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RIM ruling risks US Blackberry shutdown; 419 scams; and How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking – see full post for details

Yahoo is reporting that RIM ruling risks US Blackberry shutdown. RIM lost its motion to have the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit stay an injunction halting the sale of BlackBerries and shutting down the existing service pending the US Supreme Court’s hearing of its cert petition. A very odd ruling, given that the injunction had been stayed since 2003 as the case wended its way through the courts; it would be hard to find a better example of irreparable injury than such an injunction pendente lite, particularly if RIM wins on appeal.

The LA Times has an insightful piece on 419 scams. Two quotes of note are: that the Nigerian scammers “‘have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There’s this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way.'”; and “Kovacsics said victims can’t believe that a scammer would spend months of internet chat just to net $700 or $1,000, not realizing that is big money in Nigeria and fraudsters will have many scams running at the same time.”

The Register has a story titled How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking. If fully accurate, it’s quite scary; a mixture of technical failure in the way PINs were set up and use of the ATMs monitored, plus an allegation that “at that time the computing department of one of the banks issuing ATM cards had ‘gone rogue’, cracking PINs and taking money from customers’ accounts with abandon”.