Fire power

When the new tablet ranking numbers come out after the holidays, the Kindle Fire is poised to become the number two, behind the iPad. And when you own one, it comes pre-loaded with all your Amazon customer information – name, shipping address and payment preferences – to make it easy as pie to buy stuff. So easy, in fact, kids can do it, and they have. Reuters is reporting on a number of cases where kids get a hold of the device, touch a pretty picture, then touch the Amazon-patented 1-Click button. Viola! Item purchased. There’s no real way to get around this problem either. You can turn off 1-Click, but it’s pretty easy for curious kids to enable it again. You can unregister the device after making purchases, but that erases content. Amazon has been compliant with returned merchandise, but some parents are still miffed about having to figure out workarounds.

My advice is as old as the hills, don’t let kids play with Fire.