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Last week just before the P2BK forum, I was surprised to receive 3 email spams. One for P2BK, and two others for elections. I am usually very careful where I put my email, so my best guess is one of the online sites in Kuwait I deal with is selling my email.

Today, I got this rudely and clearly email spam from 6alabt.com:

Clearly as the title says, United Networks ad coming from 6alabt.com. I usually wait to resolve the matter with the company, but this is outrageous and cannot be explained. Funny thing is I was standing at their booth last week discussing their business. They’re doing pretty good, making thousands of KD per month. But it seems nothing is good enough for them so they chose to make money out of our emails. My simple reply to them was “Why are you sending us spam email please?”

Well thanks a lot 6alabt. Now I’m neither ordering from you nor coming near United Networks. I think we should gather to build a list of Kuwait spammers to protect users from them.

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“There was a time when a pirate was free to make his own way in the world wide web. But our time is comin’ to an end”

I was thinking that online piracy is a non-stoppable act. Pirates are always few steps ahead of the law and content makers. Music and movie industries kept chasing those pirates for years, in court, and through Government legislation, trying to make the ISP responsible for the content it delivers. Nothing serious happened. Just last month however, I started hearing UK and some countries are seriously considering enforcing this police act on bits traveling through the ISP channels, Kuwait it self banned 20 Bittorrent sites, but that’s just Kuwait. Now Japan ISPs them selves are bowing to the increased pressure from movie and music industries, and will ban illegal file sharing users from the internet. Using special detection software, initial warning is sent to the file sharer first, followed by cut from internet after subsequent events, and then a permanent ban is put on that user from the internet. (Just hang me if that’s the case!).

The odd thing in the story is how the pressure made ISPs take the step, without Government law mandating it. Now I don’t think that this could stop pirates for good. This is never the case I believe. There is always Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and the secured BitTorrent file sharing, but that latter I assume takes much longer time and for some people would kill the use of it. But with the increased legislation happening at country level, and from UK and Japan, US are also under tremendous pressures, things will get more difficult by the time. Anyways, the news story about Japan on Techcrunch has gotten a number of comments I’ve never seen before, 1005 so far. Go check!

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First of all, this post is from Kuwaiti citizen, so please foreigns just keep a blind eye on the speeds, we’re paying a lot for them!

One of the things I noted when I upgraded to 512 kbps is I was able to watch YouTube videos without waiting. Downloading goes faster than playing, so you don’t get the annoying idle waiting time. Now is there a need for extra speed if you just like YouTube? For me there is more reasons than just that, but with YouTube testing new HD streaming, this extra bandwidth could sure come in handy. Why would I download few hundreds of MB just to watch a trailer, when I can just stream it on the fly? The link shows picture of the HD and normal streaming, and tips on how to stream using HD. In a nutshell, all you need to do is add a &fmt=6 to the end of the url, like this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0&fmt=6

Add the &fmt6 to the end of any video URL you like, and you may get the HD format. Then again, maybe not. It’s only testing.

By the way, Qnet is having special offer right now double speed for same price for 256 & 512 kbps valid until mid March. Could be the only good thing in Hala February. See if it fits you. And no, I wish I was getting paid to link it :)

Popularity: 45% [?]

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Again, I was trying out the list of 24 recommended meta-search engines, when I found out one of them, InCrawler, is blocked by our ISP Qualitynet. Now for those of you who may not know, a meta-search engine is a search engine that gets its search results from other multiple search engines, and combine them in a way for the end user. So they are basically a search engine, just like any other. You can search for bad offensive stuff there, or for technical or any other useful stuff. However thanks to Bojacob’s tip last time, I tried to query the site category online and it was marked as pornography. Why? I’m not so sure. Doing several searches, and looking at the main page, I could see Yahoo! main page more offending as they show some celebrity pics and stuff, when all this one does is:

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Dear Valued Customer,

As part of the ongoing developments and enhancements to the Internet services, we would like to inform you that we will be upgrading some major elements of the Internet platform. As a result, the DSL Internet services might not be available for short period on Sunday 30^th September 2007 between 3.30 a.m. through 6.30 a.m.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconveniences caused by this important outage and thank you for your understanding and support.

For further information, please do not hesitate to contact our 24 Hours call center on 804444.

Best regards,

Customer Services - Qualitynet

We really need more of that kind of service. Planned outage is a must. Transparency with the customer is nice and builds trust.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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According to an ISP insider, they were surprised MOC have stopped creating new accounts for Fiber Optics users and they were trying to find out why. Really depressing after everyone (even people who don’t have Fiber yet) was so happy that we finally might see an improvement. My best thought is MOC saw they are losing money or they want more money.

What else could be the problem? Unable to handle load? This is even worse! I will update the blog if I come to know of anything new.

Popularity: 47% [?]

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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One of the challenges we face in Kuwait is fast and stable internet access. It’s not easy to get, which is why I pay $55/month for 256 DSL connection. I heard the prices went a bit down now though. Now that I have moved to a new area, I still don’t have phone lines (Fiber optics is still future in Kuwait), I had no other option but to use one of the internet services provided telecom companies. For EDGE service with Excellent reported connection status and claimed 220 kbps, this is the PING reply I got last night:

Pinging google.com [64.233.167.99] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=2152ms TTL=236
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=3176ms TTL=236
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 2152ms, Maximum = 3176ms, Average = 2664ms

When was the last time you saw such ping reply time of 4 digits, and from whom? from Google! with 50% packet loss. All I hardly could do is open light text based pages, after long wait! The cost of this service is 14 KD (~=$48) and they intend to be DSL replacements. In a new area at the middle of the night, I don’t expect there should be that much high traffic affecting the network. I also tried the same connection in different areas at various times. My brother changes his mind when he saw it. He was about to grab one him self. So sad really. I can’t wait to get a phone line and enjoy my life again. For now, I have spare time for some quite book reading at late nights, but that still doesn’t bring full satisfaction.

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