Cornered!
Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.

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Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow The black art of Blackberry
The black art of Blackberry E-mail
by Stuart Corner   
Tuesday, 12 February 2008


"Our customers are aware that our network operations are central to our ability to provide the BlackBerry service, and in fact are encouraged by it because of the benefits...Our security architecture also makes the location of the network operations centre irrelevant to customers." Irrelevant that is until something happens to make that centre inaccessible, as seems to have happened this week in North America.

And while RIM might have made out that the true routing was common knowledge, that wasn't the impression I got from an insider at one of the Australian carriers. When I suggested to him that RIM was trying to give the impression that messages were routed direct to the end user's mobile network from the Blackberry enterprise server (rather than via Canada) he commented "And that's the way RIM would like the public think."

Rim had plenty of good reasons for doing things this way, security being high on the list. I observed two years ago "But that begs the question: if there are some many good reasons for doing things this way why not boast about it instead of trying to hide the fact? And if the service is as secure as RIM makes out it is, then there should be no need whatsoever for what is quite clearly deliberate obfuscation."

So what's changed since then, apart from the fact that RIM's network is still vulnerable to large scale outages? Well, the organisation certainly as not become any more open about how its technology operates. Quite the opposite in fact. I've just dug deep into its web site and been unable this time to find any information comparable to even the partial explanation of how traffic is routed that I found two years ago.

Given how addictive the Blackberry (aka Crackberry) is supposed to be for many thousands of its users, perhaps it is better not to know.

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