National security risks prompt French BlackBerry ban
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(InfoWorld) - French government members and their advisors have been told not to use BlackBerry smartphones, for national security reasons. The ban on BlackBerry devices is just one of the IT challenges facing new National Assembly members as they take their seats following Sunday's elections. The smartphones, developed by Canadian company Research in Motion, send and receive e-mail through just a handful of servers in the United Kingdom and in North America -- a reality brought home when a failed software upgrade to the North American servers in April abruptly halted service to BlackBerry users there. This concentration of data poses a threat to national security, according to Alain Juillet, senior economic intelligence advisor to the French Prime Minister, because of the risk of data interception. There's reason to believe that Juillet knows what he's talking about when it comes to industrial or political espionage: after a career in retail, Juillet made headlines in October 2002 when he was appointed Director of Intelligence for the French General Directorate of External Security, the country's foreign security service, moving to the role of senior economic intelligence advisor in December 2003. In his most recent post, he has long maintained that French government and businesses should be more wary of how they use technology to exchange information. The French Secretary-General for National Defense first circulated advice to government officials two years ago, warning them not to use BlackBerry devices. That same advice has now been reissued, Juillet's office said Wednesday. The republication of the advice coincides with the arrival of newly elected officials and their advisors, unfamiliar with the French administration's rules and traditions on using IT, in the National Assembly, following Sunday's national elections. Many of the new arrivals will face another IT challenge as they move into their offices at the National Assembly: learning to use an unfamiliar suite of software on their computer. Last year, the outgoing National Assembly voted to install open source software on their desktop machines. That software is already installed on the machines of the assembly's existing members: new members get their software update after being allocated an office. Government officials were not immediately available to identify which open source software is being used.
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Much ado about nothing France has become the fourth country to blame China for an upsurge in hacking attacks against government computers.â¦
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A disruption of BlackBerry cellphones in North America for several hours Monday was caused by the failure of one of its recently upgraded systems, Research in Motion said Tuesday.
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The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
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Email and Internet service to BlackBerry cellphones in North America stopped working on Monday, according to US telecommunications giant AT&T.
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Get INQ7 breaking news on your Smart mobile phone in the Philippines. Send INQ7 BREAKING to 386. PARIS, France -- A virus that spies on keystrokes and downloads passwords and bank account details is circulating
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(InfoWorld) - The head of the cellular industry association sent a letter to President Bush, asking him to strike the U.S. International Trade Commission's recentÂ ban on the import of Qualcomm phones in the U.S. The ban, issued by the commission on June 7, can be vetoed by the president within 60 days of the ruling. Historically, presidents have rarely overturned such a decision from the ITC. The ban will "freeze innovation" for wireless networks in the country and will adversely affect public safet, wrote Steve Largent, president and CEO of the CTIA cellular industry association, in a letter to the president dated Wednesday. In addition to diminishing public safety agencies' ability to conduct basic communications, the ban will also hinder the mobile industry's efforts to improve emergency 911 services, he wrote. That's because the ban only covers future phone models while allowing existing phones to continue to reach the market. As a result, new technologies that can allow better pinpointing of 911 callers won't be imported if the ban stands, Largent wrote. He paints a broad picture of woe across the industry that will result from the ban. "Substantial investments will be stranded and jobs will be lost if the ITC importation ban is allowed to stand," according to the letter. Largent warns that the ban will force the redesign of all handsets that use the chips, a process that could take 18 months to two years and could cost millions of dollars. That process will reduce the international competitiveness of the companies and pass on costs to consumers, he said. The ban is a result of aÂ patent feud between Qualcomm and Broadcom. The ITC ruling follows an earlier finding thatÂ Qualcomm infringed on a Broadcom patentÂ related to power management. The ITC took unusual steps in order to develop the parameters of the ban, holding hearings with the two companies and entertaining ideas from the industry. It is rare for the ITC to grandfather in products, allowing them to be imported even though they have been found to infringe intellectual property. The only similar cases historically have involved products that could directly harm lives if they became unavailable. If the president doesn't strike the ban, Qualcomm can appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, asking for a stay of the ban. However, the court rarely issues stays to such decisions. Qualcomm has said that it plans to urge the president to overturn the ban and if he doesn't, the company will appeal the decision in court.
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A major service outage afflicted users of the popular BlackBerry smartphones across the United States and Canada on Monday, wireless carriers said.
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The Blackberry wireless device maker is straining to exceed expectations.
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A federal agency bans US imports of new mobile phones made with Qualcomm chips due to a patent row.
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French ministers tried on Tuesday to calm  tensions following the government's decision to ban cultivation  of the sole genetically modified (GMO) crop grown in the  country, stressing that the move was temporary.
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Blog: Despite warnings by French national defense authorities that their messages might be swiped by off American servers by the National Security Agency, some officials are reportedly still using the smartphones in secret.
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The U.S. International Trade Commission ordered a ban on Thursday of some imported cellphones with Qualcomm chips that infringe on a Broadcom patent.
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A federal judge has halted the ban on mobile phones containing chips made by Qualcomm that was imposed after a court earlier determined that the chips violated a patent held by Broadcom.
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The French Health Ministry on Wednesday  issued a warning against excessive cell phone use, especially  by children, though it recognized science had not proved  cellular technology was dangerous.
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A department in the Australian government is holding back a RIM BlackBerry rollout due to concerns about the impact on staff work/life balance.
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InfoWorld - BlackBerry mobile data services were disrupted Monday afternoon due to a problem with Research In Motion's infrastructure, apparently affecting customers of all major North American mobile operators, an AT&T Wireless spokesman said.