Alec Saunders SquawkBox

There were some very thoughtful posts on the lawful intercept issue raised by Jeff last week.

Aswath Rao puts aside the "rightness" of the FCC’s position completely, and instead looks at how it could be implemented. Among the many good points he makes is this little jewel: "I want to bring to your attention that complying to CALEA requirement will not only be expensive for VoIP providers; it will also destroy the basic architectural advantage."  CALEA can kill the stupid network by forcing all traffic through a proxy.  He proposes determining whether signalling or signalling and media is required in a tap situation and then argues that the ISP should be responsible if access to media is required.  This proposal makes sense to me.

Richard Stastny is scathing.  He concludes with "This is basically what the world likes so much with the US: explaining the whole world how democracy works by creating asymmetric laws. The best example on this was the proposed international court on war crimes: valid for everybody exept US citizens."

I have three basic questions:

• What is the cost?
• Will it make a difference?
• What guarantees do citizens have that their rights won’t be abused?

Andy thinks so.  Certainly there’s a compelling case for capping international minutes.  Domestically, calling minutes are cheap, and getting cheaper. There may be enough play in the models being used by "unlimited" carriers today that they can tolerate a few extreme cases.

Rich Tehrani has a great post on the challenges ahead for RIM.  I had a very similar conversation with a close friend at RIM about a year ago.  What I told him was that usability, especially, was going to bite them hard if Microsoft and others put their minds to solving the email problem.

Rich’s comments on Blackberry Server are not quite on the mark.  He says:

The Blackberry Server is everywhere but it is little more than a crutch that allows you to access large documents on slow networks by enabling the server to take out the crucial text and send just that to you. But as networks speed up do we need a server to help us in any way? It can take longer for the server to open and analyze a document than it takes to just send the document over EVDO in the first place.

The server he should be looking at is the Blackberry Exchange Server, which is a little more functional than this.  It does a number of things, including providing cellular access to services inside the corporate network, synchronized email, calendar and contacts with the exchange server.  Something like 80% of RIM users are now corporate users and using BES.  The carrier server is, as Rich says, little more than a crutch.

Even so, these are features that have been built by Microsoft for Exchange.  RIM’s advantage, at the moment, is momentum — the fact that nobody does email better. What I need from them is:

• Better support for attachments — better viewers, the ability to play back a WAV file (since my voice mail system at the office is dropping voice mail into my inbox), more viewers, and the ability to save an attachment to my PC over the air.
• More emphasis on phone from the cardfile application.  Right now, the cardfile assumes you might want to do any number of things, and presents a great long list of possibilities.  While driving, trying to phone someone by name is nearly impossible.  I want to be able to pick the RIM device up in my right hand, and from whatever application I am in, begin tapping out the letters of a name, and have the system assume I want to call that person on the most likely device they can be reached at. Anything less is a failure.