UAE Says RIM Played Ball, Will Maintain Service

cgriffin21 writes "The United Arab Emirates will not suspend services on BlackBerry smartphones next week, following an agreement reached with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion that is said to comply with UAE policy. It'll be a relief for the roughly 500,000 BlackBerry users in the UAE, a turnaround on the planned Oct. 11 service suspension. In a brief statement, the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said that BlackBerry services 'are now compliant with the UAE's telecommunications regulatory framework.'" The Guardian's coverage quotes an anonymous UAE university professor, who said, "The general opinion amongst the business expat community, westerners at least, has been for some time now that [the ban] wasn't going to happen. Call it a failure of imagination on their part, but no one could conceive of how the country could do something so counterproductive to the image they are trying to present primarily to the west. Was it posturing? To some extent."

Comments

There was never any doubt

[clang_jangle]

There was never any doubt RIM would cave. Nor any doubt that private communications are virtually nonexistent on this planet.

Re:There was never any doubt

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

That's kind of the trick though, nobody will talk about what happened.

what we really need is somebody to talk, we'll never know what happened otherwise!

Re:There was never any doubt

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye
Blackberry!
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar's sweet, so is she,
Bye bye
Blackberry!

Funny

[jgagnon]

What's funny is that some day soon (-ish or could already be argued true in some cases), huge multi-national companies will be more powerful than governments.

Re:Funny

[Pojut]

Depending on the government and the corporation, I'd say that's definitely already true.

Re:Funny

[clang_jangle]

Most (if not all) governments are merely the enforcement arms of cartels which are comprised of huge multi-national companies.

Re:Funny

[smitty777]

Interesting observation. Ironically, the acronym finder includes Relative Importance Measure as one of the uses for the acronym RIM.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

The US is already a corporatocracy. Corporations decide the law. They WRITE the law.

Re:Funny

[masmullin]

Major corporation just emailed me this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo&feature=related
[Synopsis: I am the law!]

Re:*faaart*

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said that.

rms

Re:*faaart*

[clang_jangle]

Of course not. Stallman can never get FP, he has to run a daemon to laucnh wget and then emails the downloaded page to him. Duh!

How does this affect visitors?

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me ...

If I take my BB over to UAE, I guess when I start roaming on their local service, all my BES communication will go through the local UAE RIM gateways, correct? The same gateways that the UAE will have some major visibility into. So that means that something that is private in the US/Canada will forego that confidentiality once I'm within their borders?

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your email will still be encrypted by your corporate's key (not even RIM can decipher it). Your internet access, though, will have to be decrypted at the RIM servers (in this case RIM UAE servers) and the local govt (whether its US or UAE) will have access to it.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[methamorph]

If you are using BES and you have your BES server at your company then they won't be able to monitor the communication. It will be encrypted between your device and the BES server located in your company.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

When your data device (of any make or model) roams on to another network, that network talks to a middle-man service to verify that the device should be allowed to use data and where to send the bill. After that, all your data is routed through a 3GPP encrypted tunnel (effectiveness of that encryption is outside the scope of this post), back to your home carrier's network. It is then routed through their APN and out to whatever service you requested. The upshot is that your data is encrypted from your device to your carrier's network and everything operates as if you were at home.

Posting anonymously to protect the innocent.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Existential Wombat]

If you think your BB information is private in the US and probably Canada, you're living in cloud cuckoo land (wherever that is).

There's no way the US would allow a public communications system they could not get into.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think your BB information is private in the US and probably Canada, you're living in cloud cuckoo land (wherever that is).

There's no way the US would allow a public communications system they could not get into.

The USA doesn't have a choice in the matter, aside from sending in the marines to kill anyone who uses PGP, AES and RSA.

Now, the NSA does have a lot of fast computers, and a lot of smart people, so they may be able to break things that other people think are not feasible.

But the USA long ago stopped putting restrictions on the type of cryptography people use.

For example, if you are a US gov't contractor doing classified things, the US gov't has standards for you to follow. It strikes me as odd that the US gov't would require contractors doing classified things to use AES if the US gov't didn't think it was very secure.

If the US gov't government knows of flaws in AES, then it's also possible that the enemies of the US gov't ALSO know.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is correct. BES traffic is still secure.

You can also set your browser to use BES for its browsing and maintain security that way.

BBM, PIN messages, and other services will be decryptable by the local authorities.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but last time this came up a few years ago, UAE's telco (Etisalat) got around this by infecting all the BB's with a spying worm, using an SMS-activated update-push. Their excuse was the same as it is now, but once infected, the spy worm works even outside the UAE. Since the terms are all secret, how do we know the ``compliance'' they worked out isn't a RIM-endorsed version of the same style of worm they used before?

IMO all these proprietary security systems are garbage, and sometimes are even worse than nothing because people will believe in these ``not even RIM can decrypt it'' claims and then fall victim to corporate espionage. It's not theoretical: it's already happened, and it happened in UAE.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Kvasio]

that is why encrypting stuff as a spam (pseudo-spam more precisely) might be the best way to send secret messages.
(say - http://www.hoax-slayer.com/hidden-text-spam.html ).
Need to parse through zillions of penis enlargement adverts would definitely piss off the any gov, including US.

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think your BB information is private in the US and probably Canada, you're living in cloud cuckoo land (wherever that is).

There's no way the US would allow a public communications system they could not get into.

I was under the impression that if a company had an internal BES server, that it would encrypt the message with the device's public key, and then send it off into the network. Once the message arrived it would be decrypted by the private key.

How is this not private? Or am I misunderstanding how things work?

(Of course people who use the telco's servers are open to intercept/warrants.)

Re:How does this affect visitors?

[Pinky's Brain]

Because if RIM affected US/EU/Canadian devices in such a way they would get sued.

Re:*faaart*

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would RMS call people freetards? That doesn't make any sense.

Relief?

[ftobin]

It'll be a relief for the roughly 500,000 BlackBerry users in the UAE [...]

I'm not sure where this relief is supposed to come from. Most people are not relieved when its hinted that the UAE will now be capable of relieving them of personal and commercial secrets.

Re:Relief?

[rabbit994]

I've found in many parts of world people are ok with government snooping in. "I have nothing to hide, why should I care? It also helps defeats terrorism and criminals". This distrust of government seems to be uniquely American.

Re:Relief?

[Confusador]

Really, can you blame us?

Re:Relief?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Canadian and I distrust the Government of Canada even more than the Americans distrust their government.

Re:Relief?

[enjerth]

Do you have any compelling reason why I SHOULD trust my government? They are a bunch of strangers to me. I don't trust strangers in general.

How about lawyers? Congress is largely comprised of lawyers. I REALLY don't trust lawyers.

Re:Relief?

[blair1q]

Only for voting Republican and making it worse.

Re:Relief?

[GameboyRMH]

Uniquely American? LOL, I think you're describing your travel/communication habits.

Re:Relief?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Canada is part of North America.

Just say USian, it's more accurate. :D

Re:Relief?

[masmullin]

We know who you are and where you live Mr "Anonymous Coward" but it is a matter of Canadian Government policy to be too lazy to do anything contrary to your interests.

We dont get paid $120,000 a year for something you know!

Re:Relief?

[jmac_the_man]

Fun fact: Of the countries on the North American continent, only ONE uses a form of the word American in their name. By contrast, there are two countries in North America that call themselves the United States. The real name of Mexico (in English) is "The United Mexican States."

Isn't the US pushing for the same?

[ejtttje]

Wasn't there just something in the news about Obama pressing for similar access? I wonder if the mighty US gov't will fair any better...

And you believe this?

[Linegod]

Anything else that would have come out of the UAE, you would have held under suspicion. Doesn't the phrase "are now compliant with the UAE's telecommunications regulatory framework." set off any alarm bells to you?

UAE adjusted their policies, RIM didn't change anything. Then the UAE grandstanded.

Re:And you believe this?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is almost certainly correct. Of course RIM didn't change anything, because they're using secure encryption and couldn't give the UAE a back door, even if they wanted to.

The UAE realized that they were out of luck and decided to save face by saying that RIM had complied, rather than banning the technology.

Crypto Mobile VOIP?

[Doc Ruby]

The day when all endpoints encrypt all traffic to keep network operators from poking around in what is literally none of their business cannot come too soon. And the more tyrants (the US not excepted) insist on groping our data, the sooner that day will come.

So where's the encrypted VOIP apps for Skype and Facebook, running on Android and/or iPhone?

Suptacular Double Stupendulous FAIL

[Jane Q. Public]

Big double fail:

(1) UAE for pulling this bullshit in front of the whole world, showing their true colors, after all these many years of trying to repair their reputation.

RIM for giving the UAE despots a RIM job, for dollars. They did have the option of saying "No!"

And to think I was getting close to doing an app for the Blackberry. Hmmm. Maybe the app will work on other mobile platforms, but the Blackberry version might just FAIL for some unknown reason...

Re:Suptacular Double Stupendulous FAIL

[Jane Q. Public]

To be clear: yes, there are people and companies I will charge more, and some I simply won't deal with, depending on their ASSHOLE quotient.

Re:Suptacular Double Stupendulous FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

They did have the option of saying "No!"

RIM's encryption is allegedly unchanged. What would saying "No!" look like to you, exactly?