Backbytes: Fight! Fight! Fight!

Who's more secure, BlackBerry or Blackphone? There's only one way to find out...

Nowadays, there's only one reason why anyone could possibly want to venture into one of Britain's God-awful town centres on a Friday or Saturday night: to watch the inevitable catfights that break out after Kylie and Traycee have had a few Jagermeisters too many.

Today's entertainment, though, has been laid on by the senior executives at BlackBerry, once the king of smartphones, and SGP Technologies, maker of the Blackphone.

It all kicked off after BlackBerry's "content strategy marketing manager", Joe McGarvey, described the super-secure (and eye-wateringly expensive) Blackphone as only "purportedly secure", describing its security as merely "consumer grade".

It wouldn't, he continued, really protect all your valuable emails, selfies and wotnot from the NSA's all-consuming data Dyson.

Ooh, the bitch!

Rather than ignore the opinions of someone with a job title that was clearly missed in the last round of BlackBerry redundancies, Toby Weir-Jones, CEO of Blackphone maker SGP Technologies, slapped back.

"The world discovered in 2010 that RIM [BlackBerry] was willing to compromise its integrity if sufficient pressure was applied by governments intent on spying on the messages sent via the ubiquitous devices," wrote Weir-Jones, taking aiming at the crotch, metaphorically speaking.

He continued: "Various statements from the Saudi, UAE, Indian, and other telecom regulatory bodies all confirmed the same thing: RIM made it technically possible for the formerly-secret encrypted messages to be decrypted and viewed.

"Much speculation surrounds exactly what was done, and whether it remains in place today, but if anything there was more than one approach which achieved the same basic goal: a betrayal of the objectives of privacy," Weir-Jones caustically wrote.

After that pummeling, it remains to be seen whether McGarvey will fight back.

His ultimate boss John Chen, though, is unlikely to join the fray, although maybe McGarvey's given him some new ideas in any subsequent job culls at the Canadian smartphone maker...

@backbytes