for free where they email it back to you and you need to copy it over from a computer to your Kindle using USB. You can also download free software to convert documents on your own computer.)

You save paper, yet still can carry your document to read in a convenient, lightweight, portable and easy to read medium. As a bonus, your document is searchable and your bookmarks, clippings, highlighting and notes can be transferred to your computer.

You don’t need a computer at all to take advantage of all the main features of a Kindle, but a computer does allow you to get even more value from your Kindle: You can use it instead of printouts and you can copy audio books and music to your Kindle for listening via its speakers or a headset.

As an educational tool, the Kindle comes with another useful and time-saving feature. You can ask a question using the Kindle which is answered by an Amazon-affiliated human researcher at no additional charge. The Kindle not distract your reading with Web browsing or email and it gives you a way to save some time which you would have spent researching yourself via Web searches — and we know how that can be: Sometimes you go the Web to look up something and end up wasting time on other things. With this Amazon Kindle’s research service called NowNow, you send your question via the Kindle and a human expert does the research for you and sends you the answers they find.

The Kindle can be charged using the A00 Tip with an iGo Adapter, which is great because you can carry it on hiking trips and to places where an electrical outlet is not conveniently available and charge it using two double-A batteries using the iGo powerXtender.

Want to take a break from Web surfing that encourages the attention span of a goldfish? Try the Kindle and enjoy being focussed and engrossed in a book. You can learn about all its features and benefits, watch videos and read its reviews at the Kindle page on Amazon.com.1

Rating: ★★★★☆

  1. Note & Disclosure: the links to the Kindle pages in this article tell Amazon that I referred them. If you happen to buy it in that session, I will get a commission but they will not charge you any extra. I like the Kindle and thus wrote this favorable, and in my opinion, fair review. It expresses my opinions and shares my experience with the Kindle. The purpose of this review is not at all to profit from selling Kindles. [↩]

Why I’m not a fan of fingerprint scanners for computer security

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These days many notebook computers and portable devices like USB drives are featuring fingerprint scanners which they advertise as biometric security.

I’ve never been a fan of biometric security of this type. I will explain why using different scenarios:

Likely scenario: Stolen or lost laptop

If your laptop is lost or stolen, it is bound to have nice samples of all your fingerprints all over its nice smooth body. Picking up samples of your fingerprints from your laptop surface is much easier than cracking your password. A few internet searches or a visit to a detective/spy shop will provide the person in possession of your notebook computer or other lost gadget all they need to make copies of your fingerprints and create a mold that they can use to authenticate as you.

If your laptop had been secured with a password and encryption, they’d likely reformat your hard drive and your losses would be limited to your hardware. If a fingerprint scan was all that was required to gain access to your account, then your data, your privacy, not to mention your peace of mind for years to come will likely be stolen too.

Another scenario: Forced access to your computer

Let us consider another likely scenario without going into the cinema-like gruesome situation of a villain cutting off your thumb to forcibly access your computer. Say you are sleeping in a shared college dorm. Your roommate or a friend can bring your laptop near you and easily swipe your finger on it to gain access to all your files. You don’t even have to be unconscious. A person or gang stronger than you can easily overpower you without hurting you physically and swipe your finger on your computer to gain access.

Security Related Cartoon from XKCD

You see? This type of fingerprint scanning biometric security alone replacing passwords (instead of being used in combination with them) is a lot less secure than one would think. Such advertising of biometric security might seem impressive, but it leads to a false sense of security. In this day or digital privacy and identity theft, relying on such an insecure authentication alone is not a good idea.

As an aside, here is an interesting article on how fingerprint scanners work at HowStuffWorks.com.