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Interesting spin...

Jeff Dickey 7th Sep 2008

If you only browse the headline, you'll come away with
ZDNet screaming "iPhone can be abused by hax0rs!
(Implicitly,) Windows Mobile is the safe choice!"

Reading what the article actually says, and the expert
quote included, leads to a somewhat different view. "It's a
bit like the BlackBerrys", he says. His point clearly was "the
shift away from PCs towards mobile devices" entails risks
and difficulties so long as new devices appear in the
marketplace before forensics tools support that new
device.

This really isn't a failure of any technology, and certainly
not iPhone-specific. Rather, it's a political/regulatory
issue, and is best addressed at that level. Governments
which place substantial priority on being able to access
data in these devices, for law-enforcement or other
purposes, will eventually fine-tune their
approval/certification process so that these concerns are
addressed (and ideally well-publicized).

Several security-aware iPhone enthusiasts here (Singapore)
have blogged about speculation that the lack of such tools
was one reason the iPhone 1.0 was not (officially) offered
for sale here. When a government can decide which Web
sites its subjects may lawfully view or what news they may
lawfully read, allowing a sure-to-be-popular device that
can't be mind-raped at will is highly inconsistent.