Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews

Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews(teleread.com)

19 points by suninwinter 11 years ago | 13 comments

DigitalSea 11 years ago |

Once upon a time I used to think Greenpeace stood for something, wanted to make a real change in the world and then they go and pull crap like this. Sorry Greenpeace, but this is just plain childish and in the end, does very little to bring attention to your plight and just makes you look bad.

There are worse things happening in the world than Amazon not running green data centres...

drewcrawford 11 years ago |

Hang on a minute. I've reverse-engineered icloud and I have personally verified that it is hosted, in significant part, on AWS and Azure.

Is Apple buying some kind of carbon offset? Or has Greenpeace gotten the information wrong? Or did things change in the year or so since I looked at this?

gress 11 years ago | |

When did you perform that verification? I know they started out by hosting storage chunks on AWS and Azure in 2011, but they have massively increased their own data center capacity since then.

Have you reverified recently?

wcchandler 11 years ago | | |

And "how" was it verified? When Apple was building a large datacenter in North Carolina[1], a lot of local techies were saying it was for 2 purposes -- Siri and iCloud. Granted, that was the popular technology at the time for Apple, so it may have been inferred knowledge, and not directly stated...

I also wouldn't be surprised if they used AWS/Azure for load balancing, geodns, routing and simple filtering before actually being tunneled in to their datacenter.

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/25/apples-icloud-reig...

tehwebguy 11 years ago | | |

Images sent to me through iMessage come to my computer via AWS (verified when someone sent me an image like 10 minutes ago)

api 11 years ago | |

... or does Greenpeace have a clue what they're talking about?

jstanek 11 years ago |

I can't see how this makes Greenpeace look good and Amazon look bad. After reading this, Greenpeace looks like a bunch of ignorant thugs, and Amazon seems victimized. How could this possibly be more effective than a boycott?

umeshunni 11 years ago |

Slacktivism at its finest

pkulak 11 years ago |

Nuclear is dirty now?

cbd1984 11 years ago | |

If you're being generous, it's a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good: "We wouldn't need nuclear if we went all-in with renewables!" is the cry, even if it's not necessarily the case in every environment. But if that's your cry, and you ignore all the waste renewables create (what, are solar panel factories 100% efficient now?), then doing anything other than 100% renewable all the time is unjustifiable.

If you're being less generous, it's all about fear-mongering and the people who bought into the fear. Nuclear Is Evil is pretty axiomatic to them, and it takes little to convince them that power plants will explode like bombs and waste is just being dumped at random and everything else you can imagine if you don't let facts get in the way of a good Righteous Indignation.

So, yes, to some people nuclear is "dirty" in the sense of "ritually unclean", and they will not be convinced otherwise.

7952 11 years ago | | |

It is fascinating how difficult it is to find a good argument for opposing nuclear power. The discussion usually turns into an endless round of meaningless comparison that pretends that we only need one perfect choice instead several imperfect ones.

The best argument I have been able to come up with is that whilst it could be the perfect energy source humans are fundamentally incapable of designing or operating nuclear plants perfectly. You end up with designs that are tightly coupled and massively complicated, which is always risky from an engineering perspective. To make them safe you have to spend huge amounts of money on staff to maintain and operate.

Fukushima was designed and run by highly trained people but it still went wrong. Several stations in the UK were designed by brilliant scientists and still needed flood defenses built in response to Fukushima. There is a real threat and it is entirely due to the normal fallibility of humans. I personally think that nuclear is a necessary choice, but it is hardly a good choice. We need a new generation of generators that are very small, needs minimal maintenance, and have negligible risk even if they are completely destroyed.