Archive for July 8th, 2008

Privacy Workshops In Lahore And Islamabad

Published by Babar Bhatti on July 8, 2008 under Business, Call Centers, Consumer Rights, Pakistan, Privacy, Telecommunications

From Jehan Ara’s blog, In The Line Of Wire. I am glad to see that the concept of privacy has started getting some attention.

Bytes4All and P@SHA and holding two events in Lahore and Islamabad on the issue of Privacy which should really concern us all.

The first event will be an Open Forum on Privacy which will be held at FAST-NU in Lahore on July 11 from 10.30 am for about 2 hours.

The second event is a National Workshop on Privacy which will be held at the Holiday Inn in Islamabad on July 14 from 10.30 am - 1 pm followed by lunch.

For details, please visit the P@SHA website.

Three privacy experts from Privacy International - Simon Davies, Gus Hosein and Dave Banisar are flying in to Pakistan to facilitate these workshops. It is a great opportunity for us to use their visit to influence policy and open up a discourse between the government, civil society and the business sector.

Ufone Call Block: 420

Published by Babar Bhatti on July 8, 2008 under Consumer Rights, Emerging Markets Telecom, Mobile Applications, Telecommunications, Value Added Services, mobile phones

Unwanted calls have become a major problem in the fast growing telecom market of Pakistan. Ufone has introduced the 420 service (got to love the name) to block calls from any network (or landline). Only for pre-paid customers, it comes with a Rs. 9.99/month price tag and allows you to block up to 20 numbers. Click here to go to Ufone site for more specifics.

Ufone Call Block 420

PTCL Site Down. Technical Issues Or Hacking?

Published by Babar Bhatti on July 8, 2008 under PTCL, Security, Telecommunications

The PTCL website www.ptcl.com.pk is inaccessible as I write this. I can think of a few possible reasons:

a. PTCL came up with a great service offering and people loved it so much that the extra traffic crashed the load balancers (sorry, this is just too much of a stretch)

b. Someone got really upset with all the rate hikes and default pakcage activations and decided to throw a few virtual stones at the ptcl glass building. Hack job it could be.

c. The IT department of PTCL forgot to patch the servers (simple incompetence). Now this is very likely!

Well, we’ll know in a short time about the real reasons. After all if they can take Youtube down, it is much easier to take their own site down :)