BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie is sounding the alarm about surveillance

https://thewalrus.ca/are-you-afraid-of-google-blackberry-cofounder-jim-balsillie-says-you-should-be/

by walterbell • 7 years ago

171 41 7 years ago

batbomb• 7 years ago

I’d be afraid of Google if I had worked at Blackberry too, just look at the destruction they did.

na852• 7 years ago

Eh, I think blackberry's destruction was of their own making. They had a huge head start but failed to embrace apps. The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered.

They failed to read the winds of change that saw Bring Your Own Device come to the workplace and thought they were safe with enterprise and government users.

capsulecorp• 7 years ago

The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered.

I can resonate with this. I worked for a major bank developing their blackberry app. It was amazingly painful to develop on their platform, its a literal mess.

protomyth• 7 years ago

Looking back, I’m more and more convinced it was Verizon’s need for an iPhone clone that killed them. The book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry goes into a lot of detail about their decisions and that looked like the big problem. Something like the Passport earlier would have been a better bet than any Storm model.

jayd162• 7 years ago

Their developer tools were laughably painful in the iPhone age.

29083011397778• 7 years ago

Jim Balsillie actually tried to change course, open up, and monetize BBM. He was shot down hard by the rest of the board, who thought hardware was the way to go. I can't imagine how much that would sting, considering a couple years later Whatsapp would be sold for billions. Taken from the book mentioned in the article actually, Losing the Signal, before anyone asks for a source.

otabdeveloper1• 7 years ago

There's only two possible ways to survive in the commodity phone hardware world:

a) Price dumping and giving out a free OS to Chinese OEM's.

b) Making a "luxury" product to differentiate against Chinese OEM's.

Neither of these two paths was open to Blackberry. Sorry.

Zhenya3• 7 years ago

Pretty rich, coming from the co-founder of a company that willfully handed over encryption keys of user data to authoritarian and brutal governments[1].

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackberry-saudi/rim-to-s...

devoply2• 7 years ago

Whataboutism. Regardless, his point is that comprehensive surveillance of the Sidewalk project is bad.

Sidewalk’s proposal is peppered with phrases like “comprehensive data collection,” “an enormous amount of data,” and “fine-grained data.” The data it desires runs from environmental (localized weather conditions, noise levels, and pollution) to social ( everyday actions that paint a detailed picture of what residents are doing and when ).

It looks like Google's vision for the modern city is to turn it into the Sims where Google can peer into everything. If you want to live in that world be my guest, but he's absolutely right. This is not something which is good in many ways. Where Google is monitoring everyone all the time. I mean even in Star Trek the computer isn't monitoring everyone all the time.... if it were then many plots could be resolved with the surveillance log on everyone's actions.

Zhenya3• 7 years ago

Not whataboutism at all; with historical context you might be able to see that this isn't a principal stand but possibly has some, yet unknown, commercial reason.

cantrevealname2• 7 years ago

I would fully trust an encrypted communication system only if it is (1) end-to-end encrypted, (2) open source (or at least with source code available and buildable from source), and (3) based on a sound security design. Having said that, however, you're being very hard on Research In Motion (now called BlackBerry Ltd).

From everything I read and know about RIM, the enterprise level BlackBerry systems were unbreakable to governments and the keys were generated and controlled entirely by the customers (not by RIM). The pissed-off governments demanded access and threatened to ban RIM--the market leader at the time. I think the first to demand access was India and RIM put up a years-long fight against them before they capitulated.

It's easy to say that they should have taken a principled stand and lost the market. (In a similar vein, RIM had to pay a slimy patent troll $612.5 million dollars [not a typo, more than half a billion!] by a certain deadline otherwise the judge in the case would have banned them from the entire US market until they had a trial. The patents in question were ludicrously obvious and should never have been granted. I'd like to have seen RIM take a stand and fight the troll, but I can forgive them for having chosen not to go bankrupt.)

At the other extreme of corporate misconduct, are you aware that AT&T has been giving the call records (meta data) of every person in the United States to the NSA for decades? If Snowden's info is correct, they even allowed live tapping into phone calls for every phone call that passed through their network.

Furthermore, here's a quote from the article you linked to: "RIM, unlike rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers located in Canada and other countries such as Britain." I have a high degree of respect for Apple (and somewhat for Nokia), but isn't it odd that RIM was being targeted by the host country but Nokia and Apple weren't? Perhaps they had a way to monitor communications (or at least get meta data) on Nokia and Apple phones, but they couldn't monitor RIM because RIM maintained its servers outside of the country.

In summary, cut some slack on RIM. RIM did use good encryption and did put up a fight. Many other companies have done and are doing much much worse.

Zhenya3• 7 years ago

The issue here is not that other companies have worse security, we can rightfully assume thats true. The issue here is that by specifically releasing the keys to such a gov't they could have put peoples lives in danger that specifically relied on their lauded security and encryption.

So I agree with you fully, but I also do not have to cut them any slack as what they did was shitty.

Also, please have an upvote.

mirimir• 7 years ago

Those are great criteria. But I would add that it should be P2P, with anonymized addresses. Such as Tox or Ring, where users run Tor onion services.

And if there must be central servers, they should also have anonymized addresses, and the owners and admins should be anonymous. Adversaries can't coerce people, if they can't identify or locate them. Even so, having central servers is a weakness to be avoided.

Just as with RIM:

RIM, unlike rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers located in Canada and other countries such as Britain.

Those were not secure servers. Because RIM was coerced into compromising them.

bigprovolone• 7 years ago

not sure if you are aware of this story concerning Blackberry

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg77vv/rcmp-black...

amsau• 7 years ago

Pretty rich indeed, but for different reasons.

From this story: "Facebook had been caught designing algorithms to identify stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious teenagers on its network, presumably to assist advertisers who might want to target them"

From NYTimes story last November https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...

"But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation……….She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.....“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos………………Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic"

throw0101a• 7 years ago

The word "willfully" is too strong.

Short of Apple and ( theoriginal) WhatsApp, I don't there was/is another major company that took encryption between devices as serious as RIM did: getting on the podium with bronze is not a bad accomplishment.

We can also thank them for helping move the ball forward with ECC encryption. They were taking crypto seriously before Apple and others even were in the game.

The fact that they didn't manage to get things perfect, or implement what we now call end-to-end encryption, shouldn't diminish the positive things they did.

devoply2• 7 years ago

In the future we are Sims running on Google's computers.

AFascistWorld• 7 years ago

Any of these big tech companies is not your friend.

aresant• 7 years ago

This article is a long winded view of the sophisticated behavior modeling ad-targeting networks that google and others employ - long on hand wringing and short on solutions.

Stratchery published a beautiful, irreverent proposal earlier this week to address this very challenge through a regulatory framework that actually feels like it could work and I encourage all HN users to absorb:

https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-...

maksimum• 7 years ago

platform providers that primarily monetize through advertising should be in their own category: as I noted above, because these platform providers separate monetization from content supply and consumption, there is no price or payment mechanism to incentivize them to be concerned with problematic content

The article does a good job of explaining why YouTube and Facebook don't currently do a good job of currating content, or whether that should even be their responsibility. It's not about machine learning, it's about price incentives.

nnq• 7 years ago

Maybe forcing separation of content providing companies and advertising companies should be the modern equivalent of separating State from Church.

An advertising company would always want to get more and more infos about the users that it sees as "resources" instead of customers. A content providing company would be forced to treat its users as actual customers and respect their rights at least a bit, and would push back against the advertising company asking for more surveillance data.

Now, unfortunately this can't actually work because the more an advertising company makes, the more it can afford to pay the content creators/channels/providers, and everyone just wants more $.

But if anyone has any idea how to make it work, do share!

spaced-out• 7 years ago

I've read a lot of these types of articles, which are heavy on hand-wringing and light of suggestions that would actually help things.

I think the core problem is that under our current model of free-market capitalism, there really is no way to constrain what companies like Google and Facebook are doing. You can add on some additional privacy protections like Europe does, but it only goes so far, since the core model of these companies is to make products that people want and give them away in exchange for data. Google and the like will continue to get the data they want because people will keep giving it to them voluntarily.

Me personally, I don't want to give up my free gmail, or my free maps app. I was on a trip in Japan and Google Translate works amazingly well. Way better than a few years ago, and also free.

Even if I am uncomfortable with some of Google's practices, I'm not going to stop using their products.

bartimus2• 7 years ago

I believe the issue is overblown and we're underestimating how well platforms are succeeding in curating their content.

The controversy evolves around opinionated content where group A sees a problem with group B having a certain opinion heard.

We need to think about extreme cases. Take for example a political party for pedophiles. You can rest assured any free market player will be laser focused as soon as such content shows up on their platform. Reputations are at stake. Many will execute their freedom to have such content removed. They don't need to provide a reason.

Now with a regulatory system it becomes a different story. There is no way to define a set of rules that prevents people from advocating pedophilia without sacrificing freedom of speech.

close042• 7 years ago

There is no way to define a set of rules that prevents people from advocating pedophilia without sacrificing freedom of speech.

I disagree. The problem is just that people interpret "freedom of speech" as "I'm free to say whatever I want [period]". There are some limits however, that most fail to recognize. One of them which is both the letter and the spirit of freedom of speech ever since its first proclamation: the speaker shall be responsible for any abuse as defined by law. Being allowed to speak freely doesn't absolve you of supporting the consequences.

This is why you can speak state secrets or instigate violence against refugees but will be prosecuted (there are corner cases as in every other legal area).

In your example you are perfectly free to support that case. There's no actual "censorship office" to physically close your mouth while you do it. You may even escape any kind of legal prosecution. But in the court of public opinion you will not fare well.

guntars• 7 years ago

Does a day go by when an article about some version of Google Is Evil doesn’t make it to the top of Hacker News? It’s ruining the site, imo.

dosy• 7 years ago

it's pretty funny as blackberries used to be the phone of choice for intelligence services. but now their business has failed he's against people who are exploiting data. I know he's talking about a different type of data but it's still funny.

as an aside I'm wondering when the the last nail in the coffin is going to laid for one of these big tech services. and how are these huge tech companies going to respond to this increasing government interference.

I'm sort of waiting for one of the big five to go full early-airbnb or Uber and just start circumventing. a part of me would find this big tech versus big government civil war out in the open pretty funny.

plus big tech being distracted and hammered by government would provide more opportunities for startups.

IshKebab• 7 years ago

I got many paragraphs in with no new information given. Yes we know that Google allows targeted advertising. It's how they make money. We also know that they don't sell user information. Neither does Facebook actually - they just had a stupidly permissive (and free) API in the past.

frolig• 7 years ago

"Free as in puppy" is something people say? I don't like this meme.

BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie is sounding the alarm about surveillance

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