Saudi to Impose BlackBerry Ban

Saudi Arabia are to restrict the use of BlackBerry Messenger from this Friday. The ban will remain in force until the country's mobile phone operators "fulfil the regulatory requirements it has requested", although the authorities haven't said what these requirements are. This comes as the United Arab Emirates also threatened to block some BlackBerry services on Sunday.

The two states are unhappy that they are unable to monitor communications over the BBM service as data is automatically sent via an encrypted connection to Research in Motion's (RIM) servers outside the countries' jurisdictions. RIM are the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone.

Lets hope the UK government don't follow suit; they'll find all the rubbish that I send very boring indeed!

JR