RIM, Government Stalemate Continues, RIM Wants 2 More Years to Figure Solution

If you smell something burning, it’s probably RIM squirming a bit in complicated stew. As popular as the Canadian company may be right now in the country with the younger and more corporate segment, they’re at serious loggerheads with the Indian government. The situation has recently taken on a new turn. According to the Economic Times’ latest report, the secure phone maker has now requested that the Indian government give them till the end of January… 2013, to find a work around for the whole encryption key, corporate email security scenario. They were given till the end of this January i.e. 2011 to come up with the solution or face a ban of service.

Government says, we’re coming for you RIM, your days are numbered

RIM has also requested that should the government decide to give them this “grace period”, their services will proceed normally. The same report also mentioned that RIM is working on a manual option with which the government would be able to tap into RIM’s BBM service. A more automated option is expected by January 31st 2011. While some solutions were apparently working out, a few wrinkles like accessing certain files types are still being ironed out. RIM is still standing firm about the data being ‘in-accessible’ even to them. they claim that since they are not storing any of the data sent through their system but simply ‘routing’ it, no actual decryption occurred at the routers end. So emails etc. sent across were not decrypted since the keys are located only with individual users.

The fight is not going well for RIM as the various government bodies assigned to this case are not backing down just yet. The deadline of January 31st 2011 still stands and is looming over the Canadian company. It’s turning out to be a ‘Do or die’ situation more than a ‘Shape up or Ship out’ scenario.

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