The objective of the Canadian TSB is to analyze the evidence and come up with findings. They are well known and well respected within the accident investigation community and there is frequently significant cooperation between the NTSB and the Canadian TSB.

Any time a Canadian registered, designed or manufactured aircraft goes down in the USA it will be the Canadian TSB involved in the investigation. The converse is also true within Canada. I think if you look up annex 13 you'll find a complete section of the Chicago Convention that deals with this.

There really are no Canadian law implications with this investigation as it is a technical investigation done by engineers, not lawyers.

Reading posts you can generally tell what product each poster owns. Point for point the Blackberries match up with the requirements. Despite personal biases they have the goods and plenty of market experience doing so.

Put another way you're asking for a bread slicer. Instead of buying the industry standard machine that slices bread you have all sorts of proposals for trying to make ninja swords do the job instead. Hey, the sword will be a lot more flashy. At the end of the day security and business focus the only real bread slicer available is the blackberry. This has been their focus from day one. Not entertainment, not the latest greatest games, plain simple secure business apps. Ask the majority of law firms, accounting firms, security firms, police forces, military and government users. Alas, they are not using android or i-ninja-swords to slice the bread. Plain simple non-nonsense BES and Blackberries.

There is also no reason why the Android couldn't do the same. Lawyers don't care about whether it would have been possible for some company to modify their product to meet the requirements of a contract - they care what was done.

RIM designed their infrastructure and device from the ground up to be secure and there is a reason why nearly all the law firms, government contractors and big business uses their devices. Apple designed their iPhone around the best user experience - 2 different objectives and this explains why they've had great success with the home type users.

The problem with this is that it's media-driven. You can't compare reliability on a vehicle until you've had 1,000,000 on the road for 5 years. You are correct that Ford has done some catchup over the last 10 years but talk to anyone in the industry and they will tell you that the money is all made repairing domestics. Their engineering strategy of cheaper cheaper cheaper means a constant supply of work for us mechanics. I love domestics because I can make a lot of $$$ off them.

Walk into your local police station, law firm, government office you don't see the business people carrying around iPhone or Android. For security sensitive applications they are almost exclusively blackberries. This comes at a cost, sluggish phones and more potential for outages as they all rely on the encrypted infrastructure. It says something when middle eastern countries want to ban the phones because their intel communities can't get into them.

So while the common user may try to measure the success or failure of RIM in the home market they are still quite strong in the business world.

I'd suggest much of the problem lies in the mail providers being unwilling to or unable to use measures to stop spam.

I own a small webmail company (fastworks.com) and we routinely get spammed. There are a number of methods people use and a number of ways to combat them.

Spammers will go out and get a dialup account, start spamming after the ISP's abuse department has gone home (usually a Friday night) and continue until someone finally pulls the plug.

These spammers will either send the spam by connecting directly to the victim's SMTP server or by using a 3rd party relay.

We combat this by subscribing to the RSS, RBL and DUP services at mail-abuse.net.

Mail sent via a dialup connection is often denied at the outset because many dialup connections are in the DUL. Open relays are often in RBL and RSS.

These two measures alone cut out more than 80% of our incoming spam.

Another popular way (among spammers) is to try the brute force method. They connect to a service with a few million subscribers and blast away with a dictionary-type attack. This usually causes the most problems on a network side because the victim mail server has to contend with 100,000 plus bounces in a few hours. This tends to fill mail queues quite fast.

Some of the most popular mail systems (which shall remain nameless) combat this problem by not bouncing after a threshold has been reached. This, although a simple method still allows the spam to get through.

I refuse to believe that I'm any smarter (maybe faster, but not smarter) than the folks running yahoomail and hotmail, but it makes a lot more sense to me to have the delivery agent blackhole (delete) this spam as it arrives based on the source IP, email address and even the content. It doesn't take much logic to detect a host that sends you 100,000 messages in an hour where 90% of them bounce.

This cuts out 99.9% of bruteforce spam. It saves us on disk space since the spam is never delivered, and it saves on CPU cycles since the SPAM lands in /dev/null as soon as it is received rather than bouncing all over kingdom come.

I believe a very effective way to stop spam is to regulate that each ISP must specify valid SMTP servers much in the same way there is a whois database with all the DNS servers listed. If we do this, then organisations can easily choose to deny all messages coming from dialup connections and it leaves spammers with only one method of sending spam. They would have to use their local ISP's SMTP relay to get their spam out. This would be trivial for the ISP to find and shut down. It would also bring stronger incentives to monitor and stop such activity if their own SMTP servers were being hit.

Now if only we can stop ICQ spam...

-Michael