Blue Screen of Censorship for TECOM

The papers today are awash with stories related to telecoms: Emirates Toady headlines with a story about rumours of a third entrant into the retail market in the UAE. TRA denies all knowledge.

Gulf Snooze carries a couple of stories, one that says conventional telecoms companies need to embrace VOIP or die (I paraphrase). The other brings us the good news that du (the new telco, soon to start mobile operations) will be connecting TECOM to the proxy any day now and therefore that Media City's tagline 'Freedom to Create' becomes even more meaningless than it has been up till now. Interesting to note that du, the monopoly-breaker, will still have a monopoly within TECOM, Emaar and Nakheel properties. Du is 20% owned by TECOM Investments, who about a year ago took over SahmNet, Emaar's own telco. As TECOM is wholly-owned by Dubai Holdings (who also own propery developer Nakheel), they are given preference in supplying telecoms infrastructure to all new Nakheel developments.

Of course, it is not fresh news that the Broxy will be imposed on TECOM (collectively Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City and Knowledge Vamlet). But what is interesting is the disingenuous tosh used to justify it. Gulf News says:

Asked why users were not free to choose what sites they visit, Mohammad Al Ghanem, director general of the TRA, said the TRA was not out to "police" the citizenry of the UAE.

"We are not inventing a procedure or a process," he told Gulf News. "This is implemented in every single country but with different limits and different categorisations."

Mr Al Ghanem, that is not an answer...

Al Ghanem said the TRA desired to avoid any negative impacts on businesses residing within the free zones, and promised exemptions for companies with a legitimate interest in keeping unfettered internet access.

Breaking with the commonly perceived notion that the free zones had their own sets of telecommunications laws, [Mohammad Al Gaith, the TRA's manager for technical affairs] said the reason the free zones weren't previously covered under the filter was technical, not jurisdictional.

New telecom operator du provides Internet service in the free zones, and problems had arisen over implementing the proxy filter over du's network.

Mr Al Ghaith, I have been a tenant at Dubai Media City since shortly after its inception 6 years ago. I can tell you that the reason these free zones were not previously proxied was neither technical nor jurisdictional. It was a deliberate decision by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum who, in his wisdom, realised that these entities would not be very attractive to potential international clients if their Internet access was censored. That reason is still valid today

Can somebody please explain to me why the Telecoms Regulation Authority thinks it is fit to tell me, or any other Internet user, what sites we can and cannot visit? I know there is a cultural thing with the locals and some others, but surely if they want a restricted Internet then they can request and be given that. For everyone else, we pay more than twice as much for Internet access than anywhere else in the real world, and I think you, the TRA, should respect that and let us have (more or less) unfettered access.

I am sick to death of being treated like a child by these people. Apart from anything else, their obsessive, frequently unreasonable, often illogical blocking of millions of websites, including some of the world's most popular (Flickr again) makes me cringe with embarrassment. We are supposed to be the most free of all Gulf States, but we block Flickr because some wastafarian tells us to.

I despair. And my FTP and HTTPS are still not working.

*%#$ the Proxy

OK, Keefieboy, try to be calm. Don't bash those keys too hard, you'll be needing them when you leave this wonderful country. Deep breath
.................. innn....................... outttt
...................innn ....................... outtt.

OK. I'm calm. I'm CALM!!!

For the last week I have been having a problem with my Etisalat Al-Shamil ('broadband') connection from my mansion. The problem is that I can no longer use FTP. You don't want to know this, but FTP is File Transfer Protocol - a thing that allows you to upload and download files to and from web servers. It's pretty essential if you design websites like what I do. The problem is that I can connect to various servers, but once connected I cannot change folders or upload/download files. Why? Well, some of my research on the web suggested this was symptomatic of a firewall problem. Somewhere in the chain of computers between my labtob and the web server, a little pox is saying 'computer says no'.

So, with the greatest reluctance, I called the Itisalot Call Center in Ajmaaaaan. I say reluctance because many years of experience have taught me that they have a very limited range of responses available to them, namely:
1) 'Your computer is misconfigured, please format your hard drive.'
or
2) 'There is something wrong with your server.'

So we go through that and then I request a phone number for someone who actually knows something about the Itisalot Interweb network. No can do, says the boy on the phone: 'send an email to mailto:help@itisalot.ae. Yeah, right. So I did.

To my absolute and utter amazement I got a phone call from someone who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Admittedly he did go through the usual 'it's not our fault' routine, but I feel like we are making progress of a kind. But not fast enough.

In the intervening days I've provided this guy with Traceroutes of my connection attempts to various servers in the UK and US. I have suggested to him that it may be a firewall problem. I have told him that I can successfully use FTP from my office in Media City, so configuration of my laptop and of the servers concerned is absolutely ruled out. So now we are at a stage where they are on the verge of admitting that they have a problem, and he's trying to get a meeting together with various departments to sort it out.

Bravo!

The other day I realised that we (BetterArf and moi) have a related problem, and we've had this one for quite a while. We cannot easily access 'https://' domains from our house. This means that e-commerce transactions almost always fail, it takes forever for me to use Red Triangles' online banking, and BetterArf cannot access her work email from here.

So, enough of the Sherlock Holmes. I just thought I'd try something. Forget about Etisalat's restrictive and ill-configured infrastructure, I'll try my own. I have servers in the UK. I set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to one of them. This means that anything I send or receive comes straight from that server without any of the intervening Itisalot stuff getting in the way.

Bingo!

FTP worked straight off! And much faster than it's ever worked through the Broxy. But, the Interweb fell over. So it helps if I need to do an emergency out-of-hours upload, but not if I want to visit my bank or playboy.com.

Itisalot (sorry, Etisalat, you might not recognise our little jokey name for you), I hope you read and understand this post. It tells you two things

1) The Proxy screws everything up and everyone with more than half a brain hates it
and

2) Stop your Call Center staff from always assuming that the problem is at the customer's end. Because more often than not, it isn't.

One Point Four Billion Dirhams. Itisalot.

The lovely Etisalat have just announced a third quarter profit of Dhs 1.4 billion. This is an increase of 41% on the same period last year.

I thought we had laws against obscenity in this country.

Mobile Number Buggriation

Our belovéd Telecoms Regulation Authority has just announced that we have until December to sort out our mobile phone books. Currently, all mobile numbers in the UAE have the prefix '050'. If you are calling a mobile number from another local mobile, you can drop the prefix. But from December, that prefix must be dialled. Partly this is because Itisalot is running out of capacity on 050, and they are going to introduce 056 if they get any new subscribers. And of course, du will need a prefix of its own.

I met somebody who works for du the other day. The conversation went something like this:
du guy: Hi, my name is zzz and I work for du, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
me: So I'm hearing that du could use another year or two before they launch?
du guy: zzzzip.
me: ??
du guy:

Hmm. I actually sent an email to du at the end of September, explaining that I had been under the impression they would launch by the end of September and wondering what was actually happening. Sadly I have not had a reply yet. Neither has 7Days, who were getting themselves into a bit of a strop about it a while ago. Anyhoo, the current zeitgeist says they'll get something on the market by the end of this year. But really they'll need two or three years to get their act together. I'm disappointed by the current radio silence: they started off well, but have been completely absent recently. This does not inspire confidence.

Ho hum.

Etisalat's Annual Broadband Satisfaction Survey

No doubt you lucky lucky beoble who live in the UAE and are hostages of Etisalat will have been invited to do their annual 'Hostage Satisfaction Survey'. And you've probably thought 'I can't be bothered - the questions are always phrased so that whatever you say makes it look like you actually like Etisalat'. That's what I thought, but then I had a look at it and I have to say it's better than previous years; your options are no longer limited to a range of 'quite good' through to 'excellent', they now have a ten-point scale that goes from 'terrible' to 'outstanding' or words to that effect. And there are free-text boxes dotted around where you can write an essay telling them how great or how crap you think they are.

I was a bit stumped on the satisfaction rating for the proxy though: the question is 'How IMPORTANT the following network and other related aspects for an Internet service are to you?...Internet Filtering/ Content Blocking (feature by which the ISP blocks certain websites)' and the answer options go from 'not important at all' to 'extremely important' - it's very hard to answer that when what you want to say is '99% of censorship is immoral and a contravention of basic human rights so please go burn your damned proxy'.

And it was interesting to see a number of questions asking about the possibility that you may be thinking of switching to an alternative supplier.

Etisalat - this survey is a brave but hopelessly belated attempt at pretending that you give a damn what your hostages think. But you already know that you've lost the vast majority of your hostage base even before the new operator starts operations. You have acted as smug and callous monopolists for as long as I have lived in this country. You have bled us dry.

Customer Service, UAE Style

I went to perform my patriotic duty this morning by paying my monthly visit to the gatherer of taxes.

I went to pay my phone and Internet bills this morning. I was expecting great things of Etisalat, seeing as how just last week they won an award for Best Customer Service in the UAE. And it's Ramadan, so everyone should be super-nice.

There was a small huddle around one of the cash payment machines, but the other had no queue. I fiddled around with it for a bit, and soon discovered the reason for its queuelessness. It wasn't working. So I joined the huddle for the other machine, which had grown a little bit (the huddle, not the machine). I stood in the queue for ten minutes, during which time the person at the front looked like he was about halfway through the sheaf of bills he was inputting.

So I stomped off to the cashier's desk and was about fifth in line. The cashier finished with the person he was dealing with, and turned the next one away because she had fewer than six bills. Buggrit! I left that queue and rejoined the cash machine queue, which by now was simply enormous. I must have had steam coming out of my ears because a security guard came up to me and suggested I use the other other machine. It's outside, round the back of the building, in a little lobby. Great. I get there. It's outside, round the back of the building, in a little lobby, in pieces.

Back to the main building. I noticed that the cashier had no customers now, so I approached him with my feeble list of three accounts. 'Cash machine' he said. I pointed out that a) only one out of the three machines was working, and b) he was doing nothing. 'Go see manager' he said.

I went to see the manager, pointed out that he had a problem, and wondered if Etisalat didn't want my money. 'Of course we want your money!' he said, so I suggested he might want to find a way to make it possible for me to give it to them. He had a quick look at the mess in the main hall and told Abdullah to be a cashier for a bit.

Abdullah donned a cashier's hat and did the business. He had no change, of course, so I ended up giving Etisalat a bit more than I wanted to.

Hurry up du, we need you!

UAE Cyber Crimes Law

My thanks to Grapeshisha for posting an English translation of the UAE's new cyber crimes law. I hope and pray that it is a bad translation, because it talks about issues that are very far removed from 'cyber crime'. Anyhoo, I quite like this clause...

Article No.5 of the law reads anyone convicted of hampering, blocking or preventing the reach of service or logging onto computer programmes, or information sources with any possible means whether via the use of internet or any information technology mean, shall be punished with a jail term, or a fine, or both.

That's Etisalat in the slammer then.