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Stand-up security

Posted on 18 Jan 2005 at 15:20

Mark Needham gets an earbashing over data security and experiences the joys of 3G phones

But the success of the original BlackBerry pager wasn't only thanks to its software, but to the fitness for purpose of the whole hardware unit. In that audience being roundly insulted by Martin Smith, I sat next to John Riches from software vendor PTC, who had just given up on using his Nokia 6820 Messaging Device: 'It has a fold-out keyboard, and is supposed to have BlackBerry on it, but as a user I wasn't happy with it. It is not as intuitive as a BlackBerry,' he concluded. If you have had experience, good or bad, of using one of the email-equipped generation of mobile phones, I would be interested to hear from you.

The Sad World of 3 Subscribers
Whenever I see those adverts from the telephone network 3, boasting that you can download full-length music videos, I shudder at the thought of lives so empty they can be enlivened by watching Britney Spears perform on the screen of a clamshell phone...

But Ed Candy, technology director of 3 is a true believer: 'Video is the killer application for 3G,' he assured me. 'Not only does the technology work, but customers are buying it. Our users are showing that they want and are prepared to pay for using information services, such as football clips, short interesting pieces of video.

'I travel a lot and when I find myself in a restaurant or somewhere else where I'm waiting, I take a quick look to see what the FTSE is doing, a quick look at the news, a little bit of weather - anything that is just a bit of fun.'

Buried in the concrete depths of the London Hilton Metropole, where we were both attending the CAL-IT conference, he downloaded an ITN video clip about the latest US assault on Fallujah - had he been a plain subscriber rather than a company employee, this would have cost him 25p. He told me he had family in the military, so I can imagine why he might want to spend this amount of money to hear the latest news, even though he could presumably have gone up to his hotel room and watched the same item on CNN for free. But even Ed could only characterise the majority of the clips available as 'tabloid style' entertainment. The clips featured at the top of 3's online home page tend to be two-minute videos concerning the love lives of Coronation Street stars or Big Brother rejects. According to the latest published figures, 14 per cent of 3's customers pay 25p a pop to download this sort of tat, presumably while they are waiting for the arrival of next week's Hello magazine.

But Ed did mount a convincing case that these video downloads do not contain viruses or spam. First, he argued that bandwidth between the transmitter and the phone is a precious resource, which the mobile phone company treats a lot more reverently than ISPs treat their bandwidth. Second, because each subscriber is individually tagged by his or her SIM card, it is a lot easier for networks to track down anyone who tries to spread viruses or spam, and they can easily block such offenders.

Bluetooth again
This month, Yogesh Sharma poses and solves his own Bluetooth connection problem:

'I'm an avid reader of your PC Pro articles and am hoping you can help me out on a problem I'm having pairing my iPAQ h2210with a Nokia 6230. Every time I try to pair the devices the connection is rejected for "security reasons".

'Now I know my iPAQ is okay as I have previously managed to establish a partnership with a Nokia 6310i (which I no longer have). Have you come across this issue at all? If so, do you know of a solution?'

Long before I could come up with anything useful to tell him, he emailed again: