steel-wool panty liners = Java?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| John Chambers wrote, On 08/04/2004 06:16 PM:
| > Yes,  the  device  has a full-time Internet connection, anywhere that
| > there's GPRS or GSM service.  But you can't install software over the
| > Net,  like  java  was  designed  to do.  So far, I've found that most
| > installs take several tries, as the Windows code either crashes, goes
| > zombie, or gives insane failure messages, different every time.
|
| Yes.  Can you imagine how quickly a virus would be able to spread if it
| were that easy to install new executable code on one of these things?=20
| It'd be almost as bad as Windows itself!  (Worse?)  I'll bet the
| engineers that designed the system discussed the topic at length, and
| determined that it would be much safer to require the user to install
| new software from their computer (rather than having it sent via GPRS /
| GSM).  It would also be much less of a support nightmare for them this
| way -- and in a business like handhelds, I'm sure that matters quite a
| bit.

As I remember the descriptions of the java download scheme  (from  15
or  more  years  ago  so  it's a bit fuzzy), the idea was that a java
installation would  be  given  a  short  list  of  network  addresses
(probably  URLs now), and would only download from them.  There was a
java-server protocol involved, of course, so a java app would  ignore
a  server  that  didn't  speak the right protocol.  There's still the
possibility of hijacked IP addresses, I suppose, but  how  often  has
that  happened  in the real world?  You'd have to have a lot of ducks
lined up perfectly to pull it off.  And in most cases, only a  server
on a local network would be used.

Java does routinely load .class files from your  $CLASSPATH  list  of
directories.   I'd think that it wouldn't be difficult at all to make
it also understand URLs, so you could download .class  files  from  a
short  list  of  machines on the net.  I haven't read of anyone doing
this, but how hard can it be?  In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised
if someone replied with a list of javas that can do it.

It seems a bit odd that RIM hasn't done this with BlackBerries.  They
could add a bit of secret handshaking of their own if they liked, for
a bit of added security through obscurity.  It  wouldn't  be  totally
secure,  but it'd be a lot more secure than SMB, and look at how many
people use that (and expose  all  their  files  to  the  Net  without
knowing  what they're doing).  Then they wouldn't need Windows or any
other intermediary machine for BBs that have Internet access.

Maybe I should offer my programming services to RIM?

Or maybe I should first try to get more familiar with  their  current
software  development  scheme.  I could use it to add a "netio" class
that extends the basic IO in the obvious way.

I've done this sort of thing on a number of previous  projects;  just
not in java.