This may seem like something we can all agree on. But technology has made this an ideal that is increasingly hard to obtain. And it slips further away from us with each second.
We don’t have a moment to lose.
That’s why Silent Circle and Geeksphone started the blackphone project. We want to put you back in control of your data. And with that, we’re proud to announce the release of an updated version of PrivatOS, coming to your blackphone this week. Continue reading…
Blackphone’s introduction into the global market over the past 90 days has been exhilarating. My responsibilities as EVP of International sales includes building the Blackphone distribution ecosystem. This has meant traveling across the globe meeting with global and regional distribution partners, carriers and enterprises. Without exception the reception to what Blackphone represents and offers has been embraced wholeheartedly.
We’re continuing to enroll global and regional carrier partners as well as global distribution partners with mature supply chain infrastructures. As we launch Blackphone with carriers in Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Asia, supporting these launches the distribution supply chain is vital to our success.
Today we moved another step towards building a strong relationship with the security researcher community by announcing our bug bounty program. The bug bounty program also serves to provide transparency with industry so that everyone knows precisely how many vulnerabilities have been discovered and by who. To us, the who is just as important as the vulnerability itself, because we wish to reward those who are assisting us with our mission of continuing to provide the most secure and private smartphone in industry. We know this program can only be successful if we continue to build a strong relationship with the security researcher community.
We’ve written at some length about our commitment to the principles of responsible disclosure, transparency, and integrity in our products and publishing. We’ve released kernel source code to github, we’ve owned up to vulnerabilities and remediations from outside researchers, and we’ve taken it on the chin from critics who believe BP1 should have been perfect from Day 1.
That’s all fine, but we also know that — for now at least — we are a specialty product. Much as I would like to have hundreds of millions of Blackphone users today, the simple truth is we’re not that big yet. We started shipping June 30, and while the growth we’re tracking internally is indeed significant, the practical reality is that we’re not yet shipping tens of millions of devices.
We are thrilled to announce that BP1 has been officially certified by Good Technology to run Good for Enterprise (GFE). Good is the first Enterprise Mobile Management provider to add BP1 to their approved list, and of course it opens us up for support and deployment within Good’s many enterprise customers, no matter how big or small. We encourage all of you to check out how GFE helps manage company policies within complex, mixed-platform mobile work environments. It works with BYOD or employer-issued devices, and there is no additional cost to support BP1 when an existing Good license is active.
Welcome to our new blog!
It’s been a busy few weeks at Blackphone. We shipped the pre-ordered Euro-model phones on June 30, and the North American ones at the end of July. We re-opened our online store on July 14 and within the first week we had sold more phones than had been pre-ordered during the six-week window from February 24 to April 8. While there was an expected spike in demand at first, we’re much happier to note that the pace of orders has settled into a consistent and steady rate. We continue to work with our key carrier partners, distributors and retail stores to make Blackphone available in your neighborhood around the world. So that’s all good news.
As I mentioned in my earlier post — we took on the challenge of building a secure and private smartphone system. @TeamAndIRC threw a proverbial jab to the jaw, and well, our jaw is not made of glass. Kudos to @TeamAndIRC for explaining the exploit. No hard feelings — things get fixed by being found.
Now to address the release of the vulnerabilities disclosed at #Def Con by @TeamAndIRC: Continue reading…
Greetings from Def Con! Thus far Team Blackphone has been having a very positive Con. We have been receiving a lot of positive feedback and praise for taking on the flag of building and maintaining a secure and private smartphone system. This was a challenge that we knew full well would not be easy, but if it were easy then anyone could do it.
The researcher @TeamAndIRC was a little miffed at our initial response to his inquiry and I understand his point. In response, he had a t-shirt made that stated he rooted the Blackphone at Def Con. The ironic part to this is I would have absolutely gone over and made that t-shirt for him myself once the full vulnerability was explained. @TeamAndIRC and I had a chat here at Def Con. I would like to thank him for not blowing the issue out of proportion and going back to the twittersphere for a little more transparency by explaining that direct user interaction is required and that we had already patched one of the vulnerabilities through the OTA update.
Recently some of you may have noticed that BlackBerry turned their attention to us. The basis was that our friends in Canada made various claims about Blackphone and suggested their closed end-to-end solution was the only way to ensure adequate “corporate” security. Therefore, they claimed, our inaugural launch product which started shipping on June 30 wasn’t competitive with their complete infrastructure which resulted from 15+ years of R&D. Our response was that there is more than one way to solve this kind of problem.
I remember the last time I used a Blackberry device which was the Blackberry Storm. I left for the iPhone and the one thing I remember missing most at that time was BB Messenger. IMHO BB Messenger is one of the most popular Blackberry products supporting text messaging, plus video and VOIP calling, between BlackBerry, Apple, and Android devices. These messages are routed through a BlackBerry server farm before being delivered to the intended recipient and, for an extra fee, you can upgrade to “BBM Protected” which adds “enterprise grade encryption to the already secure BBM service”, according to this: http://us.blackberry.com/business/products-services/e-bbm.html
I was hoping for a much more interesting initial post here at Blackphone, but circumstances dictate a little more formality. We recently released our first update to PrivatOS with version 1.0.1. In publishing our release we made a few faux pas:
If we met at #HopeX and had any brief discussion RE: security/privacy posture at Blackphone, then we indubitably discussed that I will be very transparent about security and privacy of Blackphone and PrivatOS; and that my team would respond directly. Well, I am on week number three and still in the process of…well everything. But, I am responding as promised.