RIM Reaches Temporary Agreement With India

Canadian_Daemon writes with news that India has granted a 60-day reprieve for their threat to ban BlackBerry devices while the government evaluates RIM's proposal for "lawful access" to users' encrypted data. "The Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement it would review the situation in 60 days after the Department of Telecommunications studies the feasibility of routing BlackBerry services through a server in India. India wants greater access to encrypted corporate e-mails and instant messaging, though it remains unclear precisely what concessions Research In Motion agreed to in order to avert the ban. About one million BlackBerry users would have been affected in India. 'RIM have made certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these would be operationalized immediately. The feasibility of the solutions offered would be assessed thereafter,' the ministry said."

Comments

Re:makes sense

[bhagwad]

I can see cases where the information will be abused but such risks are no match for the benefits.

Oh please. I'm an Indian and this is bullshit. What are the "benefits?" The chances of me dying in a terror attack are less than being hit by lightning. I'll take that risk and won't complain if I die thank you very much.

Why BIS is bad

[nathana]

See, this is exactly why device manufacturers shouldn't be making devices that are entirely reliant upon an external "cloud" service that is also controlled by the device manufacturer. If Blackberry was merely making devices that could be configured to talk to any server(s) using industry-standard protocols, they wouldn't get themselves into the kind of situation where 1 million deployed devices could have been turned into doorstops overnight. (Maybe my understanding of the way that Blackberries work is misinformed, and so my rant here could be completely groundless -- and just for the record, I'm open to correction -- but I am under the impression that Blackberries need to be in constant communication with the BIS servers that Blackberry themselves run in order to function.)

This is also why the whole push notification system that Apple came up with for the iPhone is stupid. If something goes wrong with servers that Apple controls, then suddenly that feature across every single phone that has shipped to-date is dead. Device features should not be wholly reliant upon a service that the device manufacturer controls...all you are doing is making a single point-of-failure when you do that.

-- Nathan