RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie has no objections if companies that make use of its secure BlackBerry smartphones want to hand over their encryption keys to government officials. However, RIM itself has no way of providing the unencrypted content of the emails that passes through its network operating center (NOC), since it doesn’t have the keys in the first place.
This was the most direct answer to date given by RIM in response to government sanctioned wiretapping, a topic that was brought to the front even as countries such as the United Arab Emirates and India have threatened to ban the BlackBerry service unless RIM accede to their demands to a backdoor into its encryption system. Other countries such as Lebanon, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia were reportedly considering similar steps. (more)
Are governments going to accept this explanation, or say with finger poking their lips, “You will change your NOC, Mr. Berry. Un-zip it.”
Stayed tuned.
A new study shows that the overheard half of cell phone dialogue can steal our attention from other tasks, with potentially dangerous outcomes.
Currently a doctoral candidate in psychology at Cornell University, Lauren Emberson and her co-authors recently published a study that helps explain why hearing only one half of a cell phone conversation is so aggravating, yet so captivating. The researchers argue that such “half-alogues,” as they dub them, make for dissonant eavesdropping because they are unpredictable. The less information we glean from a conversation, the harder our brains work to make sense of what we hear and the more difficult it is to stop listening. The findings,
published online September 3 in
Psychological Science, further suggest that cell phone half-alogues demand more of our attention than dialogues and decrease our performance on other cognitive tasks—whether we are sitting at a computer in the lab, trying to read on the subway or driving a car. (
more)
This client briefing looks at the increase in espionage across the globe and how businesses can and have been affected.
For a free copy, please click here.
