UAE Says RIM Played Ball, Will Maintain Service 41
cgriffin21 writes "The United Arab Emirates will not suspend services on BlackBerry smartphones next week, following an agreement reached with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion that is said to comply with UAE policy. It'll be a relief for the roughly 500,000 BlackBerry users in the UAE, a turnaround on the planned Oct. 11 service suspension. In a brief statement, the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said that BlackBerry services 'are now compliant with the UAE's telecommunications regulatory framework.'"
The Guardian's coverage quotes an anonymous UAE university professor, who said, "The general opinion amongst the business expat community, westerners at least, has been for some time now that [the ban] wasn't going to happen. Call it a failure of imagination on their part, but no one could conceive of how the country could do something so counterproductive to the image they are trying to present primarily to the west. Was it posturing? To some extent."
Re:How does this affect visitors? (Score:2, Informative)
Your email will still be encrypted by your corporate's key (not even RIM can decipher it). Your internet access, though, will have to be decrypted at the RIM servers (in this case RIM UAE servers) and the local govt (whether its US or UAE) will have access to it.