RIM & BlackBerry Rant

Now, time for the big news story of the day, riots happening across several parts of the UK. The riots are thought to be organised on BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM) as it's a closed system and more private than other platforms of communication.

Quote from RIM:

We feel for those impacted by this weekend’s riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can. As in all markets around the world Where BlackBerry is available, we cooperate with local telecommunications operators, law enforcement and regulatory officials. Similar to other technology providers in the UK we comply with The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and co-operate fully with the Home Office and UK police forces.

Because of this statement, the BlackBerry blog site was hacked and defaced by TeaMp0isoN, and here is the quote from them.

Dear Rim;
You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all, the Police are looking to arrest as many people as possible to save themselves from embarrassment…. if you do assist the police by giving them chat logs, gps locations, customer information & access to peoples BlackBerryMessengers you will regret it, we have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g – Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc. – now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters…. do you really want a bunch of angry youths on your employees doorsteps? Think about it…. and don’t think that the police will protect your employees, the police can’t protect themselves let alone protect others….. if you make the wrong choice your database will be made public, save yourself the embarrassment and make the right choice. don’t be a puppet..

p.s – we do not condone in innocent people being attacked in these riots nor do we condone in small businesses being looted, but we are all for the rioters that are engaging in attacks on the police and government…. and before anyone says “the blackberry employees are innocent” no they are not! They are the ones that would be assisting the police

I have to say I am with TeaMp0isoN, not every BlackBerry user is guilty and passing on messages that are perfectly innocent to the police is invasion of privacy, how many of your customers would love to know you plan on passing their location via GPS to police? it's besides the point that it's police but that your tracking them anyway, when customers may not want to be tracked.

Innocent police will be harmed just to track down the guilty? there has to be a better way than this, it's not right but it's not like we have a choice in the matter right? think about it though for a second, because of this, how many people will leave RIM and go over to Apple (iPhone)or Google (Android)?

On a similar note, a few days ago I made a quick blog post about another raid on a PS3 hacker that was raided by police (http://goo.gl/dRWpy), and during these riots, a Sony store caught fire, bad karma? quick video here http://youtu.be/dK5ecuxXyYM