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BBC Shuts Down Internal BlackBerry Service
sebFlyte writes "Silicon.com is running a story on a little problem the BBC is having with their email. Apparently, the BBC has suspended service to all its executives BlackBerrys, because the server software was randomly sending chunks of messages to arbitrary users, thus showing execs each others emails. Not what you want from your remote-working solution, really."
The BBC tech department amuses me. Not patching on schedule, etc.
Follow the link in TFA that goes to the BBC's limiting employees to the use of PocketPC2002. Pretty funny stuff there:
"An internal email from the company's technology division stated all PDA platforms other than PocketPC are insecure - which will prevent anybody operating a Palm or Psion handheld device from using their PDA at work."
Which impies that the Beeb's tech division believes PocketPC to be secure. If we've learned anything over the decades, no system is secure.
The email said reasons of security and unusually, the "exposure to users of health and safety risks" left the company with no other choice but the PocketPC platform.
Health and safety risks for not using PocketPC? What, like Palm caused PDAs to emit toxins or explode in 2002?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't know about today, but I can relate my experience.
I once was part of an e-mail group and was assigned the task of writing a pseudo-mime interface into our smtp allowing transfer of binary information. (This was pre-mime.)
I would amass large test streams of e-mails and data for testing. And while I did strive for discretion, invariably I got a peek here and there of the e-mail messages. I had to assert complete conversion in and out of binary form with no changes to the originals. I did do this mostly with diff scripting, but for sanity checks would read text to ensure that the starting point of my work looked reasonable and uncorrupted.
I wasn't surprised to see very personal messages exchanged, but what surprised me most was the blatant conducting of what were clearly illicit affairs via e-mail! And, how many times I saw those kinds of messages!
I never associated message text with address info, so it was anonymous voyeurism, but I must say I was shocked.
Word to the wise, never conduct any transactions or conversations via e-mail you wouldn't mind showing up in some blog, or bulletin, etc. I suspect the level of monitoring of e-mail is even more prevalent today than the day I was doing that work.
Probably it's not even a technical problem, just some BOFH having some fun on the mail server!
It's the same people managing the service. It's just they were outsourced.
They've always had a funny "not invented here" approach which means that systems are often quite strange and non standard. I expect this email problem happened was because they insisted they do it their own way not how everyone else does it. That has been their downfall many times.
Nothing wrong with inventing new solutions, but BBC T (or certain parts of it) insists on re-inventing the wheel for every project!
While "frantically" installing SP3 after reading this article (it's only been out for 7 days or so) I noticed a "silent BCC" option in the BES config. You enter an email address and it automatically bcc's you on every message sent to/from all the Blackberrys. This is rather disturbing, and I can't really see any reason for it. Sure I can always just give myself access to their Exchange Mailbox, but still... disturbing.
Honestly I can't wait until this NTP patent infringment thing brings down RIM, releasing the market from the blackberry stranglehold. While the blackberry itself is a decent piece of technology (the J2ME platform is a good thing), RIM's server software is an altogether different beast. Perhaps due to legacy issues, but probably mostly for profit reasons, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server software that you MUST have to do anything with the blackberry on the back-end is a giant, proprietary mess. It is deeply dependent on Windows (integrated into the WMI), it does bizzare things to communicate with the blackberry devices (most models don't have their own TCP/IP stack, so all communication must go through the BES's proprietary protocols), the user and device management stuff is really a joke.... I jsut can't say enough bad things about this server software. It just sucks.
The I.T. world would be a better place if RIM were to collapse, taking their ugly BES with them. What we need is a BlackBerry-like device, with its own TCP stack, a very simple gateway server, using only open protocols (web services would be a really realy good thing, for example). This will not happen as long as RIM is runnign things. The BES is a cash cow for them... a single BES user licenses costs almost as much as the blackberry device itself (with the profit margin on a license being 99%).