I feel bad for BlackBerry users waking up today in Saudi Arabia. Yahoo is reporting that Saudi Arabia has cut off BlackBerry messaging services as of today “Due to security concerns.”
It turns out that the Saudi telecommunications commission ordered the 3 main carriers to block BlackBerry service or face a $1.3 million dollar fine. The US and Canada are holding talks with Saudi authorities to see how they can ease this issue.
The irony is that RIM kind of made it easy for carriers to block BlackBerry traffic since they just have to block all connections to RIMs servers. You could not do this with other devices because they connect over regular ports using technology like ActiveSync, IMAP, & POP3.
I express my condolences to all BlackBerry users in Saudi Arabia. I hope your withdrawal is not that bad.
andrewnyc ( View Profile) - Posts: