The flaw, named “Curse of Silence” was demonstrated on Nokia’s Series60 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition phones (FP1 included).  It worked this way: People sent a carefully and very very painstakingly typed series of messages to an E-Series / N-Series phone.  And voila, the affected device would stop communicating  with the outside world using SMS.  You could only make / receive voice calls.  And the only known way out for this hack was to hard reset the phone.

What happened as a result of this was the noise in the Nokia forums, which obviously happens…  And then, F-Secure chose to act.  They released a patch for the flaw saying that they could protect the devices if users agreed to shell out 60$ USD for it.  Crazy!

And then the noise level in the forums grew even further, and people started to blast Nokia for making such a mistake in their production devices and then Nokia chose to act.  They just released a free application download which would clean up your phone if your device is infected. And keep you secure.  This also probably answers the various firmware upgrades Nokia has been pushing out for most of its models lately.

What I particularly wanted to point out with this post are the following:

1. The fact that Nokia actually listens to its users.  The security flaw is not major.  If you take a look at the video from the link posted above, it shows how strenuous it is to actually hack into the system.
2. People will always complain.  Listening to the complaints and having to put up with all that noise AND take what is important for both an organization and its customers (loyal and otherwise) is real mastery!
3. It shows one straight thing from the management perspective: You may have the first mover advantage for a situation.  But, when the playground is not yours, you dont get to play according to your rules. F – Secure!
4. F-Secure sucks!!! Nokia needs to stop teaming up with F-Secure and stop listing them in their Download! application.
5. Nokia rocks!
6. Nokia rocks! and, lastly
7. Nokia rocks!!!

So yeah, all is well in the Nokia and Symbian and Smartphones world!   You can continue to send out confidential mail, love-ka-mail and all other sorts of yeee-mail… and listen to “?? ?????? ?? ???? ???…” or any other song of your choice on your cool Nokia phone while getting traffucked in any city that you are in.

But do remember, you do need to periodically backup your phone.  There is the software part that Nokia and its team of hard-working, dedicated, engineers can take care of… And there’s the “idiot using the box” that you can choose / not choose to be.

And, in other unrelated news, Apple’s multitouch patent got through…  I feel really sorry for the Palm-Pre!!! They need some really awesome magic from the Harry Potter world to rewire the stuff!

Last, but definitely not the least, thanks to Ricky Cadden of SymbianGuru for the update / info.

There! Another lovely blog post done!