Blackphone es un producto de un equipo dirigido a la privacidad de los clientes, pero al parecer el concepto ha llamado la atención de BlackBerry y ambas empresas ya se han dirigidos unas a otras.
La empresa SPG Technologies es la empresa detrás del Blackphone, su alternativa para Smartphone totalmente ligados a la seguridad de sus usuarios y al parecer tenian algo que sacarse del pecho en estos días.
Ya que al parecer que el concepto no había convencido a BlackBerry quienes habían comentado su opinión del mismo a través de su Blog Inside BlackBerry y se lee como sigue:
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The Blackphone: Consumer-Grade Privacy that’s Inadequate for Businesses
Depending on which side of the digital privacy debate you fall, Edward J. Snowden, the now-infamous cyber surveillance whistleblower, is either a traitor or a patriot. But long before his Wikipedia entry is finalized, he may also be credited with launching a cottage industry of consumer-targeted secure communications products.
Not since the Cold War was red hot has public awareness of electronic espionage been so heightened. It seems like everyone, following revelations of widespread state-sponsored digital eavesdropping, has a hankering for their own Cone of Silence.
The latest artifact of the so-called Post-Snowden era is the Blackphone, a purportedly secure smartphone. The phone’s manufacturer, SGP Technologies, started shipping preorders of the $629 device at the end of June.
As a pioneer in mobile security, accumulating thousands of patents and dozens of certifications over the past 15 years, BlackBerry welcomes the attention the Blackphone brings to secure communications and digital privacy. But when it comes to protecting corporate information and end user privacy, meeting compliance requirements and expanding the productivity of your mobile workforce, the similarities we share with Blackphone end with the name.
Consumer Targeted
As this review points out, the Blackphone was designed chiefly for consumers. The product’s target market sweet spot appears to be individuals — not necessarily affiliated with an enterprise — requiring eavesdrop-proof communications. The Blackphone appears to be designed to operate outside the realm of IT oversight.
It’s currently unclear if the Blackphone will support the logging and archiving of business communications conducted on the smartphone, an unacceptable condition for regulated organizations, such as financial services and healthcare firms.
Blackphone’s go-it-alone approach to security contrasts dramatically with BlackBerry’s end-to-end enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution. The BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES10) platform provides IT with a single console for managing corporate-issued or personal BlackBerry, iOS and Android devices. BBM Protected also enables CIOs to rest assured that their workers are messaging each other securely and privately. By infusing security and control within every segment – device, EMM server and network – of the end-to-end digital journey, BlackBerry has attracted the business of some of the most security conscious and highly regulated organizations in the world.
Productivity Trade-offs
The maker of Blackphone proudly proclaims its laser-like focus on privacy. This from their website:
“In a world where devices and apps increasingly offer features only in return for users’ personal or sensitive information, the pent-up demand for Blackphone shows there is strong, international demand for our brand’s devices and services that stand apart by placing privacy before all else.”
BlackBerry’s similar preoccupation with protecting user privacy is apparent through features like BlackBerry Balance and BlackBerry Guardian. BlackBerry Balance comes standard on all BlackBerry 10 devices and automatically separates personal data and applications from enterprise data, giving users the best BYOD experience on the market. We pioneered the concept of giving users the ability to control mobile application permissions and combined the BlackBerry Guardian vetting tools with Trend Micro’s expertise to protect users from malicious applications.
We also recognize that worker productivity and end-user satisfaction are just as important as privacy and security. Enterprise-grade mobile security must provide ironclad protection of behind-the-server data without impeding employee productivity or negatively impacting usability. When it comes to fully realizing the benefits of enterprise mobility, a hierarchical approach to privacy, productivity and usability just doesn’t work.
Enterprise Grade Security
Everybody should be confident that their electronic communications are kept private and their mobile devices safe from siphoning by malicious hackers. For individuals, a costly Blackphone may fall short of delivering the desired peace of mind.
For enterprises, security that stops at the device isn’t secure enough. When it comes to enterprise security – in a Pre- or Post-Snowden environment – the protection offered by BlackBerry’s end-to-end EMM solution makes the most attractive features of the Blackphone superfluous.
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El CEO de SGP Technologies Toby Weir-Jones en nota amigable recordó con su respuesta de donde vino BlackBerry y que en el lenguaje se entiende que BlackBerry no tiene la moral en decir que Blackphone no es adecuado para privacidad y ambiente corporativo cuando hasta hace algunos años BlackBerry emprendía situaciones legales con países que reclamaban tener acceso a los servicios de BlackBerry Internet Service y BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
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Dear Privacy Enthusiast,
On July 11, our friends at Blackberry posted an article about, of all things, us! The piece goes to some effort to suggest that BP1 is “consumer-grade”, and therefore “inadequate” for business users. Setting aside the fact that we think consumers deserve the same security as companies, we weren’t surprised the piece extols the virtues of Blackberry’s own solutions at our expense.
Blackberry was a huge, defining brand in our industry. Nobody can question the success they achieved following the release in 2003 of the 72xx series, which was their first proper smartphone. They cost $400 (roughly $615 in 2014 dollars) and soon became the must-have executive accessory, driving device and BES license sales worldwide. They were revolutionary products. I personally owned an even older device — a 957 — and used several of its descendants over the years. Nowadays, the only thing sustaining them is the inertia of their remaining enterprise and government customers, but that too will eventually come to rest while we and others continue to win over those accounts.
Unfortunately, the world discovered in 2010 that RIM was willing to compromise its integrity if sufficient pressure was applied by governments intent on spying on the messages sent via the ubiquitous devices. Various statements from the Saudi, UAE, Indian, and other telecom regulatory bodies all confirmed the same thing: RIM made it technically possible for the formerly-secret encrypted messages to be decrypted and viewed. Much speculation surrounds exactly what was done, and whether it remains in place today, but if anything there was more than one approach which achieved the same basic goal: a betrayal of the objectives of privacy.
That, along with the restrictive platform architecture, lack of widespread adoption by third parties, and shifting priorities among large enterprise customers, all closed the book on RIM, and the precipitous decline in its fortunes — well-documented by the press — began. Now we have Blackberries which run Android apps (of which there are >40x more than legacy BB apps), BES environments which manage Apple and Android devices, and all the fanfare of the Playbook, Z10, Q10, and other devices which simply didn’t sell. And everyone you see in an airport, or at a meeting, or on a train, is generally still using Apple, Android, and now, Blackphone. Passbook is likely the last chance to reinvigorate the Blackberry hardware business; otherwise they will probably shift entirely towards MDM, where they are already at a disadvantage once multi-platform capabilities are taken into account.
These are, we’ll remind you, the same circumstances which have seen Blackberry’s adjusted share price drop from $230 (in July 2007) to $11.51 as of July 11 2014. That’s over a 95% decline during that period, and if we used the lowest recent price of $5.44, it’s almost a 98% drop. In the past five years, the drop is still almost 83%, and that’s including the recent bump following Blackberry’s announcement that, at last, they’re opening up their own Blackberry Enterprise Server to manage the devices people actually buy: namely, iOS and Android.
The substance of Blackberry’s recent post (which you can — and should — read here) tries to make the fact that we have only the BP1 device on the market a liability. This is a short-sighted and misleading suggestion, for two main reasons:
1) while it is indeed our first hardware product, the interplay between Blackphone’s platform and Silent Circle encrypted communications suggests we’re striking a chord with the market; and
2) we offer features and extensibility which simply aren’t available on Blackberry.
The most obvious one is encrypted voice communications to Blackphone, Android, iOS, and almost any traditional phone number. We include Silent Phone and Silent Text on every Blackphone, and they can be managed by the Silent Circle Management Console. The tool is a licensing and provisioning system which enterprises can use to manage their deployed secure comms subscriptions across the employee base. And as of last week, you can now buy a Global Dial capability — the Global Encrypted Calling Plans — which gives every Blackphone and Silent Circle user the ability to make calls to landlines in 79 countries, and mobile numbers in 41, all for a fixed monthly fee that’s much less expensive than any alternatives. That’s in addition to the unlimited use of the Silent Circle network for placing secure, peer-to-peer encrypted calls between Silent Phone users anywhere in the world.
Why is that important? Because it’s strictly a peer-to-peer system, even if a foreign government demanded we somehow allow them to eavesdrop on our customers, the technical truth is we couldn’t do it. The network doesn’t have a central control point which enterprises, governments, or individual users must depend upon. This improves security and reduces cost and complexity. You can provision and start using Silent Phone in minutes on any Blackphone, Android, or iOS device, anywhere in the world. BBM Voice only lets you talk to other BBM users after being provisioned by a BES, and who knows exactly what might happen when those chats go through the same data center architecture that allowed text messages to be viewed by anyone who asked?
For situations where centralized tracking is required, such as in regulated industries with employer-issued devices, we’ll support the efforts of any MDM vendor who wants to adapt their sandboxing clients to work on PrivatOS, so long as we don’t have to yield on our underlying security principles. We’ve already been contacted by several of those vendors and supplied test devices to them.
This touches upon a key point: our approach is attractive because the technology and architecture of the Blackphone ecosystem is more flexible, more transparent, and more usable. Closed systems — like BES and Mr. McGarvey’s beloved EMM approach — are not attuned to how most enterprises are deploying mobility solutions today. Certainly, there are cases where centralized management and policy tools are useful (hence our openness to MDM, as mentioned above), but there are plenty of other ways to keep sensitive data ‘behind the server’ which don’t limit you to BB10 smartphones or the BES infrastructure.
The whole point of Blackphone is privacy, choice, and control. This puts the ability to make those decisions back into the hands of the device owner. If it’s a private individual, then they control the whole spectrum of decisions. If it’s a company, then the company chooses what to permit its employees to do with company-owned equipment. But we reject outright the argument that an end-to-end approach is the only viable choice, because it’s that same approach which allowed Blackberry to betray its customers and jettison its credibility.
And because Blackphone’s PrivatOS is built on a familiar core — Android 4.4.2+ — we’re not asking people to adopt a failed and dying platform in order to have maximum interoperability with an MDM. You’ll soon see announcements about Blackphone’s MDM plans. If you’re following some of the press, you already know we’re planning a family of devices, including a tablet, and that we are firm believers in the need for our devices to play nicely with a variety of ecosystems. We validate our security credentials with our policy on transparency, our commitment to open source review, and our soon-to-launch policies on incident response and customer notification, including guidelines for responsible disclosure on vulnerabilities.
We enjoy the aggregate benefits of a global community of Android developers and their world-class efforts to push the envelope with innovations. And, of course, we are investing heavily ourselves on PrivatOS and everything we dream it will become.
Some of these things aren’t ready yet, but remember — we only announced ourselves to the world this past January 15, and revealed the product on February 24. Think how far we’ve come in such a short time, and what might be around the corner — we’re pretty sure Blackberry’s already wondering about it. In the meantime, we’ll spend our time innovating and growing due to our adoption by carriers and Fortune 1000 customers (including 27 of the Fortune 50, plus 11 international governments) will continue, instead of slinging mud with our Canadian friends. We just felt that, in this instance, it was worth setting the record straight.
Regards,
Toby Weir-Jones
CEO, SGP Technologies
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El Blackphone incluye aplicaciones para encripciones de Silent Circle, conector propio de Virtual Private Networks (VPN), buscador anónimo con herramientas para navegación segura, computación en nube segura, analizador de Wi-Fi, servicio propio de acceso remoto y de borrado.
Algunos de los servicios mencionados son dados por servicios pagados, pero al comprar el Blackphone, vendrá incluido con licencia de 2 año para algunos de los servicios que son pagados y lo mejor de todo, SGP aseguró que las aplicaciones serán activamente actualizadas.
