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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Friday, August 30, 2002Krzysztof Kowalczyk: MMS Will Fail
Do we really need reports to state the obvious? Short summary: MMS will fail. [...]
Here's why it won't work. If people wanted to send you sounds wouldn't they just call you instead of sending a message? And where will they get those sounds and images in the first place? Built-in cameras are just a novelty. The quality is terrible, it will never match even the simplest digital cameras. This thing will wear thinly very fast.
I also believe that MMS will not be a great success for the carriers, but I do think that phone cameras will prove to be more than just a novelty.
Consider last month's Bye bye digital cameras?, which projects 14 million phone cameras sold worldwide in 2002 and 147 million in 2007 (vs 22 and 95 million digital cameras). Ray Ozzie recently wrote about how a tiny digital camera leads to more ad-hoc picture taking. Dan Bricklin has a series of writings about Web Photo Journals in which he advocates the use of tightly-cropped and reduced images.
Cellular phones are ubiquitous and unobtrusive. Phone cameras will allow people to record impromptu moments where they might not have thought to carry a traditional camera, or it's use might have "spoiled the moment."
Call Him Paranoid
We had discussion yesterday re Instant Messaging. A lawyer has indicated that he likes to use IM while on a conference call. Sidebar conversations mostly. This sounds great, but does he understand the security risks he's exposed to? I think not.
My impression is that most of the legal staff is treating e-mail and IM as if it were sealed mail. [...]
The pervasiveness of IM ought to scare the crap out of any organization with secrets to protect, the popular IM services are completely insecure. The use of secure and auditable IM systems (ie: Jabber) face heavy resistance from users: client software is often less mature, network effect, user intertia, etc. Users will ignore IM mandates that aren't backed up with technical measures that prevent the use of non-approved IM systems.
E-mail encryption has hurdles of it's own (NFN: E-mail Encryption: Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?). S/MIME is natively supported by most popular e-mail clients but requires an investment in certificate infrastructure. PGP doesn't require much infrastructure but suffers from poor client integration. Neither technology is likely to be widely adopted by a company's external contacts.
Teaching the appropriate use of e-mail encryption is also an issue. I recently saw an example of why you shouldn't sign/encrypt all e-mail, but I can't find the reference now. The jist of it was that simple messages lacking context ("Approved, do it.") could be used as a sort of Social Replay Attack. The message had a valid signature... I'm not aware of any e-mail products that use PGP or S/MIME to validate and protect the headers of a message, except to confirm the sender's e-mail address.
