The blogosphere is buzzing with a hot subject: a worm attacking Symbian smartphones. The creature has a name too, not a latin one as the living worms but a rather techie one: Trojan:SymbOS/Yxe.A. Or, among its friends, "Sexy view".

You can read Gabor Torok's analysis of the incident at Mobile worm, Yxes.A - an analysis but in this post I want to challenge you with a more hands-on task: how to protect yourself from this worm?

We all know (I hope) the good old security advices published by Nokia at http://europe.nokia.com/get-support-and-software/learn-how/security/your-device:

• Exercise caution when accepting applications sent via Bluetooth or opening MMS attachments as they may include software harmful to your phone or PC.
• Do not approve or download content to a mobile device from an unknown or unreliable source.
• In general, keep your Bluetooth connection on hidden mode unless you specifically need to be visible to others.

For the sake of this post however, let's pretend that we want to ignore these advices and instead ensure that we can install any sis file that finds its way to our devices ... except this virus, of course.

So, given that the info we have about the virus is whatever we can find from this picture from F-Secure's blog,

the requirement is to design a component that blocks the installation of the worm without affecting any other application. If multiple solutions are proposed the winner will be the one with the simplest design and less Platform Security capabilities requirements. Only public APIs can be used for creating the solution.

Do you have the answer? Post it here or, if it has any attachments, send it to ltomuta@ovi.com

Fine print:
Since the task is trivial there will be no prize in this challenge, except of course for the antivirus protection you will implement for yourself :)

The Forum Nokia site and the Discussion Boards are frequently bombarded with one simple question: Where can I find the registration key (serial number) for Carbide.ui Theme Edition?

This post is yet another attempt to help themes designers get past this problem and hopefully, with the help of Google's search engine, the videos provided here will be the final answer to this apparenly really complicated issue :) 

1. Carbide.ui Theme Edition - online registration
   

    

   
   

    

Carbide.ui Theme Edition - offline registration


 




 

A few more things to be noted:

• Carbide.ui Theme Edition is the IDE to be used for creating themes for Nokia phones, be they from the S60 or Series 40 product ranges.
• The same registration technology is used by Nokia Series 40 Theme Studio 2.2 and it does work just the same. However, the tool is old and deprecated and Carbide.ui should be used if at all possible.
• Don't post here requests for the even older Nokia Series 40 Theme Studio 1.2 and its serial number. If the registration wizard does not work anymore for that tool then there is nothing I can help with ...

And, as a final comment, this is not a totally useless post for C++ and Java developers either as the S60 emulator uses an identical registration procedure :)