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Posts: 2,102 | Thanked: 1,309 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#26
Yes, the mobile phone side of their operations is probably quite different. I don't use a Symbian phone so I don't know anything about that, but I can understand at least one reason why they'd want to limit what can be run, and that's abuse of a given provider's network.
I've heard this argument, and for the life of me, I can't understand what this argument means? How can you 'abuse' a provider's network?

Is it using too much bandwidth? Well, all ISP's can limit this in any economic or technical sense they want. Let them offer limited and/or unlimited packages at their discretion? What's the big deal? Land ISP's have been doing this since the beginning of the internet.

Is it the fear of screwing up the cell voice calls? I can possibly see this, but I would imagine if one wanted to do that, the technologies and radio's are already out there. And assuming it is true, leave the voice processing locked/hidden, but there is zero reason not to leave the Internet Protocol traffic completely open.
I think it's certainly the latter case, screwing up the network by interfering with the underlying protocols, etc. Yes, I'm sure it's possible to get tools and radios to do this is you really want to, but if a virus could be crafted to do this on every Symbian handset then you'd have a far larger problem (more widespread, next to no cost involved other than time).

It really depends on how much of a black-box the radio is; with OpenMoko it's completely closed and the interface is by sending AT commands over a serial connection. This is pretty much the same as plugging a mobile phone into your PC. If you could manipulate the radio at a low level you could start sending out spurious ID data, using more than your allocated time slice, etc. Lots of things that might "annoy" the provider.