White House Confirms: President Keeps His Blackberry

Tue, Sep 23rd 2008 11:16am

Filed Under:
blackberry, email, encryption, india

34 Comments | Leave a Comment..

India Claims To Have Cracked Blackberry Encryption; Proudly Spying On Emails

from the details-missing dept

Earlier this year, India demanded that RIM allow it to easily snoop on any email messages sent via Blackberry devices. The company explained that since the end user sets the encryption key, there's simply no way to provide a backdoor to snoop on the messages. However, now the government is proudly claiming that it's cracked the code and can now monitor Blackberry messages on various mobile operator networks. The details are quite vague, especially an offhand comment about how this is "wholly for non-enterprise solutions." That would suggest, then, that enterprise Blackberry messages may remain secure. It also raises questions about whether or not the mobile operators in question are simply providing access to their mail servers. Either way, the whole thing seems weird -- including the government's effort to publicize the fact that it's spying on Blackberry messages.

Tue, May 27th 2008 10:26am

Filed Under:
blackberry, email, encryption, india, snooping

Companies:
rim

33 Comments | Leave a Comment..

RIM Tells India That It Simply Cannot Snoop On Blackberry Email

from the so-sorry dept

A few months back, we noted that the Indian government was demanding that RIM let government officials snoop on emails sent via Blackberry devices, or they would be banned in India. I'm not sure why it took so long for RIM to point this out, but it finally has explained to the government the nature of its encryption scheme which means that RIM itself cannot decrypt messages sent via the network, since they're based on an encryption key set up by the end user. It's not clear how India is going to respond, though the article notes the two sides are "talking."

Legal Issues

Mon, Feb 18th 2008 4:24pm

Filed Under:
blackberry, innovation, nuclear war, patents

Companies:
motorola, rim

8 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Motorola: Since We're Not Innovating, We'll Litigate Over Patents

from the suing-RIM dept

We recently noted the challenges facing Motorola, as it's been unable to continue to innovate in a way that customers desire in the handset business. Unfortunately, it looks like Motorola is choosing the all-too-common strategy among those who fail in the marketplace: they start suing for patent infringement. Motorola has now decided that since it hasn't been able to beat RIM's Blackberry in the marketplace, it's simply going to sue the company for patent infringement instead. Of course, as in any good patent nuclear war, RIM has fired back with its own patent infringement countersuit, meaning that both companies will be tied up with lawyers and judges, throwing away money that could have gone towards actually innovating and actually competing in the marketplace.

(Mis)Uses of Technology

Tue, Feb 12th 2008 4:54pm

Filed Under:
blackberry, outage, software upgrade

Companies:
rim

15 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Once Again, RIM Blames Upgrade For Outage; Time To Do Weekend Upgrades

from the just-a-suggestion dept

Last year when RIM's Blackberry service had a major outage, the company blamed a software upgrade, which made many folks question why RIM would be doing a major software upgrade in the middle of the week. Since most Blackberry users are corporate users, it would seem to make sense to do upgrades over the weekend -- or at least late at night. So, with this latest outage, it's a bit surprising to see RIM fall back on the old "software upgrade" excuse again. The company doesn't say that's definitely what happened, but suggests that's what caused it, failing to explain why the company would run an upgrade in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.

Wireless

Mon, Feb 11th 2008 8:59pm

Filed Under:
addiction, blackberry, centralized services, mobile email, outage

Companies:
rim

29 Comments | Leave a Comment..

RIM Toys With Blackberry Addicts Again; Cuts Off Users For 3.5 Hours

from the want-to-stay-connected? dept

Last April, RIM woke many Blackberry users up to the idea that they might be Crackberry addicts by having the system go offline for a few hours overnight. It's amazing how people recognize just how dependent they are on a service once it goes away. The eventual excuse given by RIM (a botched software upgrade) was unconvincing. However, there hadn't been any more outages, so questions about the service died down. However, with widespread Blackberry outages Monday afternoon, lasting about three and a half hours, impacting all mobile operators, some of those questions are going to be raised again. The Blackberry system involves all traffic going through RIM machines, and a cascading problem across those machines can certainly cause quite a bit of trouble. At some point, people are going to start asking if there isn't a more robust, distributed way of offering a Blackberry (or Blackberry-like) service that would be more immune to these types of issues.

Legal Issues

Fri, Nov 9th 2007 11:31am

Filed Under:
black cherry, blackberry

Companies:
lg, rim