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The BlackBerry services ban has been delayed for at least two months as the Indian government gives Research in Motion more time to comply with it’s requests.
BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion and India’s government have avoided a confrontation by agreeing to extend talks over intelligence agency access to BlackBerry services for another two months.

The Indian Government had set a Tuesday deadline for corporate e-mail and messaging services on BlackBerry to be shut down if the Canadian company did not agree to the demand, but a home affairs ministry statement said that “RIM have made certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies.” The situation will be “reviewed” in 60 days, the ministry said.

RIM has previously said that India’s demands for access to its encrypted BlackBerry Enterprise Server email service was not possible because customers control the service’s security codes. Over the weekend, however, talks took place between Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, and home affairs officials.

India has recently begun to insist that its security agencies should have access to all communications in the country, which has prompted Nokia to say that it will install a server in India to handle communications from its messaging service by November.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and other nations also fear Blackberry devices could become a tool to plan militant attacks or for those breaking Islamic laws.

The Indian department of telecommunications is now set to prepare a report on a long-term solution under which RIM would locate a server in India. BlackBerry currently has 1 million Indian subscribers and 46 million around the world.

India may shut down Google and Skype messaging services over security concerns as the government threatened a similar crackdown on BlackBerry services.
The Financial Times quoted from the minutes of a July 12 meeting between telecommunication ministry security officials and operator associations to look at possible solutions to “intercept and monitor” encrypted communications.

“There was consensus that there more than one type of service for which solutions are to be explored. Some of them are BlackBerry, Skype, Google etc,” according to the department’s minutes. “It was decided first to undertake the issue of BlackBerry and then the other services.”

On Thursday, the Indian government became the latest of several nations that have threatened to cut off Research In Motion’s encrypted BlackBerry email and instant messaging services if the Canadian company does not address national security concerns.

India has set an August 31 deadline for RIM. It wants access in a readable format to encrypted BlackBerry communication, on grounds it could be used by militants. Pakistani-based militants used mobile and satellite phones in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

India’s demands follow a deal with Saudi Arabia, where a source said Research In Motion agreed to give authorities codes for BlackBerry Messenger users. The United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Algeria also seek access.

Officials say RIM had proposed tracking emails without sharing encryption details, but that was not enough.

The Financial Times report said representatives from two of the telecom operator associations present confirmed the details of the meeting earlier this month.

“At the last security meeting, the agencies were talking about BlackBerry. They were also coming out heavily on Skype and Google,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India.

A shutdown would affect one million users in India out of the smartphone’s 41 million users. India is one of RIM’s fastest growing markets.

RIM, unlike rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers located in Canada and other countries, such as Britain.

In a matter of a few weeks, the BlackBerry device – long the darling of the world’s CEOs and politicians, including US President Barack Obama – has become a target for its sealed email and messaging services with governments around the world.

While the vast majority of malicious programs are designed to attack Windows PCs, there is evidence that some hi-tech criminals are starting to turn their attention to smartphones.
Booby trapped applications for smartphones have been found online and in recent weeks Apple and Google have removed applications from their online stores over fears that they were malicious.

Chris Wysopal, co-founder and technology head at security firm Veracode, which helped the BBC with its project to replicate the apps, said smartphones were now at the point the PC was in 1999.

At that time malicious programs were a nuisance. A decade on and they are big business, he said, with gangs of criminals churning out malware that tries to steal saleable information.

At that time home computers in the form of the BBC Micro, Vic 20 and Sinclair ZX machines were in vogue. The proud owner of a Vic 20 I spent hours laboriously copying line after line of code out of magazines to get games running.

The end result was a program that does not look great but gets the job done. The process has educated me about modern programming and put me on my guard about what goes on my phone.

Mobiles, he said, offered a potentially more tempting target to those criminals.

“Mobile phones are really personal devices,” said Mr Wysopal. “You might have one computer for a family but every family member has a personal device and it is with them all the time.”

Simeon Coney, a spokesman for mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile, said criminals were focused on handsets for one simple reason: money.

“In the PC domain the only way a criminal can generally take money from a user is by having them click on a web link, go to a website, purchase a product and enter their credit card details,” said Mr Coney.

“In a mobile network the device is intrinsically linked to a payment plan, to a user’s credit,” he said. Nothing happens on a mobile network, no call is made or text is sent, without money changing hands.

Criminals have tapped into that revenue stream by getting phone owners to dial or contact premium rate numbers. Now they are turning their attention to applications and the lucrative information they scoop up.

The App Genome project by mobile security firm Lookout was set up to map what applications produced for smartphones do. It tried to find out if they do everything they claim and if they do more than expected.

The project has looked at 300,000 smartphone applications and mapped the internal functions of one-third of them.

It found that about one-third of applications it has studied seek to get at a user’s location and about 10% try to get at contact and address lists. The study also found that a significant proportion of applications included code copied and pasted from other programs.

To get a better understanding of the barriers to creating malicious programs the BBC downloaded a widely used application development kit, learned the basics of programming in Java and gathered some snippets of code already released on the net.

It was possible in a few weeks to put together a crude game that also, out of sight, gathered contacts, copied text messages, logged the phone’s location and sent it to a specially set up e-mail address.

The spyware took up about 250 lines of the 1500 making up the entire program. The code was downloaded to a single handset but was not put on an application store.

All of the information-stealing elements of the spyware program were legitimate functions turned to a nefarious use.

“That’s kind of the scary thing,” said Mr Wysopal from Veracode. “The face of the application, be it a game or a simple application that is for fun, can have behaviour that is not visible at the surface.”

It’s way less effort to hack into someone else’s application, as you do not have to write it yourself”

By contrast, he said, stealing a popular application, packing it with booby-trapped code and offering it for free can reap rewards.

Some application makers have found that 97% of the people using their software are doing so via pirated versions.

Application stores are making efforts to police the programs they offer. So far the number of booby-trapped applications remains low. But many feel the threat is only likely to grow.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10912376

Internet phone firm Skype has filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the US as the Luxembourg based company hopes to raise up to $100m (£63m) in a stock market flotation.
Skype will sell American Depositary Shares (ADS) – which represent shares in foreign companies – and expects to trade on the Nasdaq index.

Skype’s software lets computer and mobile phone users talk to each other for free and make cut price calls to mobiles and landlines.

The company did not specify when its shares would go on sale, or at what price- or what the total comapny valuation might be.

According to the regulatory filing, in the first half of 2010 Skype had 560 million registered users, who logged 95 billion minutes of voice and video calls.

Online auction site eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn in 2005, but sold 70% of the company for $2bn last year.

A group of private investors made up of private equity firm Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz bought a 56% stake.

Joltid, a firm controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, owns a 14% stake.

In its filing, Skype said it made a net profit of $13.1m in the first six months of the year, but warned that it “may not maintain profitability”.

The company reported a loss of $417.5m in 2009, thanks largely to legal costs in settling a dispute about the ownership of the technology it uses.

“We may incur net losses again and cannot assure you that we will be profitable in the future or that, if we are, we will be able to maintain profitability,” the filing said.

The Saudi and UAE BlackBerry ban goes to the heart of how the mobile phone market has evolved.
The decision of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to ban BlackBerry email, messenger and web browsing services goes to the heart of the way in which the handheld devices operate – itself a consequence of the way that the mobile market has developed.

When the first BlackBerry appeared, over a decade ago, mobile phone networks were far more basic than they are today. The most innovative service the majority of users had seen since mobile devices first appeared in the 1980s was the introduction of text messaging.

In the US, many mobile users were still making calls on analogue networks, while in Europe the new digital operators were only just introducing data services.

But the sorts of speeds possible over networks such as Orange and Cellnet in the UK were pitiful. Speeds of 9.6Kb per second – less than 1% of the average speed available in the UK today– meant the networks had to resort to offering a pared-down version of the internet using WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) technology.

Using a mobile phone to receive email, let alone access the “real” internet was almost unheard of.

By the mid-1990s, Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) was already working with partners on a messaging device that would work on a new wireless data network, which its owners hoped would be rolled out across Europe and the US.

As a result, RIM switched to working with the existing mobile phone companies, but to squeeze emails across their networks meant using compression technology.

RIM also needed to be able to persuade jittery corporate IT departments their emails would be safe, which required encryption technology.

To create such a lean and secure service required an end-to-end solution, with both the device, the BlackBerry, and the server hosting the user’s email being able to understand each other. However, RIM wanted to be able to offer its devices on any mobile phone network.

As a result, it created the Network Operations Centre (NOC), which seems to have created such a headache in the Gulf.

Every mobile phone operator that wants to offer BlackBerry devices has to have a connection to a Noc: – there is one based in Canada to cover the Americas and one covering Europe and Asia. A company that wants to offer BlackBerrys to its employees, meanwhile, has to install software within its own IT systems that can communicate with the Noc.

When a user’s inbox receives a new email, that software securely communicates with the Noc, which then connects securely to the BlackBerry over a mobile phone network to deliver the email. It uses compression technology to make sure the email can be squeezed over even the most congested network.

Numerous research reports over the past year have suggested that BlackBerrys are at least five times more efficient at email and attachment viewing than any other platform.

RIM has since opened its network up to consumer email services such as Gmail and Hotmail, which together with the introduction of a range of stylish devices aimed at the consumer market has created a boom in usage of BlackBerry phones among teenagers.

Opening up the RIM network to the web has also allowed internet browsing, which is also faster on a BlackBerry than other devices. They are three times more efficient than other carriers, according to a recent research.

But there is another side-effect to the way that RIM’s network architecture is configured and it has been seized upon by cash-strapped teenagers: BlackBerry Messenger.

Because RIM knows every BlackBerry device in use, regardless of which network it is on, and they are all directly connected to its Nocs, BlackBerry users who have devices with the right software can communicate with each other without incurring the network interconnection and roaming charges associated with text messages.

Text messages and telephone calls, meanwhile, are routed solely over a mobile phone network, so neither will be affected by the UAE’s decision. That also explains why when there is a problem with RIM’s network – which has happened in the past – BlackBerry users can still make calls.

When the first BlackBerry appeared in the late 1990s it was effectively a two way pager.

BlackBerrys have fallen foul of two Gulf states after Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have announced bans on some functions of the mobile phone amid national security claims.
Users of the BlackBerry in the UAE, which is owned by Research in Motion (RIM), will be barred from accessing email, web browsing and instant messaging from October this year.

The move, expected to affect half a million users, comes after the government last week said certain BlackBerry applications allowed people to “misuse” the service.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia said it would bar the use of the BlackBerry instant messaging service. Both countries are understood to be concerned that they are unable to keep tabs on instant messaging.

The UAE’s regulator complained BlackBerry users’ data, which is automatically sent to overseas servers, was “managed by a foreign, commercial organisation”.

The current set-up allows users to behave “without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national security concerns”, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said.

Activists said the reality was that the BlackBerry system made it more difficult for conservative countries, which actively censors websites, to monitor what users were saying. Reporters Without Borders has accused the UAE government as viewing BlackBerry services, “especially its instant messaging, as an obstacle to its goal of reinforcing censorship”.

Abdulrahman Mazi, a board member of state-controlled Saudi Telecom, said the ban was intended to encouraged RIM to release data from users’ communications “when needed”.

UK mobile phone buyers are not being given sufficient information about how to cancel contracts if they encounter coverage problems.
In secret shopper tests, the Communications Consumer Panel found that over half of shoppers were given inaccurate information.

It also found that some firms allow cancellations due to coverage issues while others do not. The panel called on mobile firms to offer consistent guidelines.

Panel chair Anna Bradley said that consumers must be given simple and accurate information before locking themselves into contracts that they might not be able to leave for up to two years.

The time limit allowed by mobile firms for cancelling contracts currently varies dramatically, the study found.

Most, with the exception of Orange, allowed customers some period of grace.

Virgin Mobile gives customers 28 days to cancel, compared to 14 days for 02 and Tesco Mobile, and 7 days for Vodafone and T-Mobile.

3 came out best in the survey. It has no time limit on cancellations due to coverage issues and only 4% of shoppers were given inaccurate information.

“Whilst we are significantly expanding our network, we accept the fact that no mobile operator can have total blanket coverage, which is why we have this policy in place,” said a 3 spokesman.

Orange, on the other hand, does not allow users to cancel contracts because of poor coverage.

“When a customer purchases a handset and then returns it to us, the handset becomes second hand. As such we are not able to offer a formal money back guarantee.

However we are aware that sometimes issues do arise, which is why a reasonable and flexible approach is applied. If a customer is deeply unhappy with their purchase from a store we will will always consider their issue on a case by case basis,” said a spokesperson for Orange.

The study found that stores themselves seemed unsure of the policies of individual mobile firms.

Carphone Warehouse wrongly told people that T-Mobile had no cancellation policy for coverage issues, while Phones 4U said that Orange did allow cancellations when it does not.

A football which generates enough electricity to charge a mobile phone or power a light from a brief kick about is undergoing trials in World Cup host country South Africa.
The sOccket power generating football has been designed by four female undergraduate students in their twenties from Harvard University.

The sOccket works on the same principal as the “shake to charge” torch, where a magnetic ball rolls through a coil to create an electric charge.

In just 15 minutes of being kicked around, it can generate enough electricity to power an LED light for three hours and charge virtually any type of mobile telephone.

The undergraduate students wanted to find a solution to the developing world’s chronic power shortages.

“Soccer is something you will find in every African country,” Jessica Lin, one of sOccket’s inventors, said. “People play for hours a day, so we thought, ‘Why not try to get a little more out of that energy?’”

She said the aim was to harness the passion for football particularly among children in Africa’s poorest communities to provide them with reading torches for when the light fades – at present around 5.30pm in South Africa.

Julia Silverman, 21, who also worked on the project has brought the ball to South Africa’s townships for trials to coincide with the World Cup.

“The kids call it ‘the magic ball’,” she said. “Whenever you see a child plug in their ball for the first time and see the torch light up from the energy they’ve created, their eyes light up too – it’s a wonderful feeling.”

“If you think that the energy generated by a 15-minute kick around provides three hours of light, you can read a lot of pages from a textbook in that time.”

The sOccket team hope to have their product available for sale online by the end of the year. They intend to sell them to people in developed countries in a buy-one-give-one scheme that will see the second ball sent to charities working in African townships.

“Obviously, this won’t be a regulation ball,” Miss Lin said. “But it’s a big improvement over some of the makeshift balls the kids create from things like old plastic bags.”