Turkey - Social (Unrest) Media

(Photo credit: vpickering)

Once again, a nation's people has taken to the streets protesting its government. This time around it's Turkey, now into the third day of protests sparked by government plans to build a shopping mall in a public park. A swift and draconian reaction by police to the original protest (a relatively small scale affair) saw tear gas canisters being fired directly at protesters, with images of badly injured people quickly making their way online.

The demonstrations quickly swelled as people took to the streets. Quite who those people were and what their motivation, we'll probably never know. Some undoubtedly were thugs, looters and anarchists bent on using the protests to their own ends. Some probably represent a disaffected opposition, beaten at the ballots recently with mutters of alleged irregularities.

But the overwhelming majority were people like you and me, angered and feeling disempowered by their government, driven to action by reports of shocking police brutality. Those reports moved fast - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Quora among other platforms used to get the word out when 'traditional' media was slow on the uptake. Even now, 72 hours into protests that have filled the streets and squares of Istanbul and Ankara, international media coverage is surprisingly muted - although Turkish media apparently have ignored the protests altogether, which is a worry. I first started seeing the reports and images from Istanbul online on Friday - you're always waiting for 'major media' to come in and back them up, always wary of buying images that purport to show events that could be slanted or weighted by vested interest. It's the same problem an editorially minded observer faces with the footage from Syria.

And yet the images kept coming, the reports of people shut in tube stations with gas canisters lobbed in after them, young people with horrific wounds from canisters and rubber bullets fired into the crowd. Yesterday, as the damage increased and images of bloodied civilians flowed, Turkish authorities throttled the Internet, specifically Facebook and Twitter. This report from TechCrunch explains more. Apparently the police pulled back - a mixture of reduced confrontation and information flow combined to take the heat off the demonstrations.

We'll see today whether that has worked - the protests have been more focused in the afternoons so far . But the sight of a wannabe European, secular democracy shutting down the Internet to better control its people as they're bludgeoned by massive force is not one that sits comfortably. You can follow the hashtag #direngeziparki..

Beirut An Explosive Thriller. The Unloved Easter Egg.

Early on in that most thrilling of Middle Eastern action-packed spy thrillers, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, we find that the possible future president of Lebanon, a somewhat Mephistophelean chap by the name of Michel Freij, is involved in some very hooky transactions indeed, transferring some $80 million using bursts of micro-transactions to a German shopping website, kaufsmartz.com.

Because I'm slightly sad, I thought it would be amusing to buy the domain, www.kaufsmartz.com and redirect it to the Beirut book website in case anyone thought of looking it up. At one stage I even considered putting up an ecommerce lookalike front page before common sense took over.

Of course, nobody's ever bothered - there's never once been a click to the Beirut site redirected from www.kaufsmartz.com.

Consequently, it's come up for renewal and I'm not bothering. Watch it become the most popular ecommerce site in the world now...

"With inputs from agencies" - More Copy/Paste Gulf News Shenanigans

Gulf News (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' inside front cover story today (flagged on the front cover) will be familiar to anyone who's been online over the past few days - the gang who ripped off tens of millions of dollars from RAKBank and Bank Muscat and the two alleged gang members who photographed themselves with a pile of cash in their car.

It carries a local byline but signs off with a little tag in italics - with inputs from agencies. So what precisely does that mean? Well, as we've seen before with similar GN stories, it means whole wodges of the report are actually not written by Gulf News at all, but simply copied and pasted from the newswires. I have alluded to this practice before. In the case of this story, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI", Gulf News has used the text of a Bloomberg report verbatim - in fact, the story from the words "the digital currency company" to the end is Bloomberg's report. It represents a little under half the entire extent of the story.

Much of the rest of it is mostly rewritten or just plain copied from an Associated Press file:

On two pre-arranged days — once in December and again in February — criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Associated Press (running as "Bloodless bank heist impressed cybercrime experts" in The Guardian)

On a pre-arranged day in December, criminals loaded with the debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. They worked for about 2.5 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. In February, the gang hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Gulf News, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI"

So there we go. A story that happened right under Gulf News' nose, covered by cutting and pasting agency reports and the practice justified by 'with inputs from agencies', when in fairness what it really should say is 'with no real input from Gulf News'.

HSBC Predicts Internet Banking Growth. Shock Horror.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In an interview with Gulf News, an executive from HSBC has predicted a rising trend in the adoption of technology. This is the kind of insight we have come to expect from the bank that knows in Beijing bicycles are a mode of transport, while in Dubai they're used in the gym.

The interview goes on to tell us that mobile technology adoption is on the rise, while m-commerce "is good news for consumers who will experience the benefits of greater convenience and ease of access."

Astounding. It's like Paulo Coelho's entire body of work squeezed into a single, punchy sentence. I could feel my life changing as I read that. I had never before considered the possibility that mobile commerce would allow greater convenience and ease of access. It's one of those moments, you know the ones when the world suddenly seems, well, a little different. Something has shifted. Something has changed.

Apparently HSBC has a mobile banking solution, which was launched on the UAE Apple app store in November 2011. It's also available on Android and BlackBerry. That's news to me, but I'm just one of their customers so see no reason why I would be told. The application, developed by Montise, allows account access, balance, movement of funds between accounts and bill payments. All you need is your Internet banking PIN, password, memorable information and your HSBC Secure Key (which is a small hardware device designed to make Internet banking more frustrating than it need be).

HSBC has apparently conducted research on the factors inhibiting the adoption of Internet banking. While that research is alluded to in Gulf News' piece, the results are not. We are told merely that a third of HSBC's customers are using Internet banking, while half of those are inactive.

I'm one of the inactive ones. I couldn't remember all the usernames and passwords for phone banking and Internet banking both. Username, password, the sequenced genome of a pipistrelle bat, six digit PIN, memorable information, ten digit phone banking identification matrix, internal diameter of a six tonne bow thruster, date of birth, the names of six different violent mammals, secure key entry. I don't even have a secure key. Sarah does. She loathes it with a passion. I wonder if perhaps the sheer richness and complexity of information required to access these services would not count perhaps as one of the inhibitors? My real bank just wants an Internet banking account number and password and hey presto, I'm in.

The study, apparently, revealed that it was important for HSBC to raise awareness about the benefits of online banking.

I can't wait.

Sold Out

Mars (chocolate bar) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What?

Have I sold out? What's going on? Adwords on Fake Plastic Souks? What kind of swine would keep his blog ad free for five years and then sell his soul to Goog?

Me, that's what kind of swine. I've been playing around with Google AdWords quite a bit lately and thought I'd do some experimenting with the other end of the horse.

There's very little money in AdWords for yer average blogger, so I'm not about to give in the day job (in fact, it's the day job that's driven much of this interest) - with my traffic, I might buy a Mars Bar every month out of it if I'm very lucky. But I'm interested in the dynamics of things. And sometimes the only thing to do is pull the tyrant's nose and see what happens.

If you really want to know when I've sold out, it'll be when there are Amazon affiliate links on here to buy my books...

The ICDL Social Media Release

After much commentary online, particularly on Twitter, I offer you the unexpurgated text of the ICDL Social Media Release, as sent me, for your elucidation and enjoyment. There are many gems in there, from an inauspicious start with the assertion that social media has revolutionised the way we interact within two decades. In fact, two decades ago there was no Internet at all in the Gulf.

The 'money shot' for me personally is the assertion that 'the Internet is full of billions of people', which has a certain charm to it, I feel. You are, of course, free to select your own highlights...

ICDL urges social media caution for GCC youth

Facebook users in Emirates and the Arab world reached over 45 million as of end June 2012

Dubai, UAE (27 May 2013) – Within less than two decades, social media has revolutionised the way people interact with each other. ICDL GCC Foundation, an organisation that promotes digital skills and cyber safety across the Gulf region, believes that while the technology is here to stay, people must continue to exercise caution in sharing personal information online so as to avert cyber threats.

Jamil Ezzo, Director General of ICDL GCC, said the need to address online safety in using social networking is particularly significant in the Gulf where smartphone and Internet penetration rates are high, and children have access to mobile devices.

“Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Tumblr are social media tools that have now become household names and their influence as a communication channel continues to increase. In the Middle East and North Africa, we recently saw how social networking sites can bridge communication gap. However, we must remember that despite being effective vehicles of social interaction, social media can also be abused and exploited by people with malicious intent,” said Ezzo.

According to the Arab Social Media Report published by the Dubai School of Government, Facebook usage in the Arab world has almost tripled in the last two years to reach over 45 million as of end June 2012 – about 50 per cent higher than the 37.4 million recorded in January of the same year. Out of the countries surveyed across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), those in the GCC posted the highest Facebook population in the region.

The report also noted that youth (those between the ages of 15 and 29) represent the majority or 70 per cent of Facebook users in the region, a number that has been holding steady since April 2011.

Ezzo said the figures point to a widening adoption rate of social media technology among young people. Users, who are often not aware of the security or privacy setting of various social networking sites, are more prone to fall victim to cyber-attacks.

“Facebook has undoubtedly been a major game-changer in the social networking sphere. Globally it is reported to have over one billion users. According to an independent survey, if Facebook was a country, it would have the world’s third largest population, more than twice the size of the United States,” Ezzo explained.

“This gives us an idea of how vast the social media community is growing and how potentially dangerous it can be for young users. However, parents can help their children use social websites more safely by first talking to them about why they have to be cautious online, and how they can protect themselves from cyber predators.”

Oftentimes, according to Ezzo, many children find it difficult to distinguish between real life and virtual life. However they use social media – whether to play games, interact with friends and family or post videos and photos – they should understand that the Internet is full of billions of people who can access their personal and private information with just a click of a button.

In a bid to protect children from cyber threats such as addiction, bullying and exploitation, ICDL GCC Foundation has partnered with law enforcement agencies as well as educational and other concerned government organizations across the GCC countries, to visit schools as part of a campaign to raise awareness on the subject amongst teachers and parents.

“We encourage parents to talk to their children about social networking. They can even make this a family affair. By being their children’s ‘friends’ online, parents can monitor their activities and list of friends while networking,” he said.

Most importantly, however, children should be trained to be able to recognise potential threats or messages that make them uncomfortable and to step up and call their parents attention whenever this happens.

“Some of the information children post on their social network pages, such as age, can make them vulnerable to scams and cyber-attacks. Parents should also warn them against divulging personal information to strangers and setting house rules, such as the length of time one can use the Internet, can go a long way in securing your children from the possible dangers of social media,” he commented. Ezzo concluded “Internet and handheld devices have removed all geographic boundaries and conventional discipline. By giving our children unrestricted access to the world for good intention, we are also exposing them to the world’s lures and dangers. Hence, protecting them from being exploited is an individual and institutional responsibility by raising awareness among them on the responsible and safe use of technology.

-ends-

The Passing Of The Thorban Pottery

The oil fired kiln at Thorban

There used to be just the one road out to the East Coast of the UAE, a lasso-shaped affair that snaked up into the Hajjar Mountains from Dhaid and bifurcated at Masafi to snake around to Dibba and down the coast past Tayyiba and Khor Fakkan to the sleepy and delightful Emirate of Fujairah. The road back from Fujairah to Masafi takes you alongside a deep wadi, in fact a 3,000 year-old route to the interior from the East Coast, with megalithic grave sites to prove it.

Just after you pass the Manama turnoff from the Dhaid-Masafi road is the village of Thorban, long home to the mildly famous Thorban pottery. You understand we're not talking Clarice Cliff here, the Indian potters who made the cluster of ramshackle cinder-block godowns just off the main road their home produced rough terracotta pots using time-honoured techniques. The kiln they built was wood-fired, each new batch of still-damp pots placed in the kiln and then covered with soil to let the charcoal do its work.

The Thorban pottery became a must-visit destination for any group of visitors we took around the Emirates and was always busy, potters working away on their wheels or mixing new batches of clay, a couple of chaps in lungis front of house to ask for ridiculous prices from the feckless tourists, signalling the start of the long process of bargaining that would end up at half the price and still leave you wondering how much further a skilled negotiator would have got. Latterly, we arrived there to find stacks of cardboard boxes and asked where they were headed. 'Liberty in New York' was the answer!

It was around this time the oil fired kiln appeared. Thorban was thriving and appeared to have found itself a ready export market, as well as popularity with any batch of curious holiday-makers headed East to Masafi's Friday Market and beyond.

We went East for a wander at the weekend, spurred on by the discovery of the huge changes we'd seen in our recent wander around Umm Al Qawain. And yes, the East has changed in almost exactly the same way. Piles of rocks line the Dhaid road, occasional lorries with broken backs buried in the roadside sand dunes tell of the constant flow of heavy trucks down from the mountains. Ras Al Khaimah, Fujeirah and Hatta have become centres of quarrying, mountains slowly being broken down to feed Dubai's voracious appetite for rock, gravel, aggregate and cement and the road down from Masafi is still, downturn notwithstanding, dotted with a procession of groaning lorries capped with green tarpaulins.

Mirroring the story told in Umm Al Qawain, you can see signs of feast and famine: the downturn that halted Dubai's meteoric construction boom almost overnight had its consequent effect in the mountains. Shuttered shops and abandoned date plantations catch the traveller's eye on the road across the wadi plan from Dhaid. Communities that had expanded have contracted again. What used to be the police check point for 'illegals' trying to enter the Emirates from the East Coast is now an office for the Mining Affairs Department. There seems to be another rock crusher every few hundred metres.

When we got to Thorban, what used to be the pottery is no more. Something grey and dusty remains from a spill of liquid, coating the track on the approach to the tin-roofed buildings. There are laths scattered all over the place. And the pottery stands, abandoned, rather in the fashion of the Marie Celeste - there are still pots lying around, moulds on tables and the clay-mixing machine still stands by the door into the main workshop. It's as if they left overnight, taking nothing with them. We wandered around the place for a while, peering into the kilns and, for some reason, whispering.

It was somehow tremendously sad. What had been a thriving little enterprise was gone. The source of all those pots, terracotta camels, foot-scrubbers, mubkhars and candle-holders was no more. And there was no clue as to why it, seemingly so suddenly, came to an end. There's a mobile number on the sign that still stands by the main road, but it doesn't answer.

If anyone knows, I'd be fascinated to find out. 

The Cost Of Being An Expat

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First things first: I'm not complaining. We've lived here a long time because we like it here. I won't bore you with all our 'reasons to be cheerful' but suffice to say they are legion.

But there's a report in today's Gulf News, which talks about how 60% of young Emiratis surveyed are apprehensive but not frightened of the UAE's overwhelmingly expat demographic - 85% of the overall population here is expat - it's higher in Dubai, which is 90% expat.

That's nothing new. The UAE population has been numerically dominated by its expat workforce since the year dot.

Buried deep in GN's long analysis of why this is really good news for everyone is an interesting figure, though. According to a certain Dr. N. Janardhan, the average expat makes a contribution to the state of Dhs 2,507 while the state invests Dhs 14,066 a year in each expat.

I'm afraid I rather screeched to a halt. I'm sure Dr Janardhan's figures are skewed by the preponderance of the UAE's labourers, but I can tell you that I for one am paying a great deal more than Dhs 2,507 in fees and taxes. And yes, I know the UAE's tax free, but when you charge a fee as a percentage of a transaction, for instance the tenancy contract registration fee, calling it a fee is really just obfuscation.

I got to Dhs 8,000 pretty easily and hadn't even started down the road of the cost of power here (which is significantly more than in the UK, despite the fact this is an oil producing country, because the expats subsidise the Emiratis). Try as I might, I couldn't work out where the Dhs 14,066 comes from, because you pays for what you gets here, from healthcare to transportation.

It started me wondering what the cost vs economic contribution would be for yer average expat. In short, what's our ROI?

Arabtec Strike - An Inconvenient Truth

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dubai's largest construction company, Arabtec, has faced a relatively well co-ordinated labour dispute over the past few days, with UAE media reporting on the affair being somewhat patchy to say the least.

Gulf News in its story today says the company's Abu-Dhabi based workers refused to leave their accommodation on Saturday, with Dubai-based workers refusing to work the following day. However, yesterday's Gulf News story "Arabtec workers return to work" is at odds with 7Days' front page splash yesterday, which ran with 'workers down tools' in its story, 'How can we feed our families with Dhs750'?

The Abu Dhabi workers were based at the 'model' Saadiyat Island labour camp, with TDIC, Abu Dhabi's tourist authority and the master developer of Saadiyat Island (where Arabtex is building the Louvre) telling 7Days yesterday all 'workers have reported for work as usual'.

7Days' piece yesterday talked of 'hundreds' of workers on strike, with Gulf News talking about 'thousands' of strikers. Reuters goes with the 'thousands' figure in its story, run by GN today, which has Arabtec as stating 'the delivery of projects was unaffected by what it called a partial labour stoppage.'

Rather than running a Reuters file about a labour dispute on its own doorstep, 7Days today uses that old skill, journalism, to report on the end of the strike, saying that at least 6,000 workers had been involved in the work outage but they now felt they had 'no choice but to return to work as they are poor men'.

Quotes from both sides of the dispute point to a minority leading the majority to take action, which is hardly a surprise. Some workers had talked about being pressurised to join the strikers. And while it's fashionable to wring one's lace hankie and bemoan the fate of the UAE's labourers, these men signed contracts to work for that salary and are being housed in the best quality labour accommodation in the country. They are by no means the worst off - I have heard of Sri Lankan workers' wages in the garment industry here being more in the line of Dhs 400 a month.

It's also worth noting here that their pay, while a pittance by Western standards, is double the minimum wage in much of India and as much as four times the minimum wage in the worst-paid parts of the country. Bangladeshi labourers are comparatively much better off, earning over five times their country's national minimum wage.

On that same comparative scale, a British minimum wage labourer would be pulling in over $8,000 a month in the UAE, with food and accommodation paid for.

And before you pile into me for pointing out this very inconvenient truth, here's another one for you. We are all here in the Gulf on the back of minimum wage Asian labour - it's helping to fund our cosy expat lifestyles. And as you hammer the keyboard of your Mac to leave me an infuriated comment, reflect for a second how happy you were to buy that cut-price product made on the back of minimum wage Chinese labour (paid less, incidentally, than the Arabtec guys) working in conditions so harsh several have taken their own lives and anti-suicide netting is strung up in their labour accomodation.

Labour conditions in the UAE have improved immensely over the past twenty years and are likely better than those of neighbouring countries and although those conditions don't sit well with European sensibilities at times, still the labour comes here because this is still a comparatively better place to be for all of us, labourers included.

Meanwhile, Arabtec has apparently said it will hold the ringleaders 'accountable for their actions', which doesn't really strike that warm fuzzy peach note of conciliation. Bear in mind, too, Arabtec would hardly be pleased at the prospect of increasing the payroll by Dhs200 a month (the strikers' apparent demand) - that's a cool Dhs1.2 million loaded on the monthly payroll if we took just the strikers into consideration. But ArabTec employs 52,000 people according to its website. So that'd be around Dhs 10 million in extras every month.

Of course, quite apart from the massive cost, a wage increase now would also be seen to be rewarding the strike action. I can't see it happening, somehow - whether we, from the comfort of our armchairs, would like it to or not.

Indian Lecturer Held By Dubai Police For Defamation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' Bassma Al Jandaly reports today on the case of an Indian university lecturer who has been held by Dubai police, while on a visit to the country, for defamation. Arrested on the 5th May, two weeks later he's still in Dubai, out on bail but with his visa held by police.

The lecturer worked for a "private university" in Dubai's Academic City. According to the story in GN, police confirmed the man had his contract terminated without reason by the university - Dubai courts found in his favour and he had received his end of service benefits.

However, returning to India, the lecturer appears to have indulged in the activity known as the grinding of the axe. I think I found his blog, which makes for highly entertaining reading and lets the university have it in no uncertain terms with remarkable vigour and an almost obsessive degree of staying power. Although comments are turned off and the YouTube videos have been made private, the rest of the content is up there and there is certainly plenty of 'masala' on offer.

The university's response was apparently to lodge a defamation case against the man at Rashidiya police station. And so when he travelled from the US, where he is based according to GN, to the UK and stopped off to see his Dubai-based wife, his collar was comprehensively felt.

In a rare moment of sheer cravenness I'm not going to link to his blog because I can't be entirely sure this is indeed the blog in question (given there are no names in the story, I found a blog that seems to fit the bill quite nicely by Googling "dubai university lecturer india end of service", as you would) and I'd rather not be joining him over at Rashidiya nick trying to defend myself against a charge of sharing links to material alleged to be defamatory.

It's interesting (and noteworthy bloggers, tweeters and all you other online commentators - as I pointed out in my last post, in fact) that in the UAE, defamation remains a criminal rather than civil matter. Now covered by the provisions of the UAE's cyber crime law, the mere accusation of online defamation has resulted in this man's liberty being taken from him. He can now look forward to a lengthy and expensive trial process unless the defamation case is dropped.

In choosing this course of action, I would argue that The University That Must Not Be Named has ensured greater reputational harm will ensue from this affair than if it had chosen not to pursue a criminal case of defamation in the UAE.

However, in the meantime, our lecturer friend would appear to be in rather a lot of hot water...