Why I don’t use Blackberry?

Before I start, I don’t want to make any flame on my posting. This is just my personal thoughts and opinions about Blackberry.

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Blackberry (BB), a common gadget used by Indonesian nowadays. It’s a viral trend spread among youngsters and even senior population 😛 But not all individual are using BB, e.g. some governmental institutions in Europe.

Think big, achieve big. Consider this, it’s not because I’m being paranoia or what so ever 🙂
By analyzing standard procedures from telco providers connecting to RIM HQ servers in Canada it does make senses that something big happened.

Below is my illustrated diagram on BB connection, especially BBM.

Scenario;

• User A in Indonesia is having conversation through BBM with User B in Taiwan.
• Message from User A is not directly submitted to user B from telco providers instead it goes 1st to Canada where RIM servers located then it goes to Taiwan.

Now you all know why sometimes your BB have a lag connection or any problems relate to the slow performances. Most of it because of bandwidth provided by telco providers are not enough to handle all connections from and to RIM servers. We can’t always blame telco providers for problems we had with our BB.

Lets talk about encryption in BB. Its common in advertisement the salesman said “We are using encryption to make everything secured.” BB use an asymetric keys generated from your IMEI & PIN and asymetrically re-calculated from secret key on their standards. So, what you have is the public key to encrypt all of your sessions to their servers not to mention bypassing telco providers servers 😉

So the one that actually can open all of your recorded encrypted data in RIM servers are only RIM!

Why Canada? Why not other countries? Remember OpenBSD? Yeah, its the same reason with “Law of Exporting Encryption Software”.

(One of many reasons why many Indonesian Officials using BBM to chat about their deals :P)

Blackberry actually using a well known technology, IMAP, re-branded into what they called as “Push Mail”. By using this standard protocol on your cell/smartphone for receiving email u can get the same functionalities like Push Mail.

Now, for the group discussions or we called as BBM. We can create a chat server more like to IRC server (used it very often back on our highschool era) to be connected using plugin(s) to our cell/smartphone.

That’s it, we can replicate any functionalities that BB can do without having to stuck on socio-trends. Consumerism in our society culture are still the biggest problem :))

Our IT minister, Pak Tifatul Sembiring, suggested RIM to put their servers in Indonesia. Same steps also done by other countries. Ensuring security of civilians data to their own country security policies and reducing international bandwidth cost are the main goals. I really like to discuss something like this, having opinions from many side of views.

But soon I will also joining the club, it’s cliche “FOR WORKING PURPOSE” 😛

Next topic: I will discuss more about securities on Blackberry.