Saturday, August 23, 2008

When will people learn ?

Airtel (one of India's leading cell phone providers) has recently tied up with Apple to offer the iPhone 3G in Indian market. Everything is good but is the following sort of sales pitch necessary to sell of iPhones?? Airtel is quoted here as saying :

"even the most deadly hackers on the planet won't be able to crack the
codes that support the iPhone's Airtel applications with rival company
SIMs."

My question is : WHY ???. Even if you really have provided tamper-proof security, throwing a n open challenge to the highly skilled and distributed hacker work force on the internet is nothing short of the proverbial "hitting the axe on your own leg". Such stunts may be good to test your products before entering the market but not once the products are already out there. Such stupidity has surely attracted the bees and its just a matter of time before the bees sting.

2 comments:

Sagar Bhanagay said...

Highly immaturish, I would say! Getting out in the open like Goliath & beating the chest is gonna attract an army of David's with their staffs & slings!

One of the key lessons about security is to be mum about your abilities as well as short-comings & defects. Biggest of product-vendors do so. Lesser the attention, lesser the threat.

The Shaolin said...

This is the problem that arises when there is a disconnect between Engineering and Marketing teams!!! A classic example, I would say!
I bet when they read this, the engineering team must have run to hide under the tables: "It wasn't me" :D

I won't be surprised at all if hackers crack it THE FIRST DAY it hits our markets!