AAS Insight 55 - 5800 price and Palm Pre

[Rafe]

In All About Symbian Insight 55 (AAS Podcast 108) we look at the UK launch of the Nokia 5800 MusicXpress, talk about the 'Curse of Silence' vu;nerability (stops SMS messages from being received on some S60 handset, before discussing our first impressions of the Palm Pre. You can listen to AAS Insight 55 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.

Read on in the full article.

[stuclark]

I've got to say, I still don't agree with Steve's stance on the "Curse of Silence" vulnerability.

On the one hand, yes, it's right to say the reporting of this has been blown out of all proportion by some media sources, and that this is another example of mass media picking up on, and wrongly reporting, a tech news item.

However, on the other hand, this bug DOES affect a massive number of Nokia, Panasonic, LG and Samsung phones, including the "best smartphones in the world" - the Nokia N95 and N95-8GB. It is NOT known how many, and which, networks have blocked delivery of the malformed messages. While not viral, there IS a large possibility for one or more malicious individuals to target a large number of users by exploiting this bug. (especially if they use a computer to randomly send a malformed message to a sucession of phone numbers)

Saying that this is not relevent because the vulnerability does not exist in S60 V3 FP2 or in S60 V5 is short-sighted. Realistically there's only a few models of phone on the market which feature either V3 FP2 or V5 of S60, and so in overall percentages, the number of people using a non-vulnerable phone is going to be very small. The vast majority of phones currently in use by real users are older S60 V2 or S60 V3 phones. And the phones which have been Nokia's best selling recently; the N73, the E71, the N95, the N95-8GB ARE all vulnerable!

But reporting this story as a "non story" was a mistake I think. It is potentially a big problem and needs to be addressed as such. While the last thing that's needed is scaremongoring, it's been shown that under-playing the story has created just as much guff as over sensationalising it would have done.

The only other thing - NO, an "anti-virus" application won't help you here. On that I do agree with Steve.

[slitchfield]

Nope, disagree again.

Quote: " there IS a large possibility for one or more malicious individuals to target a large number of users"

But sending SMS cost money. Who's going to PAY the (potentially) hundreds of thousands of pounds to send out millions of unsolicited, malformed, quite-likely-never-received, probably-won't -affect-the-recipient-anyway messages??

[Cjp]

despite a very interesting podcast heres at least 1 person that ll hold you too a symbian podcast haha.

[Tzer2]

On the topic of spreading the "virus", SMS is much more traceable than email and someone using text messages maliciously is more likely to be prosecuted.

"On the topic of spreading the "virus", SMS is much more traceable than email and someone using text messages maliciously is more likely to be prosecuted."

But then again... in places/countries where prepaid SIM cards is fairly is buy and dispose affair (...and buy another again), it can be pretty tough tracing or pinning down that particular person....