Court Confusion Continues

Image by s_falkow via FlickrI'd hate to be the presiding judge over this one. Gulf News reports on the ongoing 'Facebook slur' court case currently being heard at the Dubai Court of First Instance. The funny thing is it doesn't really involve, well, Facebook...

It's a real 'he said, she said' case, defendant NF is accused of sending a threatening text message to Emirati AM, threatening to 'humiliate and dishonour him and his family' by uploading his and his family's photos to Facebook. None of the coverage of the case states that these photos are in any way lewd or compromising - and without that angle, we're really talking about the crime of doing what over 800 million people do pretty much every day.


NF's lawyers say that AM, having lost 11 cases to NF regarding the conduct of their business relationship, had maliciously bought a mobile SIM card and sent the messages to himself. He had allegedly used an old copy of NF's passport to do this.

So there was actually no 'Facebook slur' at all - GN's sub-editors once again using a Möbius strip to distort reality to make a better headline. There was the threat of uploading images to Facebook, which doesn't really count as a slur, does it?

This case is actually more about texting - did the accused send these texts and is their content actionable under UAE law or did the accuser apply for a mobile using a woman's passport? We're told AM is Emirati and must assume NF is not - so it's interesting to think that Etisalat would sell a SIM card to an Emirati man using a foreign woman's passport who is no relation to him, but presumably the court can get to the bottom of that one quite quickly.

The case would actually have been a great deal more worrying to contemplate had it involved a 'Facebook stur' - it's harder for a court to judge what went on here as content can be uploaded and deleted quite quickly. Facebook is a closed shop, so you can't use Google caches, for instance, to look at archived content (unless it has been posted using Facebook's 'public' setting). You could take screen grabs of the offending material, but screen grabs can be faked relatively easily. And you'd have to depend on specialists to weigh in on that type of issue. Facebook itself can be pretty obtuse when it comes to responding to user complaints - the abuse button isn't a sure-fire way of issuing a take-down notice and much of the 'policing' of Facebook is automated, so the interwebs are littered with the voices of frustrated users who have issues with fake pages and the like.

As it is, this is only one of two fascinating stories regarding texting in today's press. The other one has an Indian man sending a text to a major in Dubai police threatening to bomb the Burj Khalifa and attempting to extort $1mn, released after four months in jail after his 'friend' boasted to a barman that he'd set the whole thing up. The 'friend' is now in court himself. You have to wonder what on earth was going on in his head.

You're also left wondering what would happen if a truly complex case of Internet fraud or identity theft did come up...

Shiny Satisfaction Survey

Image by Tracy Hunter via Flickr"Hello. I'm calling you from Dubai Ltd. We're conducting a satisfaction survey. As you likely know, 82% of customers are happy with Dubai.ae according to Khaleej Times and we just wanted to know if you're satisfied with your Shiny too."

"Well, as you mention it..."

"That's great, well thanks for your feedback, we'll just add you to the 'totally delighted' column and then we won't need to bother you again."

"But I didn't say I was delighted with my Shiny."

"But you are now, aren't you?"

"Well, actually-"

"See? I mean, who could want for more, eh? Sun, sea, sand. The cooler weather and dusting off the barbecue, the woman of your dreams at your side and an iconic lifestyle where you can dare to dream and come back for more."

"Well, yes, but-"

"Secure and safe, well paid, fat and coddled in a nice warm cocoon of feelgood. So well off you'd almost feel guilty about whingeing about the downsides..."

"True, but..."

"Look, I tell you what. I'll put you down as "pretty delighted".

"What are the other categories?"

"Umm, fairly delighted and delighted."

"And what about rising visa costs, greedy developers sucking me dry with insane maintenance charges, negative equity and an electricity bill that defies quantum physics?"

"We've got Modhesh. Brand equity like that doesn't come cheap, me bucko. Come on now, time is money."

"Sigh. Put me down as delighted then."

"Nice to talk to you. 'Till the next survey, then."

"Bye."

Nostradamus

Image via Wikipedia"A Facebook group on the conflict between the army and Fatah Al Islam in Lebanon grew a membership of 8,000 in a single week: an average of two new members every minute. The movement of people, of opinions and debate in the new social networks can take place with incredible rapidity. This debate is taking place in a region where public debate, assembly and the mass publication of opinion have traditionally been discouraged. There is a new egalitarianism in the air and it’s a heady scent for many.

A flash survey of 100 Middle East based Facebook users tells us that 93% of them are using broadband connections. And 89% of them have laptop computers. 73% of those Facebook users are between 25 and 35 years of age. The survey took less than 1 hour to conduct.

There is a strong and growing Arab community using broadband technologies to move video content across the Internet, often as part of participation in social networks. The video featuring King Abdulla II of Jordan produced by the One Voice organisation, calling for peace and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, has drawn over 279,000 views in Youtube. Video clips on Lebanon have consistently drawn above 150,000 views, while other topics and productions from the Arab world have consistently driven between 60,000 and 1 million views. Few FTA channels in the region could claim such viewership.

Social networks, the core aspect of the thinking that has been characterised as Web 2.0, are driving the adoption of broadband services in the Middle East. Perhaps interestingly this is not a technical audience of technology early adopters. That the growth in adoption has not been stronger is almost undoubtedly a product of prohibitive pricing strategies among the region’s operators."

That was all written early in 2007. Not bad, huh? I recently had reason to revisit a white paper I'd written together with Spot On bright spark Mai Abaza to support my presentation at the Arab Advisors Convergence Conference in Amman. The above text is part of the argument we were making that regional telcos needed to bring down the price of broadband and stop considering it a service for shifting big files and start looking at it as a way for many people to shift many files quickly.

I recall asking the conference how many had heard of the phrase Web 2.0 or social media and getting a show of eleven hands from an audience of hundreds of operators. That's telcos for you.

Re-reading this reminded me there's a line that connects Nahr El Bared with Occupy Wall Street - those Facebook groups that sprang up contained debate and discourse we had never before seen in the region - passionate and sometimes violently abusive, the adoption rate of these groups and the way they brought people together were stunning to watch. Of course, Mai and I were so busy examining the implications for the broadband market we missed the wider implications that here was a new platform for discourse and organisation that would grow to have the ability to bring down governments.

Those groups showed people in the Middle East, for the first time, that they could not only talk to each other, but broadcast opinion to tens of thousands. It took four years' growth in adoption, but the seeds sown as the Lebanese army blasted the Nahr El Bared camp using helicopters carrying bombs in home-made cradles would lead to something a great deal bigger...

IBAN Numbers For The UAE. Be Scared...

Image by ~Aphrodite via FlickrThe news made me shudder. The UAE is introducing IBAN codes for all bank accounts.  By rights, this should cheer me up no end as the IBAN number has long been a mainstay of electronic payments to my real bank in the UK. But it doesn't. It makes me very, very afraid.

My fear is unreasonable, I know. HSBC has a nice, reassuring letter on its website, It even has a 'generate your IBAN' application that lets me key in my twelve digit account number and see what my IBAN number would be.

Let us for a moment skip over the wisdom of an application that asks me to input sensitive personal information without any attempt at security or validation. I am sure any reasonable, competent bank wouldn't encourage its customers to give away account numbers and so on in a way that could lead them to give such information away on, say, a phishing website.

The IBAN number is actually nice and easy. It consists of a two letter country code (AE), a two digit checksum and a three digit bank identification number (HSBC's is 020). Then you have a 16-digit number which consists, in HSBC's case, of four leading zeroes and your 12 digit HSBC account number.

It's nice to see HSBC so keen to use IBAN numbers. This is the bank that didn't have a field on its web-based transfer screen to enter IBAN numbers into - and then charged the currency losses resulting from  the rejected transaction back to the customer.

So why do I think they're going to screw this up? Well, in part because over the 18-odd years I've banked with them there has been no aspect of banking that they haven't at one stage screwed up for me, so I don't see why this should be any different. And in part because I bank with an institution stupid enough to get its customers keying their bank account numbers over open connections with no security or validation. But also because we're all going to need this new system working like clockwork come the end of November.

Why? Because the deadline for implementation of this new numbering system is the 19th November - and any electronic payment made into a UAE bank account without a valid IBAN number after that date will potentially bounce back and incur addtiional charges. And that includes the payment of your salary - the UAE's wages protection system (WPS) will require employers to use IBAN numbers to make salary transfers. If that causes any problems, we'll be rightly banjaxed as most people are paid at the month's end - and the end of November (the first test of the new system) segues neatly into the UAE's National Day holiday. This year the UAE celebrates its 40th year as a nation - it's going to be a biggie.

Maybe it will all go wonderfully. Maybe I'll be proved wrong to be so suspicious and cynical. We'll see...

The Emirates Identity Card: A Fresh Fandango

Image by P Shanks via FlickrIt was with infinite weariness I started this post. I've resisted commenting on the various announcements made by the Emirates Identity Authority for some time now, having just taken it as read that whatever they say will be corrected or clarified at some stage in the future, then recanted or re-clarified, changed or just turned on its head. I've been following the whole sorry saga since November 2008 and it's not been pretty, I can tell you. For a convenient glance at the whole backstory, you can follow this here link.


In this rather grumpy post, I called the whole thing a fiasco. And I do think I was justified in that.

As a communications case study it's quite without parallel - a remarkable track record of unclear and frequently unsustainable announcements that our media has done very little to clear up. The newest moves, reported in today's Gulf News (the other lads seem to have missed the story), are as impenetrable as the fog sitting on the ground during this morning's drive to work. Gulf News has two stories today, this one on its front page tells us that you now need to be fingerprinted at an Emirates ID Centre while undergoing medical tests to renew your visa. This flies in the face of the recent announcements that those renewing would not have to be fingerprinted. Asked why by the fearless bastions of the fourth estate over at GN, a spokesperson responded: "It is for security purposes."

Apparently preventative medicine centres (PMCs - you know, the places where we're herded around in shuffling lines to be dehumanised and then stabbed in the forearm by a licensed butcher, leaving a nasty bruise for days that never happens when a hospital takes a blood sample) are now being linked to the EIDA system. Quite why this means we have to be fingerprinted again is anyone's guess. This process was originally announced to be completed by 2010.

Reporting inside the paper, Gulf News tells us there is now an absolute deadline for expatriates to register for their Emirates ID cards of March 31st 2012.

The original deadline for the ID card was, as those with long memories will recall, January 2009. This deadline was extended in an announcement that said the deadline was not being extended, which I posted on here. It was subsequently extended to the end of 2010. Interestingly, the original deadline for UAE nationals was 31st March 2009, although as of today there doesn't appear to be a deadline for nationals at all.

So, three years later, we have a real deadline ("We're serious this time, we're telling you!") with a fine to be imposed upon those not complying, of Dhs20 per day up to a maximum of Dhs1,000. The real deadline is December 1st 2011 in Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain an Ajman, February 1st 2012 in Sharjah and March 31st in Abu Dhabi. Dubai gets until June 1st 2012.


Quite who is going to administer the application and collection of these fines in each municipality with different deadlines applicable is a question GN doesn't address. One suspects this is because the whole fine thing is just another pronouncement of negligible substance from a source that has given us so many.

I just can't wait for the inevitable story that the EIDA folks have been awarded for bringing the project in on time, under budget and to quality...

Ancient Geek Reprised

Image via WikipediaI had reason today to look back over the series of 'Ancient Geek' posts I put up a couple of years back and I quite enjoyed them. In the unlikely event that you would feel similarly, here they, arranged in chronological order for your viewing pleasure.

Ancient Geek
Encounters with punch cards and HP mainframes.

Ancient Geek V.2.0 (Beta)
How to crash IBM's MAPICS software running on a System 3X minicomputer


Ancient Geek V. 2.11 (Service Pack 2)
Making sweet music using the Apple IIe.

Ancient Geek V.3.0 Professional Edition
How I ended up working for Tandy/Radio Shack and getting sent to Saudi Arabia...

Computers certainly have a lot to answer for...

ENOC: It's About Time

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe Emirates National Oil Company, or ENOC as it's popularly known, has issued a statement to local media that claims it will lose Dhs 2.7 billion this year because of the cost its is having to bear to sell fuel at the subsidised oil prices currently mandated in the UAE.

You may recall, this is the petrol company that stopped supplying petrol, a slightly ironic situation given it is located in one of the world's richest oil producing nations. I posted about it all at some length, particularly with the PR mismanagement case study aspects of the story in mind: ENOC's spokesperson chose to be mildly mendacious regarding the reason why its stations had stopped pumping fuel and the company then clammed up like Sammy the Slamshut Clam in response to a constant slew of media and widespread public inconvenience.

ENOC is also, just in case you're interested, the proud owner of a deeply woeful website - including a media news section last updated in 2006, which gives you an idea of just how important the company considers its media relations to be.

The newspapers have slavishly covered yesterday's statement, despite the fact it contains no element of news whatsoever. Even the figure of a Dhs 2.7 billion projected loss isn't news, it was contained in the company's statement following its board meeting in May of this year. 

It's also oddly timed. The National ran a story three weeks ago quoting a top ENOC official in which the Dhs 2.7 billion figure and the tale of woe about subsidies was highlighted - in fact, the National's story actually contains a great deal more information than the statement GN and KT have so obligingly covered today. Even enfant terrible 7Days ran with the statement. Quite why the company has broken its silence now remains to be explained, but one is left with the strong feeling that there's something behind the timing of it. I suppose we could ask ENOC, couldn't we?

Or perhaps not. Gulf News' piece contains the amusing snippet: "A spokesman for Enoc declined to elaborate on the company statement when reached by Gulf News."

It's GITEX Time Again...

Image via WikipediaAs The National points out today (very kindly quoting me babbling on about the show) in its GITEX story, this will be my 23rd GITEX. I should really stop counting... I've done ancient geek reminisces about GITEX posts before, like this one right here, so I'm not going there again.

This year is the show's thirtieth birthday. There was much talk about GITEX being 30 last year, but they jumped the gun a tad. The miracle is that it's still with us at all - all the other great horizontal computer shows barring Hanover's CeBIT have tanked. Comdex is no longer with us, the Which Computer show died years ago, along with many others. Why have CeBIT and GITEX survived?

One part of the answer is that both are essentially government owned shows that have a wider agenda than just filling exhibition space. GITEX also fills pretty much every hotel room in Dubai and acts as a great showcase for new companies looking for a Middle East base or to expand their sales/distribution network to the region. That government support also means not necessarily having to face the grim realities of commercial pressure quite as much as a private sector organiser - particularly over the past three years when, like CeBIT, GITEX had lost a number of large, high profile exhibitors. But both shows have seen a return to form this year, in GITEX' case thanks to a concerted effort by the organising team behind 'GITEX Technology Week 2011' to package things up attractively for exhibitors as well as to add stronger vertical elements that made it more interesting for companies to attend.

There's also the resurgence of technology in business to thank. The IT industry had grown stale, innovation was no longer compelling companies to invest in technology and the great rollout of technology as we all bought our little slice of the internet had slowed. IT vendors discovered that slapping a new number on a CD in a box didn't make us all rush out to buy the New New Thing.

Now, buoyed by mobile, tablets, the cloud, social media and other innovations, technology is becoming sexy again. People are looking at new stuff and, what's more, investing in new stuff. Dubai has always been the regional centre for the technology industry and has always been very much the 'shop window' for sales organisations targeting the Middle East. It's been that way ever since technology companies first started to open up regional offices - generally, the decision on location was taken by the person handling the region who was often the person who would have to come out here to live. Given the options, virtually to a man they chose Dubai as the most pleasant place to live. And so the technology industry came here - a process that took place some ten years before Dubai Internet City was conceived and launched. When DIC came along, they just all moved up the road.

When I first moved to the UAE, my old pal Bob Merrill, the GM of Ericsson Saudi Arabia, told me (in his Southern drawl), "You're going to Dubai for three reasons, son. Golf, women and hooch. Why, I could take your Dubai and put it here in Sitteen Street Riyadh and we wouldn't even know it was there." He had a point, although I think you'd notice Dubai if you plonked it in Sitteen Street these days!

Many of the companies who set up shop here first encountered the region through either attending or exhibiting at GITEX. If you were obsessive enough, you could trace the process and see how many exhibitors have stuck to Dubai over the years and added technology to the city's list of re-export businesses. How many executives, in fact, who have turned up to the multi-hall extravaganza that is GITEX - a show, if the truth be told, that has always been bigger than its market - taken one look around and said 'We gotta be in this market, boys'? Over the years I have personally witnessed a great number of them.

GITEX is good for Dubai, which is why they'll never let it die. This year will see whether the re-invention of this most venerable of computer shows will provide the right mixture of showcase and meeting point to drive it forwards. And whether the new found burst of innovation in the technology industry will continue to make it relevant once again.

Steve Jobs. Tossing A Pebble

Image via CrunchBaseThis will get lost in the ocean of comment on Steve Jobs. It's almost pointless writing it, but sometimes you just have to jot the moment down.

There's little doubt Steve Jobs was an arrogant bastard. I've never met him (the closest I've got to true techristocracy was Ballmer) but the absolute certitude shone through in everything he did. Yet his drive and utter self-belief drove the people around him to create some wondrous things. I first encountered The Apple IIe microcomputer when I went to work for a startup computer music company back in the UK. That machine, the fruit of Jobs and partner Steve Wozniak's early 'home brew computer club' innovation, helped to create a revolution. It brought millions of people into the information age - it was the first 'proper' personal computer system. In 1981, Apple was to welcome IBM to the desktop computer age with its cheeky and iconic advertisement, followed soon after by the iconic Macintosh, launched with Ridley Scott's iconic TV spot.

It became all about icons. Jobs saw the work going on at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and immediately grasped it was world-changing stuff. Xerox, in a moment of monumental knuckle-headedness, didn't and closed the lab. Jobs hired the talent - and so did Gates. The two were each others' nemeses, both utterly driven men who knew they were right. It's just that Jobs ended up being righter. But now he's dead, so it really doesn't matter, does it?

PARC was where the WIMP (windows, icon, menu, pointing) interface was developed. Before PARC, all computing was text based. The world of mice and arrows brought a graphical way of interacting with computers and Jobs was the first to realise the significance of this new approach. Apple released the cludgy Lisa and then the stunning Macintosh. I remember my first encounter with a Mac, the little box with a screen in it happily reciting 'Simple Semen met a peeman' for me. The early text to speech software was not always brilliantly successful. But, again, Apple was way ahead of its rivals in even supporting such technologies.

Oddly, for a company that has always shunned any direct involvement in the Arab world, Apple was also a massively influential company in Arabic language computing and graphics. It would be years before Microsoft matched Apple's Arabic language capabilities - and by then, every publishing house and graphic design studio in the Arab world was Mac based. It wasn't to last: the Mac's strong domination of design and desk-top publishing was eroded by the sheer weight of the Microsoft/Intel alliance and the IBM PC architecture. Scully came, Jobs left and Apple started its long, inevitable dive towards the heart of the chapter eleven sun.

Cast into the wilderness, Jobs pursued his certitude and created NeXT, a high-end workstation system with its own innovative operating system. Too expensive, too 'out there' for its time, it failed and yet the NeXT operating system was to be acquired by Apple and form the heart of the Mac OS X. Incidentally, the World Wide Web was developed on a NeXT system by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who put the hole in the toilet seat that was the internet.

In his forty days in the wilderness the graphically-obsessed Jobs also acquired the animation studio that was to become Pixar, selling it on to Disney for a cool $7.4 billion. He was many things, but our Steve was rarely hard up. You can perhaps start to understand how he got by on that famous $1 salary as Apple's CEO.

But his crowning glory was his return to the company he co-founded. Jobs' triumphal return to Apple must have felt like the ultimate vindication to the man who had all the answers all the time, but the company was on the very brink. In 1997, Apple was the Sick Man of Computing and it was arguably Steve's old enemy Bill Gates who saved the day when he pumped $150 million into the seemingly lost cause that was Apple Computer Inc.

And then Jobs did something wonderful. He turned Apple into the world' most successful company. Starting with the iMac, going on to create the iPod and then the iPad, Jobs' mania for graphics and design were translated into products that were to revolutionise the way we consume what used to be called culture and today is called content. The iPod decimated the music industry, taking Apple from being a computer company into the mass consumer market. The iPhone toppled Nokia. The iPad has redefined the way millions of people consume information and entertainment. From a no-hope bankrupt, Jobs turned Apple into a company so successful its cash reserves eclipsed those of the US government.

The man who popularised icons, first with the Mac then with the iPhone and the iPad, Steve Jobs was himself an icon. His increasingly gaunt figure, wearing his trademark black turtle-neck sweater and jeans, became synonymous with smart, funky, minimalist innovation. I truly believe he is one of the most influential figures of the last century, a man whose impact on our society and culture will be felt for many years to come.

But I still think he must have been a total git to work with.

The Daily Mail Blows It. Big Time.

The UK's Press Gazette gleefully reproduced yesterday the screenshot of the year. The Daily Mail, the right wing conservative UK newspaper, ran the Amanda Knox verdict story on its website. Except it ran the wrong story. Knox was, of course, acquited.

The Press Gazette story is linked here. I do commend it as rather fun.

The Mail realised its awful mistake and took the story down after a couple of minutes but the internet she do not forgive lightly. The botched story became a news story in its own right, with even the Washington Post weighing in and enjoying the Mail's humiliation. As it happens, The Sun also blew it but nobody mainstream seems to have got a screen grab before the piece got taken down. These guys did, though.

So how could such an awful mistake happen? Well, as the Press Gazette piece points out, newspapers do prepare materials in advance - obituaries are written for celebrities while they're still in rude health, waiting for the day they peg it. And papers will also do 'yes' and 'no' pieces for highly anticipated events with only two possible outcomes, such as high profile trials. They're called 'set and hold' pieces. It's one of a number of journalistic practices that are not widely known and would cause some concern amongst a reading public used to depending on papers to tell the truth and deliver... are you ready for this... context and analysis.

Sure, but all the same, why were they in such a rush to push the button? Well, I rather suspect there's a new pressure on them, the pressure of social media. The first word the judge uttered was 'guilty' but that was to the charge of slander. The second word was actually the one the world was waiting for. The Mail and The Sun, under the pressure to show it they are still relevant as a news source online, both leaped into action too soon - the very thing that makes journalists get sniffy about Twitter.

We're being told all the time we can trust mainstream media. That's ever less the case as dubious practices come to light and as that media scrambles in an undignified rush to try and beat all of us eyewitnesses to the punch. They're better off not trying - but cleaning up their act and truly delivering added value to the voices of the people who are there at the time.