Official Nokia Curse Cleaner

We've no hope of a firmware update to permanently protect us against this because Nokia are not even listing the phone on their device update pages despite listing the other Nxx 8GB phones.

Yes you can get latest release details if you have your device code, but it's a v11 firmware that's not been updated for nearly a year.

For a 'phone which hit the streets just over a year ago it's pretty pathetic not to release a fix, but hey, Nokias lack of support for it is one of the reasons I'm going to replace it with a non-Nokia phone and will probably not buy another Nokia for a few years.

@Al: you err..... don't say which phone you're talking about...... I'm guessing the N95 8GB North American version though?

I'd put it in the Title field which doesn't get shown in the article 😞

It's the N81 8GB. The N95 8GB makes Nokias list, the N81 8GB seems to be the unloved ugly now-orphaned child.... 😞

I still don't like hearing these messages described as "malformed". They are perfectly valid messages that are mishandled by malformed (bugged!) firmware.

I'm glad to see that Nokia has an official cleaner released, though (I previously posted about a free 3rd-party tool that had been released shortly after your initial article).

The networks shouldn't have to take filtering action like this, but it's good that they did.

Your smugness is totally misplaced, Litchfield. A few of my friends and I have actually been hit by the curse, probably by someone who got our numbers from a different person in school. Which networks are you speaking of, Litchfield? I can tell you for a fact that Three and T-Mobile have done nothing to block these messages which you call 'malformed'.

Hardly smugness. Simply saying that your anecdotal evidence is the first I've heard in a community that is almost 200 million users strong. No doubt there *are* a few instances of these schoolboy-nuisance cases, but it's simply not a problem for the vast, vast majority. There are too many factors stacked against this ever being a problem in the future, too.

I do sympathise that pranksters at school wasted their own hard-earned(!) pocket money sending malformed messages just to annoy you. Idiots. If you're worried about them doing it again, keep a copy of the SIS file for this on your memory card and reinstall it etc. Also, make sure you have latest firmware, a lot of phones are now immune to the messages.

And yes, they are 'malformed', since SMS messages should surely not be 'delivered by email' in the real world. Sloppy programming all round to even allow this as an option.

One does have to wonder how so many blogs & news sites got so excited about the "Curse of silence" on the day it was announced. I am a little doubtful that the writers were all in Berlin for New Year, and that they all understand German so well.

Nevertheless I disagree with your characterisation of the messages as 'malformed. There is a specific GSM standard for forwarding emails over SMS and the messages all comply with this. Clearly not a popular feature though, otherwise the bug would have been found before.

A stick to beat Nokia with. A very tiny stick, but one that those with an axe to grind are quick to pick up. You can completely ignore this one, do nothing. Nothing will happen. Some will make up fake stories to back up their flimsy rants, but nothing will happen.

tonyn wrote:Nevertheless I disagree with your characterisation of the messages as 'malformed. There is a specific GSM standard for forwarding emails over SMS and the messages all comply with this. Clearly not a popular feature though, otherwise the bug would have been found before.

Glad it's not just me!

For reference, Steve, they are 3GPP specifications.

3GPP TS 23.040 lists the standard protocol IDs and 3GPP TS 27.005 describes how the protocol ID can be set for messaging.