National security risks prompt French BlackBerry ban
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InfoWorld - French government members and their advisors have been told not to use BlackBerry smartphones, for national security reasons. The ban on BlackBerry devices is just one of the IT challenges facing new National Assembly members as they take their seats following Sunday&#39;s elections.
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WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities diverted a San Francisco-bound United Airlines jet to Dallas as a precautionary security measure on Monday after finding an unclaimed BlackBerry on board.
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French researchers say it may be more susceptible to viruses than Microsoft Office.
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E-mail service of Research in Motionâs BlackBerry smartphones experienced a âcritical severity outageâ on Monday, the company told clients in an e-mail.
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The Blackberry wireless device maker is straining to exceed expectations.
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"It's not a problem if you're writing to your mother-in-law"  BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful _ and now, a threat to French state secrets. That, at least, is the fear of French government defense experts, who have advised against their use by officials in France's corridors of power, reportedly to avoid snooping by U.S. intelligence agencies.'It's not a question of trust,' French lawmaker Pierre Lasbordes told The Associated Press. 'We are friends with the Americans, the Anglo-Saxons, but it's economic war.'Le Monde newspaper, which broke the story, described BlackBerry withdrawal among those who have given them up. 'We feel that we are wasting huge amounts of time, having to relearn how to work in the old way,' the daily quoted a ministry office director as saying. Read more
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It may be wishful thinking, but a Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.
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BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful &#151; and now, a threat to French state secrets.
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A major service outage afflicts users of BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday. AT&T and Verizon Wireless say manufacturer RIM told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.
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France is to seek a vote in the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo and other bans on the Ivory Coast. The move comes after a ceasefire in the Ivory Coast was broken and nine French soldiers were killed by government bombings.
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It may be wishful thinking, but a  Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its  employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry  smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.
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France halts the use of genetically modified corn crops while it awaits EU approval for a full ban.
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An outage has disconnected BlackBerry smart phones across North America.
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Do your employees have a "Crackberry" problem? Their compulsive BlackBerry monitoring could backfire on you: Checking e-mail via BlackBerry gives employees a sense of control but leads to more stress, according to a recent study from the MIT Sloan School of Management that examined BlackBerry use and organizational behavior. And this problem starts at the top.
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A federal agency has banned U S imports of new cell phones made with Qualcomm semiconductors because the chips violate a patent held by Broadcom .
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(InfoWorld) - IÂ was hungry and it had started to rain when my mobile phone buzzed to tell me I could now buy sugar in a hermetically sealed packet. A picture on my phone's screen of a goldfish swimming past the cheery new packaging drove the point home. Suddenly, I had a craving for fried fish in sweet-and-sour sauce. Pushed by some strange urge to seek out a Chinese restaurant, I looked around and saw the same goldfish staring down at me from a nearby billboard. The message, zapped to my phone over a Bluetooth wireless connection from a billboard near Opera in central Paris, is part of a new service called Chrono Connect offered by French advertising company JCDecaux SA. The service involves 54 billboards in central Paris, either 8 or 12 square meters in size. The billboards contain a roll of different posters and, had I passed by at some other time of day, I would have seen and received a different message. Advertisers buy one of four time slots -- night, rush hour, working hours or meal times -- during which their poster will be displayed. Anyone lingering in front of the billboards with a Bluetooth phone in "visible" mode will receive an invitation to download a file. If they accept, the billboard zaps it over to their phone. Each billboard contains a roll of posters and a small computer with a Bluetooth transmitter. The files for transmission are loaded into the computer from a USB (Universal Serial Bus) stick at the same time as the posters are changed. The computer can match the files it transmits to the model of mobile phone it detects, perhaps sending higher-resolution video to more powerful phones. And while unable to identify individual passers-by or access their telephone numbers, the computer can at least track whether a particular telephone has already been offered or refused a file in the last few hours, so that people who pass frequently in front of the same billboard aren't inundated with messages. One of the first customers to realize the potential of this medium was French comedian and impersonator GÃ©rald Dahan, who used it to distribute a short video clip promoting his current show about the forthcoming French presidential elections. The mobile phone is a natural medium for Dahan to choose, as he is famous for his telephone pranks. In a recent call he convinced presidential candidate SÃ©golÃ¨ne Royal that she was speaking with the Prime Minister of Quebec, Jean Charest. For now, many of Chrono Connect's advertisers are transmitting only a digital image of the poster, like the one I received, but Albert Asseraf, director of strategy and marketing at Decaux, hopes to change that. He says the company is in talks with music publishers so that advertisers can offer song downloads to those willing to stand in front of their posters for long enough. And it could also be a way to distribute movie trailers straight into the hands of people with time to watch them, perhaps with screening times and directions to the nearest cinema. The technology offers so many useful and entertaining possibilities, Asseraf is convinced people will want to receive the ads his company distributes. The only problem, he says, is that too many of them set their Bluetooth phones to "invisible," preventing them from being "discovered" by other Bluetooth devices such as his billboards.
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To enter French market, Apple must obey law that forbids companies to bundle a cell phone to a mobile operator.