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The Ministry of Communications (MOC) is the central authority in Kuwait for internet and phone, which includes ISPs, phone lines, and mobile operators. Such a big responsibility that can take the country both ways. And unfortunately, the way they’re doing it can only take us backward I am afraid. MOC is known to be trying to commercialize everything, that they are banning the VoIP as an evil technology, and wants us instead to stick to regular international calls, that cost around $20 for 10 minutes (including the dialing and waiting time!), and I’ve tried some international call cards that don’t even work.

Below is a quick summit of things MOC is doing, and not doing!:

• MOC Taking on VoIP: Purely because it’s affecting the international calls income as they state it. The only way to allow it is if ISPs arrange for a solution on commission basis, i.e., they control the price, and take part of the money! I can only guess how competitive that can be.
• After years and years of hearing about the Fiber Optics. It’s being layed down, installed, soon we will have it. News last year spread fast about activating and giving Fiber Optics accounts for users in South Surra. This didn’t even last for 2 days before MOC stopped giving new accounts. I didn’t follow up really what happened then, but some people tell me know the ministry stopped installing new fibers for one reason or another.
• Audit Bureau blows up 140 million KD  ($526.5 m) of pending money collections from the MOC side. So if you’re so much after our VoIP money, why didn’t you do something about this? Ohh, probably this is all because of us geeks. MOC was busy fighting VoIP, bloggers, and other sort of evil stuff that they forgot about their 140 million KDs! But did they stand still when they heard the news?
• MOC started disconnecting phone lines without any prior notice, with the excuse of system failure or miscommunication between departments in the ministry of COMMUNICATIONS! The same news story tells how even people who paid their bills are not getting the service back yet! So you’re ready to disconnect now and collect the bills, but you don’t know how to turn it back on?
• MOC is taking legal action now to recover the slept over 140 million KDs.

God bless MOC.

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So yesterday was the end of the Premier League season, one of the toughest soccer leagues in the world, and my favorite when I want to watch some soccer. I was shocked not to see any news about the match today in Al-Jarida newspaper, I checked it 3 times and even did a search online. The first thing that accured to me is maybe the game was late, but no. It was only 7 PM when the match finished. They had news about Italian League, which was only 1 hour before. Heck, they even had news about the Turkish league. Both Al-Watan and Al-Qabas had the news covered in details.

I’m not a big sporting fan, and I don’t watch more than a handful of matches per year. My post here is not just to fill in empty pages, and neither it is coming from an obsessed Manchester fanboy who wants to read his team news every where in the press. Rather, it’s for me a sign of how outdated and lacking some new comers in the newspaper industry are. You want to win customers, you have to give them what they want. I did post about their bad deliver service before, and how they fixed it later on as well. After which, I was really enjoying it for a while. But after today, I am rethinking my opinion about the newspaper as a whole.

Any news after 6 PM will have to wait 36 hours? Bad Call Really. Don’t expect any breaking news for the elections then.

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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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So my mother kept nagging on me to stop being lazy and open a shareholder account in Mishref Co-Op to get some promotions and profit from the purchases I make. I preferred to just use my family account instead, until I gave up and opened one for me and my wife. Ofcourse months passed without collecting the cards that I felt a shame of going asking for it anymore. My wife did the favor, and as I’m writing this right now I still don’t remember the account number. Only once I did know and use it. It was worth it. I made some extra profit this month right here:

There is even a typo in it, mishref-frofit. I really laughed when I saw it. It’s also nice from them to bother them selves and my bank to send over this money. My only complain is I didn’t get the SMS alert for money deposit :).

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Cinescape keeps giving people more and more reasons to abandon them. I used to go once every 1/2 weeks, now I only go occasionally just for a change. And on that occasion, I had to cancel my bank paid tickets for personal reasons. Could someone please explain this to me!

1. I already paid for this ticket, it’s not a free coupon to have an expiry date. You are keeping the money for my future use of the service.
2. Do not try to fool the minds of people that you actually can’t refund the online paid money. Knet online payment have easy way to refund the money directly to user account, and I’m pretty sure all others have as well.

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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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