[hzguo]

Hello!

I am a system administrator, been working with Linux and Unix for a while. Last year I got my Playbook and created my own VPN server to secure its Internet traffic. I found out today that the server also works with Blackberry Z10.

Although Blackberry Z10 does not use BIS, however it supports a number of VPN services. If you would like some extra security on your Internet traffic, with BB 10's awesome "auto-connect to VPN" feature, you can get several advantages of BIS (data compression & traffic encryption) by creating your own VPN server following this simple guide, all you need is some Linux system administration experience:

Howard's blog: Create a VPN server for Blackberry Playbook (or Blackberry 10) using StrongSwan

Hope this helps!

[Innovatology]

The overhead that the VPN tunnel and encryption adds will most likely outweigh any additional data compression it offers.

Besides, almost all internet protocols offer built-in data compression nowadays. BIS is no longer needed for compression. Http traffic is gzipped by the webserver and unzipped by the http stack. IMAP offers data compression. Images and multimedia streams have content-aware compression, which is much more effective than any general purpose compression can achieve.

The encryption argument is partially valid. It guarantees that all traffic is encrypted, not just https, but only as far as your VPN server. What happens between the VPN server and the final destination may still be unencrypted, leaving you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and snooping. An important rule of thumb in these matters is: a false sense of security is worse than no security.

[hzguo]

The overhead that the VPN tunnel and encryption adds will most likely outweigh any additional data compression it offers.

Besides, almost all internet protocols offer built-in data compression nowadays. BIS is no longer needed for compression. Http traffic is gzipped by the webserver and unzipped by the http stack. IMAP offers data compression. Images and multimedia streams have content-aware compression, which is much more effective than any general purpose compression can achieve.

The encryption argument is partially valid. It guarantees that all traffic is encrypted, not just https, but only as far as your VPN server. What happens between the VPN server and the final destination may still be unencrypted, leaving you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and snooping. An important rule of thumb in these matters is: a false sense of security is worse than no security.

My only complain about BIS is that I live in Australia and BIS servers are all in Canada, thus leaving me with huge latency in HTTP/HTTPS transmission over mobile data.

Having a VPN tunnel to a major data centre makes me feeling more comfortable when using public WIFIs, Blackberry Z10 makes it even easier by having this auto-connection feature. By the way I don't think BIS is any more secure compare to your own VPN tunnel