And why exactly is POTRAZ blocking BBM, can Techzim get a comment from POTRAZ

Question

why we are being singled out in the whole SADC region - S.A, Zambia, Botswana etc all on BBM yet Zim as educated as it is found it noble to deny us this service?

Answer 1

because of national security. The messaging servers are situated in europe, usa and canada. Only nsa, cia, mi6 and fbi have full access to them.

All bbm ar encrypted from device and Zimbabwe hav laws which requires every telecom companies to provide intercepted comms when required by law enforcement agencies.
Since they  cannt do that with bbm, because BB cannt give them access keys, they cannt provide the service lawfully

Comments

So its more a political than technological reason from what I am gathering....S.A has more riots and demos in a calendar month than Zim has in a decade yet they have BBM, so whats the issue with us? Surely the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons in a progressive country such as ours..

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You are confusing things. The riots and violence you mention have no relation to national security/intelligence issues that are driven by politics and foreign affairs.

I have to correct macdonald who said, "...because BB cannt give them access keys,...". It can but wont. The Zimbabwean market isnt so big that it is worth compromising for. Yet they did the same for other agencies where they have huge marekts

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What about Whatsapp message? Are they also not encrypted? And arent the messages handled by messages outside Zimbabwe? We can also look look at facebook messaging. Isn't their connection encrypted?So we should ban also these two and others such as viber, linkedin etc. Their reason is ridiculous.....

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Whatsapp messages are encrypted when transmitted but the major flaw is on the devices doing the transmission.

Check the link below for more infor.

http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/21864047

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Im not confusing anything. If it was not national security, why did the gvt decided to open courts even on Sundays, something which have never been done in the history of the country.

National security covers every life facet not jus political and terrorism. Even water shortage can be national security. What matters is how the security guys respond and conduct themselves.

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whatsapp may be encrypted but the encryption is no different to going to your online banking website (that is its simple HTTPS/SSL certificates) to encrypt the communications stream from handset to there server - any ISP could do some smart proxy work to intercept and decrypt the traffic at transmission time,

BB is different in that it encrypts the data as well as the communication stream so its virtually impossible to decrypt the data even if they could decrypt the communication stream and intercept the encrypted data

i'd argue that National Security is a flimsy reasoning that BB is blocked, plain and simple it comes down to the fact that with BBM you could communicate in a way the government couldnt intercept and they want to know what people are saying and when so they dont have riots on there hands or forgive my bluntness which people to make sure dont cause an uprising by "visiting" them before they do

National Security is used much to often as an argument but Macdonald is right in that something as simple as a water shortage could become a national security issue
i dont believe its a national security issue when its plain and simple certain members of government wanting to know what people are saying/doing so that they can "penalize" them for not agreeing with there agenda

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could you please explain a bit more on the 'smart proxy work' that ISPs can engage to defeat SSL? My understanding is that if the ISP re-signs the content with their own certificate (required step in re-encrypting), then the browser should warn the user about an invalid certificate, as the ISP's cert is (should) not be in CA store.

My premis is: you can't do a MITM attack unless you have a valid signing certificate for that domain (eg mail.google.com)

Answer 2

So far our questions are referred to the Ministry of Transport, Communication and Infrastructure Development

Answer 3

Let me answer you lot before anyone of starts breathing fire about freedom of speech and useless when granted liberties.

Do you know how did the security services brought order during London rioting?

By closing BBM, twitter and used their access to servers to track and arrest rioters.

How about New York protesters, same tactic was used.

So we need to kno where our freedom starts and ends.

Comments

i was in london during the riots, twitter was never shut down

Blackberry voluntarily shut down BBM temporarily as they didnt want the bad PR of being associated with all the violence

The security services had nothing to do with that, they just followed up on the public posting on twitter and facebook to arrest the idiots stupid enough to publically brag about what they looted or obviously organising attacks

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why is the word s.tupid filtered?

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That was the official story! I happen to be in West London when the London bombings took place when all phone networks, vodafone, tmobile, orsnge  mysteriously vanished for more than 3hrs and the official line was that the networks were overwhelmed only to come out later that the security guys took over everything to coordinate and direct there operations and rescue services.

In short, there is an official line, and there is what actually happened.

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i need to correct my previous statement:

blackberry never actually took the service off line, I know that the police/security services were considering asking them but they did not serve any legal warrant demanding it. only MP's being loud and saying it should happen to score brownie points with voters.

It never actually happened in reality, it ended up being all talk and no action - like a lot of things in the UK!

The London bombings was a different event in its entirety - the whole organised terrorism aspect actually gave a perfectly reasonable reason to shut it all down - and I fully support that - I suspect in reality that what did actually happen was initially the networks were overwhelmed so much that they had to shut them down to public use just so the security and rescue services could actually communicate

In London particularly the police and ambulance services actually piggy back off the cell network's masts via seperate secure frequencies so when the masts are at capacity they also have trouble communicating despite advanced QoS technologies being deployed to ensure there is capacity for the emergency services they just dont have the ability to cope with that level of demand

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If you kno what l kno you will never buy this crap and PR stunts by UK gvt and companies or from any official gvt line worldwide.

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well i dont buy PR stunts from any government full stop, they just attempts to curry favour and your vote around election times

i do appreciate governments have to consider the nations best interests and sometimes, it would spread more panic in the initial aftermath to say security services shut the cell networks down, because people would think theres cell phone bombers or something.

better it came out later in a calmer manner when everybody can go, fair enough, probably the right decision given the circumstances

its hard I wouldn't want to be a politician or a security services employee in such a situation as its very difficult decisions to be made in not a lot of time and i don't think there is always a universal "right" answer to an issue like that

we've taken this discussion way off topic now!

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What was the question again? Lol!

Answer 4

BBM security is a contentious issue in many countries with concerns of people running organised crime on a platform authorities have no access to. While big countries have negotiated their way with BBM, smaller countries have to say and only accept the service wholesale. I believe for Zimbabwe its only a matter of time though pride stands before all this.

Comments

So its more a political than technological reason from what I am gathering....S.A has more riots and demos in a calendar month than Zim has in a decade yet they have BBM, so whats the issue with us? Surely the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons in a progressive country such as ours...

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There is nothing beneficial about bbm. Its original intend was business execs who wanted to communicate in privacy. And it became viral sold to mass public. Many pple went for it to feel like business pple and ego pride.

By even bbm have agreed that that zest was lost to other chatting apps and they are now trying to reinvent there messaging and bizness strategy.

Do you ever wonder why Blackberry is sooo popular in Nigeria?

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Don't worry chaps,  we have whatsApp, twitter, Facebook and lots more which have cheap communication & also being able to have instant comms

BBM ndoyaita sei?

Answer 5

Ok, I just read all of this. Interesting conversation. Here is something you might not know. If you have an OS6 and above device you can update your BBM to 7 log in with your BlackBerry ID and use BBM over WiFi..... Try it and let's continue with this discussion.

Answer 6

Good news is that You can use a standard data plan with BlackBerry 10 devices and everything will work just fine. Pre-BlackBerry 10 devices required a dedicated BlackBerry/BIS plan to get all features working - BBM, browser, email etc. On BlackBerry 10 however, you can just use the same smartphone data plan that works for iPhone or Android as well.
 
So hala 2 bb10 nd I dnt noe  how e gvt will block BBM this time

Comments

They can if they really want to, nothing can escape deep packet inspection analysis. That is the technology they asked telecoms to install at there data and exchange points.