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Podcast Episode 11

This week Ewan’s still on his desert island, James is in a muddy field (Glastonbury apparently) so Ben and Dan talk to special guest Jay Fenton on subjects including the Nokia buy-out of Symbian, Nokia’s problem with product leaks, the new ‘UK network’ UK01 and the furore over Roger’s tariffs for the iPhone in Canada plus ‘things of the week’.

Listen now using the player below or see the links below for other options:

Episode link and feeds:

[Link] Direct link to this episode’s MP3 to download
[iTunes] Subscribe or listen in iTunes
[RSS] Subscribe via your feed reader or another podcatcher

—-

The contributors:

Jay Fenton is one of teh technical whizz-type chaps at Howler Tech and open source guru.  He made Scribe.
Dan Lane’s blog is at http://invalid.name. He’s CTO at Howler Tech.
Ben Smith is a management consultant. He has a blog, but anything worth reading is contributed here.

Sites mentioned in the podcast:

Campaign against Rogers’ awful iPhone tarriffs in Canada: http://www.ruinediphone.com/
YBrowser S60 file system explorer
S60 ROMPatcher for developing unsigned apps
Freeswitch open source soft-switch

We’re really keen to get your feedback on the podcast – please let us know in the comments or tell Ewan – ewan@smstextnews.com.

7 COMMENTS

  1. Great podcast all around, I thought Jay Fenton had some great insight into the Symbian announcement.

    Ideas for fingerprint-less security: The camera could be used to either recognize your face, or you could carry a 2D barcode “fob” on your keychain (or elsewhere) that could be scanned with the camera. Oh, thought of another: a bluetooth fob that is on your keychain. All of these sound kind of cumbersome, but that's the brainstorming for now.

    What might be better would be for only certain apps to rrequire this extended security (another signing mechanism) so that, say, Mail 4 Exchange requires it, but you do not need to jump through those hoops just to make a call. If that were the case, it would be nice to have an area on the file system similarly protected, making the handset a secure file storage device.

  2. Yes – Jay knows his stuff good 'n proper… a privilege to have him on.

    Interesting thoughts re: security. I'm not sure our corporate security types would go for the token approach – they prefer to match 'something you have' and 'something you know'… a token might be one too many 'something you haves'… although it sounds like an option for consumers potentially.

    Definitely like the tiered authentication bit – that ties nicely with Nokia's attempt to add dual use personal / business features to the E-series so they could be secured independently… like so much here though I think it would all be in the execution. Anything more cumbersome would be unwelcome on my devices!

  3. The hope with the tiered idea was that you would encounter the extra authentication bits less often than you currently do. I have not run into what you were talking about (luckily, my phone is just for fun at the moment) so my theory may not mesh well into real-world application.

    I get the “something you have, something you know” paradigm, but isn't something you have + something else you have more powerful? Might have to look at what Schneier has to say on that, but it seems like having the phone and having your face/having a fob would be more secure than a passcode that could be guessed, brute forced, etc. Again, something for real-world experimentation as this is just brainstorming at the moment.

  4. Two 'something you haves' are obviously better than 1 in some scenarios, but in a number of others there's no benefit at all – a thief can steal my phone and token from a hotel just as easily as the phone alone for instance.

    WRT the passcode, M4E enforces a 3 (or is it 5?) attempts then completely wipes the device to prevent brute forcing.

  5. Two 'something you haves' are obviously better than 1 in some scenarios, but in a number of others there's no benefit at all – a thief can steal my phone and token from a hotel just as easily as the phone alone for instance.

    WRT the passcode, M4E enforces a 3 (or is it 5?) attempts then completely wipes the device to prevent brute forcing.

  6. Two 'something you haves' are obviously better than 1 in some scenarios, but in a number of others there's no benefit at all – a thief can steal my phone and token from a hotel just as easily as the phone alone for instance.

    WRT the passcode, M4E enforces a 3 (or is it 5?) attempts then completely wipes the device to prevent brute forcing.

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