BlogAllAlong » Privacy

Wataniya says “Your email or no Wnet service!”

Bashar — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:56:46 +0000

I’ve been living a couple of dark days after my upgrade of Qualitynet connection caused down time by MOC to switch me to their new port, taking more than two days and spanning the weekend. So I thought it would be a good time to get the Wifi router I wanted from one of the telecom companies, to use it with my Galaxy Tab, as well as mobile.

After considering all options I went with Wataniya Wifi Router this afternoon. The initial impression was big frustration as I could not get it to work with any of the devices, and even taking the sim into Galaxy Tab didn’t work. Worse is my regular mobile data line stopped working completely for some reason. Calling Wataniya keeps me waiting for long time, just like any other caring company, only now Wataniya tries to estimate the waiting time “Your estimated waiting time is 15 minutes. Please hold on until we attend to your call”!. And after the estimate turns wrong, you start getting “To leave a message press 1, to keep waiting press 0″. No seriously, you expect me to fall for that?

After catching an employee it turns out no one activated my line at the branch and that was the problem. But once it was activated, all my web requests were redirected to this dismaying Wataniya page.

The screen is forcing me to hand my email beside my mobile number, as if SMS spamming wasn’t irritating enough. I complained to the support guy about it and he was surprised it’s acting this way, and said if you want I can open a ticket for you and they will make it work for you within 24 hours. No thanks, enough torture for the past 48 hours. Not that I didn’t have games and movies to waste time on, but every little thing makes me open a browser, only to realize I’m not living in this century.

Seriously Wataniya, you spend millions on your ads to empower your brand. Such simple act of ignorance destroys it all in a second. It’s not worth it for you, and you don’t need it. You need better coverage, ohh and less than 15 minutes waiting time.

Facebook new simpler privacy policy?

Bashar — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:10:29 +0000

Really? And part of the simplification is trying to make my info public to everyone?

Shouldn’t the logic be to set it to my old settings, with the option to make it to Everyone?

How to hide most visited sites from Chrome New Tab

Bashar — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:58:36 +0000

For those of you enjoying all the Chrome super speeds (and all Windows problems), if you need to disable the display of most visited sites in a new tab, although I personally love it, here is how to do it.

Facebook users beware

Bashar — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:05:38 +0000

According to this article Facebook will be allowing Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com to start indexing the facebook registered users profile, so if you don’t like it, your privacy might be exposed to public. To disable this feature you will have to login to your facebook account an adjust the privacy settings there. I tend to find this awkward though. If facebook wants to change their policy and expose my profile to the search engines, shouldn’t there be an email notification of this? Or perhaps they thought that an email warning would alert too many people to disable the feature, thus killing the purpose of it.

e-Government in Kuwait

Bashar — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 08:31:22 +0000

Kuwait has been promoting the e-Government at least since I was in college. How every thing is going to be electronic, and how the services will be all available online. In the past few years, several advancements have been made. In the MOI, you can view your speeding tickets and pay them online, see passport status, driving license, see if you have any travel prevention, gun license. In terms of jobs, and through the Civil Service Commission, you can apply for government jobs online, see the vacancies and specify your desires as well. You can request a sick leave, go to Dr. next day and he will print and fill the form. No need to consult your job location first. This is really great, and we definitely want more of it, BUT…

Online services is something that needs planning, stable implementation and rounds and rounds of testing. The way I see it, Government seems to have cut things short and ignored some critical parts. To begin with, we have the privacy and security of the systems. How can a person authenticate him self as the specific individual who is allowed to see the data, and how can we make sure no intruder or outsider gets also access to this data. The way it’s done right now is mostly depending on the person’s Civil ID number. We all know that this kind of information is not confidential. It’s something that identifies you, but it does not authenticate who you are. For example, the guy in the bank has access to thousands of Civil IDs. I was working in Kuwait University and I had access to hundreds of thousands as well. My employer has that kind of information. Many people just have it. It’s not something I can hide from the world. So imagine that by knowing my Civil ID number, you can see if I have speeding tickets, if I have gun license, my passport information, who I am ensuring, and lots of more information. It actually happened to me once as well. My uncle told my father you have a speeding ticket. Why should they know that? Maybe I don’t want them to know it.

Say this is not enough? The MOI it self posted sometime back with a flashy sign an excel sheet with the full list of eligible voters with their civil ID. So pick your name from here and paste it there. It’s that simple! This is in regard of the MOI. For the Civil Service Commission, it gets even worse. Someone could be driving your future without you knowing it. You must sign there to specify your jobs. The only authentication again is your Civil ID. Provide it and you are good to go. Then you can see your information, available vacancies for you, and alter the jobs you want to apply for. Most these windows open inside an IFRAME. Open the IFRAME it self in a new window and you will see this:

My first program example “Hello World”. For non-programmers, Hello World tends always to be the first program you write. Just a dummy program to print this message. It seems the programmers were in a rush and just left the title as it is. Now as for the security, let’s say that soon the authentication model is changed, and a password is applied. Does that mean we are safe? Not without a thorough testing and revamp of the current security model implementation, No. You know why? Because if you open one of the IFRAME windows in a new screen, you will see this is the URL:

http://www.csc.net.kw:8888/csc/SpecialNeed.jsp?kk=13&cv_id=

Where is your civil ID number. Change it to any other person number and you got it. So it’s a matter of passing parameter only. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. I can’t say now they missed it because Civil ID is already the mechanism of authentication so it’s the same thing anyways. But at least make it not that obvious and a bit future ready.

Again, as I said before, things are moving forward. I just knew you can pay your speeding tickets online. Something many people would like to do. However I don’t see it moving in the right way. Specialists must be following up with the implementation and ensuring the security and integrity of the data. The ultimate solution in hope for is one secured login credential for all government services and sites. Not a walk in the park I know. But unless this security issue is addressed right now, more and more services will come and reside on the existing weak model implementation.

Windows sneaks on your files to display relevant ads!!!

Bashar — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:47:56 +0000

When Google first announced Gmail and it’s relevant ads behavior, public concern over privacy was raised and expressed. Nevertheless it was all a free service that Google wants to make money out of. Now, and as per this new patent, Microsoft will be utilizing the email and word processor clients stored on your PC to display content related ads. To do this ofcourse, the so called “Advertising Framework” needs to pull “context data” from the end user PC over the internet, utilizing the user bandwidth and his own resources, to educate Microsoft and the publishers about the relevant Ads to display and annoy the customer with. Like the Microsoft Assistant wasn’t enough of trouble. Like the price we are paying for Windows and Office is not enough to cover their expenses, and like Windows already runs like lightning and there is all the space for more free cycle utilization.

There are still no details as to how the Ads behavior will be, but I am assuming something stupid as Office Assistant. The whole idea it self doesn’t get into my mind. I do understand ads in FREE softwares, but Microsoft and Office aren’t those type of software. In addition to that, I think that might open the door for more lawsuits. Something like, Wordpad comes preinstalled with Windows and only Microsoft can utilize showing Ads there. Google and Yahoo might ask for a share of the rights… eventually that is. For scientific and FREE softwares, I sometimes allow them to gather some user information on good basis, but not for that one. No Thank You Sir! Last thing I need is some popups in the middle of work delivering ads to me. Plus, I don’t need any more overhead to my internet connection. It’s already slow n expensive.

F or the news source and more, see The Register.

I know exactly what you are doing online…

Bashar — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:44:19 +0000

Would you like to hear me saying that to you? Most likely not. What if I tell you the government is spying on you. Imagine at any minute, you receive an email saying “I know what you surfed last summer!”. This is what Germany is trying to enforce by saving any connection data be it internet, voice calls, SMS or any other for a period of six months. Anonymization tools and services like Tor are illegal from then on as well. As a reaction, Google have threatened to close the German version of Gmail if the new law is enforced.

I am happy Google have made their official stand early clear, and hope to see other big names participate in the protest as well. If the government has the right to track all my online movements, then in the future we would expect tracking devices attached to us so that they know where we are as well. This is more security right? But it’s also zero privacy.

KEMS Blocks Blogger in Kuwait!

Bashar — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 07:46:27 +0000

I was just writing a long article about Blogger accounts being blocked by KEMS. Just before I hit the Publish button I thought of giving it another shot, and it worked. This still doesn’t explain the silly move of blocking it. How did this block happen? By mistake? I doubt. Either they quickly decided to roll back after the kuwaiti blogs got full of complains, or they were trying to block some specific Blogger account (for some reason) and somehow they made the mistake of blocking the whole service!

What I’m sure of is that, those kind of things don’t happen by them selves. No way the KEMS filter only would by mistake block all Blogger accounts. They must’ve been planning for something when this stupid block happened. It is worth mentioning that Blogger is the biggest blogging community online, and Google Official Blog, the blog of the world’s #1 search engine and one of the top 3 sites in the world resides there and was blocked in the move.

In the past few months, we have seen other stupid blocking moves from the ISPs, some were pushed for by the government as well. Kuwaiti blogs were blocked, political sites blocked and brought down, Meta Cafe, some of YouTube videos, and even once I saw snapshot of the official Kuwait Stock Exchange Market site being blocked by FastTelco! I wonder how that last one happened. Our neighbors, Bahrain blocked Google Earth by government orders. The decision was soon reversed however under global pressure.

It’s not yet that bad, but it’s on the way of becoming another China.

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