Carnival clowns in Wolfach, Germany from German Wikipedia, by Eribula
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This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists introduced me to another interesting new mobile themed blog, Mobbu. First time host Rod McLaren did a super job of putting the Carnival together. There are a number of very interesting items in the Carnival this week.

I particularly want to point out one item in this Carnival that is a must read – Mihai Preda’s on Midlet Signing. Reading this was a real eye opener for me. Signing was developed for the noble purpose of protecting users from malicious software but it has become a real impediment to technical progress. The current situation requiring multiple costly certificates or in some cases mandatory and expensive testing means that individual developers, small startups and anyone writing free software has been priced out of access to the advanced features of current handsets. I’m really sorry to hear that my favorite phone manufacturer, Nokia seems to be leading the way in locking down of mobile Java on their phones. I think I’ll be switching to Motorola‘s – were at least you can turn off the signing requirements.