It turns out that Indian government agencies are getting their knickers in a twist over the Blackberry and its use of encryption. Love it or hate it, its a solid piece of mobility goodness.
The real rub here, that has them bothered, is their apparent inability to monitor the communications. The government has asked the NSA…no, not them, but rather, the National Security Advisor to find a way to listen in.
From The Hindu Business Line:
The discussions are being held to find a spot on RIM’s network where the data traffic passing through Blackberry could be intercepted by security agencies.
The agencies had earlier rejected any temporary solution to the Blackberry controversy and told the Government that it must make sure that traffic originating and terminating on the device should not travel outside the country without proper monitoring.
FFS. Give me a break. They’re blaming RIM because they can’t figure out how to intercept traffic?
Bloody hell.
The agencies had asked RIM to share the encryption codes but, the root of the problem lies elsewhere.
The key problem was that Indian agencies do not have the required technology to monitor data that has encryption codes higher than 40 bits.
Indeed. Could somebody from Narus kindly call these people?
Amazon’s website have been going down at an alarming rate over the few days. Apparently those pesky bloggers are pointing to DoS as a possible culprit.
From vnunet:
The company is remaining tight-lipped on what is causing the problems, so speculation is rife in the blogosphere.
One explanation, according to security experts, is that Amazon is suffering a series of denial-of-service attacks.
Amazon’s US website was unavailable for over two hours on Friday, as was the Amazon-operated Internet Movie Database.
A blog posting by Supranamaya Ranjan, at web traffic monitoring firm Narus, claims that the cause is a “network-initiated attack”.
OK, that’s not just some blogger. If the folks at Narus say it’s a network attack, I would put my money on their analysis in a heartbeat. If you recall these are the folks that the US and Chinese governments rely on to monitor traffic. Narus is quite adept at their job.
No great shock here. I used to be one of “those guys” years ago who read employee email. And let me tell you, most non-spam email (try 90%) is trivial crap.
From Tech Herald:
So who reads your email at the office? Apparently more people than you think. Forty-four percent of the companies responding to the study said that they investigated an email leak of confidential information in the past year. Forty-one percent reported that they employ staff to read or otherwise analyze the contents of outbound email. In addition, twenty-two percent said they employ staff primarily or exclusively for this purpose.
There are several cases where someone has been terminated over the contents of email. Most are fired under a clause in the company’s Internet Usage Policy. The debate is a huge one, with people expecting privacy when they send email, often personal, from a work account or access personal accounts at the office. Simply put, you have no privacy at the office, and if you get any at all, you should expect very little. Some companies will offer some “personal time” and allow internet usage, but mostly everything you send is logged and monitored, and yes even read by someone else.
Mostly? Try damn near everything for most firms. Email was read only at the behest of legal or HR. Thankfully, those requests seldom arrived.
When people start a new job more often than not they are handed a copy of the acceptable use policy for their respective firm. It is staggering how often people glance over it while pondering dinner plans. Then sign off that they read and accept. It’s like people that click on EULA’s mindlessly.
Later, they potentially pay the price for that lack of attention to detail.
