BlackBerry Messenger first to go

Saudi Arabia's telecoms watchdog has called on telecoms firms in the country to block the Messenger function on BlackBerry handsets from Friday, reports The BBC.

The watchdog said the ban would last until the state's three mobile phone operators "fulfil the regulatory requirements it has requested".

But the Communications and Information Technology Commission did not reveal what these requirements were.

Researchers say they have devised a foolproof way to encrypt messages that can be unlocked only by a recipient physically located in a specific place, solving a problem that has vexed cryptographers for years, says The Register.

The technique for position-based quantum cryptography is scheduled to be presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, in October. It makes it theoretically possible for people to securely encrypt and decrypt messages without the use of pre-shared keys.

Instead, the messages would be encrypted using keys based on a recipient's physical presence at a secure facility.

The jailbreak for the iPhone released over the weekend may have exposed a flaw in the iPhone's mobile Safari browser, reveals News.com.com.

Unlike previous jailbreaks, which required the iPhone to be connected to a computer to run the software update, the latest jailbreak, posted by the iPhone Dev Team at Jailbreakme.com, is accomplished via the Safari browser loaded on the device.

But the fact that it can be performed just through Safari, and the way it's done, points to a larger problem. It means potentially anyone could control your iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) just by visiting a certain Web page. A site can present the exploit as a simple PDF link, which requires no explicit user action short of clicking a link. It can then launch an exploit that takes advantage of the way the PDF viewer loads fonts.

Demand for Linux programming skills has exceeded that for Unix programming skills for the first time ever, according to Richard Nott, director of recruitment site CWJobs.co.uk, writes Computing.co.uk.

Possible reasons for this include the fact that more mobile platforms are supported by Linux, as are HD boxes, Nott said. In addition, the increasingly popular open source operating system Ubuntu also runs on Linux.

Aside from Linux and Unix skills, those most in most demand include SQL, Java, C, C#, .NET, SQL Server and ASP.