France warns officials on BlackBerry use
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BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful &#151; and now, a threat to French state secrets. That, at least, is the fear of French government defense experts, who have advised against their use by officials in France's corridors of power, reportedly to avoid snooping by U.S. intelligence agencies.
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France warns rebels in Chad that it could intervene if they continue to threaten the capital, N'Djamena.
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It may be wishful thinking, but a  Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its  employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry  smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.
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Celltrust developed its SecureSMS application so banks could deliver secure text messages to their customers&#39; mobile phones -- but the company&#39;s chief technology officer wonders whether French president Nicolas Sarkozy might like a copy of the software.Sarkozy sued a French magazine on Thursday for publishing a message it alleged he had sent by SMS (Short Message Service) to his ex-wife just days before his marriage to singer Carla Bruni earlier this month. The president accused the magazine of falsification, use of false documents and possession of stolen goods.If a text message is sent using SecureSMS then even if the phone is stolen, the secured messages on it cannot be read, Celltrust CTO Houman Shafiezadeh said at a press event in Barcelona, on the eve of the Mobile World Congress.That&#39;s because SecureSMS encrypts messages before transmission using a key unique to the sender, decodes them at a secure gateway and reencrypts using another key for delivery. A special application on the sender&#39;s and the recipient&#39;s phones stores the encrypted message, and will only decrypt and display it if the appropriate password is provided.SecureSMS can encrypt messages sent between two cell phones as long as both subscribers have set up accounts with Celltrust, Shafiezadeh said.Celltrust&#39;s target market, though, is big business: it hopes that banks will use its gateway and application software to secure the messages they send out to customers. The software has other advantages for banks: it provides confirmation of the reception and opening of secured messages, showing that whoever holds the phone also has the password.These confirmations, however, are sent by SMS and paid for by the phone subscriber. That makes the application more suitable for customers on tariffs allowing unlimited text messages.&quot;If you&#39;re paying 10 cents a message, I wouldn&#39;t recommend it,&quot; Shafiezadeh said.Celltrust is in talks with a number of U.S. banks to roll out the software in trials, he said. Finding enough customers with the right kinds of account, phone and SMS tariff is slowing things down, he said. Once the banks have identified the customers, the company will invite them to download the application, so that it can fine-tune the delivery process. The trials should begin in March, with a commercial service up and running by September, he said.The SecureSMS software is initially available as a J2EE applet for phones capable of running Java applications. Other versions, for Microsoft&#39;s Windows Mobile and for Qualcomm&#39;s Brew platform, will soon be ready.After that, Shafiezadeh said, it will be a race between Celltrust coders producing versions for Google&#39;s Android platform -- for which there is an SDK (software development kit) but no phones -- and for Apple&#39;s iPhone, on the market for almost eight months but with no official SDK available yet. That&#39;s frustrating for Shafiezadeh because Celltrust has issued its employees with iPhones.Other companies offer secure SMS tools, but for more limited ranges of handsets. Kryptext, in Brighton, England, offers an application by the same name that works only on phones running Symbian OS, while Finnish handset maker Benefon (now GeoSentric) offered handsets that could send encrypted text messages back in 2003.The Mobile World Congress, at the Fira de Barcelona, runs through Thursday.
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Watch a movie or make a mobile phone call. Soon, in France, you might not be able to do both at once...
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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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The French prime minister urges caution over reports that two French journalists held in Iraq may be freed.
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It may be wishful thinking, but a Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.
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Parents should ensure their children use mobile phones only when necessary, a leading expert is warning.
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BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful &#151; and now, a threat to French state secrets.
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Executives who are longtime BlackBerry users will have to teach their right thumb some new tricks if they switch to a model introduced on Monday.
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Nous crachons sur la baie noire - tool of Anglo spies French ministers and other government bigwigs (perruques-grands?) will no longer be allowed to use BlackBerries, in sharp contrast to British MPs.â¦
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To enter French market, Apple must obey law that forbids companies to bundle a cell phone to a mobile operator.
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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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A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday.
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French government officials are planning to raise their concerns over China&#39;s exchange-rate policy at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
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Britain could follow France in cutting  Internet access to users who repeatedly download music or films  illegally.