Re-opened for business

I totally failed to renew "glomarization.com" so now we're stuck looking at "glomarization.blogspot.com," which is about the ugliest damn domain name I've ever been sorry enough to make other people use.

So that's why my mobile device has been flaky lately

Looks like one for the RISKS Digest, to me:

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. [...] Unlike other cellphone makers, [Research in Motion] handles email and messaging traffic to and from its phones. When it encounters a problem, millions of subscribers are affected at once. There are about 70 million BlackBerry users around the world.

(MSNBC.) I heard about the overseas outages the other day and was kinda hoping against hope that it wouldn't reach North America.

BlackBerry banned in Saudi Arabia today, UAE in October

There are some one million BlackBerry users in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. I'm honestly surprised that the two countries are seeking to ban the device for security reasons (BBC), because I would think that it doesn't make much sense economically. That's a lot of foreign businesspeople who are going to have a hard time conducting business there, and foreign rich people who are going to have a hard time spending their vacations there, now.

Are iPhones likewise banned? Taking the governments at their word, does iPhone use involve the same "judicial, social and national security concerns" that BlackBerry use does? The article states that the aim of the BlackBerry ban is to get Research in Motion to turn users' communications over to the governments on demand. Does Apple already have an agreement with the two governments to turn over iPhone users' communications on demand?

I guess if your profit-seeking motivation is strong enough, it's not a huge problem to drop your BlackBerry and switch to another device so that you can continue to do in-person business with the Saudis. And if you're rich enough, you don't care that you can't use your BlackBerry while you're skiing in Dubai. But other than those very elite groups -- who may well not be using BlackBerrys in the first place -- a lot of people use BlackBerrys to do a lot of business, and they'll continue using them for a while. So it seems like an economically unwise policy to ban them outright. The policy doesn't seem very well thought-out to me.

In which the technology defeats me

Weird. Firefox for Mac just magically updated itself, and now it looks like Safari.