Indonesia "may follow the lead of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia by banning service for Research In Motion'sBlackBerry devices," according to a recent report cited by MarketWatch.
The Associated Press, citing a spokesman for Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Information, "reported that the government there is concerned that encrypted data sent by BlackBerry devices could be intercepted outside the country and used by criminals or spies."
MyStateLine.com has reported that Research in Motion and Saudi Arabia have "hammered out an agreement to put the BlackBerry smartphone back in service" in the tightly-controlled Islamic state.
The government says it's awaiting "some final, technical details before agreeing to lift the ban," MyStateLine says, adding that the ban covers e-mails and text messages from BlackBerry users.
"Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have threatened bans if they can't get RIM's encryption codes for the BlackBerry. While those countries say they're worried about terrorists using the phones in terror activities, critics say their real goal is censorship," MyStateLine says.
...
A recent article in Hindustan Times titled "Mobiles and the value of a paisa," by Sanjit Chatterjee, director, Global Marketing and Strategy, Reve Systems, noted that in India, "there was something that was worth a paisa" - the Indian coin of such little value its minting was discontinued in the 1970s.
For just one paisa, Chatterjee says, "one can talk to someone in the farthest corner of India for one second, or send an SMS of 160 characters to any one of the 600 million mobile phone users in India. Not only that, one can extract more from the service provider if the bill plan is well-chosen."
Of course, Chatterjee noted, "it also depends on the desperation of the service provider to acquire and retain a customer."
Earlier this year TMC's Stefania Viscusi reported that M Rezaul Hassan, CEO at Reve Systems, said his company is "excited at the opening up of the IP telephony market in Bangladesh."
...
The Phybridge UniPhyer is being touted by company officials as a "new standard for IP telephony infrastructure," a "low-cost, risk free VoIP enabler."
It uses existing telephony cabling to provide a complete IP network for voice and data, letting you centrally converge with the LAN, and it provides a dedicated path for voice, QoS and POE to every desktop.
"Are you looking to transition to IP telephony? Do you have reliable phone systems based on robust and resilient legacy PBX Systems?" company officials ask, adding that to find out more about how the Phybridge UniPhyer, VoIP enabler, can help your business, there's a data sheet at the company Web site.
Some PBX systems, company officials say, do not integrate readily with Data Networks, a prerequisite for unified communications. IP Telephony, on the other hand, "is the preferred means for unified communications, but the IP PBX/IP phones lack the reliability one has come to associate with legacy PBX Systems."
...
You'd think for all the fees banks charge us they'd at least do the job we want them to do. But as it turns out, we have to help them with security as well now.
USA Today says that about 80 percent of U.S. households have come to do their banking over the Internet, but that "cyberattacks against individual online accounts have become so sophisticated and pervasive that the American Bankers Association is now asking consumers to 'partner' with banks to keep cyber-robbers in check."
The banking industry now wants consumers to monitor their online accounts for unauthorized transactions on a "continuous, almost daily, basis," says Doug Johnson, the ABA's vice president of risk-management policy. No, don't be silly, you don't get any reduction in fees for doing the banks' job for them. They'll probably find ways to add new ones.
This shifting burden has come about because the banking industry decided, about ten years ago, to promote personal computers as convenient venues for consumer banking, USA Today says. Those of us old hands in CRM know that that was all about reducing the face-to-face personal customer contact, "keeping the ugly suckers off our carpet" in the branch offices, as one rather candid banking official told us.
