[outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide

Thu Oct 13 22:40:54 UTC 2011

I have been following this thread for a while and I will have to say I am a tad confused.

Remote wipe has been in the iPhone since iOS3.1.3 And if your phone is locked it will wipe after 10 (if I remember correctly) failed unlock attempts.

My iPhone communicates completely encrypted. It is set to VPN back to our office.   And if we didn't wan't to do that we could could use TLS on our mail to keep that traffic encrypted. But encrypt all is the best approach for us.

Personally, I hate mail push. I watch folks in meetings constantly looking down or typing some response and never fully listening to the speakers and not fully engaged in the meeting. Additionally, mail push is indiscriminate and just interrupts my train of thought when I am working. If a communique is truly important whomever can iMessage,SMS,jabber/POTS me; otherwise the mail can just wait till I check my inbox. I understand others feel differently.  

On an iPhone today you can get push from exchange, iCloud/iMap, Gmail/GCloud, Yahoo, OSX Server (I believe) or set your phone the check every x minutes (after all what could be so important that 15 latency minutes would cause a catastrophe? (During many catastrophe situations sms could take hours or the voice cell network could be tied up and are you that close to whatever to be able to react). If you need instant response... script it.

As for filtering, its one of my issues about my iPhone.  However, iOS5 supports message flagging and a filter script back on your desktop (where Mail does accept/process message push via IDLE) can flag a message which will sync to your iPhone.

Lastly I have never liked RIM's model. It basically inculcates the idea that "man in the middle" is a good thing which it is not.

Just my 2¢

Tom

On Oct 13, 2011, at 8:49 AM, Erik Soosalu wrote:

> Any idea of when Apple's ActiveSync Implementation will close the gap
> with what BES does?
> 
> Like maybe having Important message notifications? Categories? Filters?
> 
> I use an iPhone, but mail handling on it is lacking.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Huff [mailto:mhuff at ox.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 8:44 AM
> To: 'Jamie Bowden'; 'Joe Abley'
> Cc: 'nanog at nanog.org'
> Subject: RE: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide
> 
> It's called Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync :) 
> 
> It works with Android, Apple and Microsoft devices. I believe both Lotus
> and Groupwise have licensed and support it as well. We have a few (but
> now, very few) blackberry users remaining. They won't let it go until we
> rip it out of their hands.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jamie Bowden [mailto:jamie at photon.com]
>> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 7:36 AM
>> To: Joe Abley
>> Cc: nanog at nanog.org
>> Subject: RE: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide
>> 
>> You are correct.  The BES uses PSKs to talk to RIM's servers, which
> then
>> uses them to talk to the devices over the carrier networks.  All of
> this
>> was in complete failure mode until sometime overnight when it appears
> to
>> have all started flowing again.  Someday either Google or Apple will
> get
>> off their rear ends and roll out an end to end encrypted service that
>> plugs into corporate email/calendar/workgroup services and we can all
>> gladly toss these horrid little devices in the recycle bins where they
>> belong.
>> 
>> Jamie
>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley at hopcount.ca]
>>> Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 6:06 PM
>>> To: Phil Regnauld
>>> Cc: nanog at nanog.org
>>> Subject: Re: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 2011-10-12, at 18:02, Phil Regnauld wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Joe Abley (jabley) writes:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 2011-10-12, at 13:05, Leigh Porter wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Email on my iPhone is working fine.. ;-)
>>>>> 
>>>>> The blackberry message service is centralised with a lot of
>>> processing intelligence in the core. Messaging services that use the
>>> core as a simple transport and shift the processing intelligence to
>> the
>>> edge have different, less-dramatic failure modes.
>>>> 
>>>> 	This is not the case for corporate customers with dedicated
>>> servers,
>>>> 	AFAIU.
>>> 
>>> I'm no expert, but my understanding is that at some/most/all traffic
>>> between handhelds and a BES, carried from the handheld device
> through
>> a
>>> cellular network, still flows through RIM.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Joe
> 
> 
> 
> 