UAE Blocks Google Voice

Image via WikipediaThere has been a great deal of concern and speculation this week regarding a possible move against Google by the UAE's telecom regulator, the TRA. Much of this concern has been triggered by appalling journalism which, for some reason, people have been taking seriously. It really is the biter bit - social media conversations driven by sloppy, lacklustre reporting from the very people that argue their continued existence is justified by their unique ability to provide us with 'context' and 'analysis'.

First of the block was Emirates Business 24x7 the former newspaper (ahem) that has been transformed, chrysalis-like into a beautiful Internet butterfly. Their story earlier this week, "Google to launch localised versions of VoIP in the Middle East" was nothing other than an awful example of a story that doesn't stand up its headline - the story itself contains the immortal comment from Google (the bit that was meant to justify the headline):

"The feature is not available in Mena. Google will be rolling out additional localised versions but we have nothing to announce at the moment."

You'll notice the one thing Google quite spefically does not say is that localised versions of its Google Voice VoIP service will be introduced to users in the MENA region. Cravenly, Emirates Business has since changed the headline on its website to read "Google to launch localised versions of VoIP", which is an entirely different story and, in fact, utterly lacking in any news value whatsoever.

This story has prompted speculation that Google would, indeed, launch this service. Given that Google Voice does pretty much what Skype does, this would of course induce the TRA to block the Google Voice site (Arabian Business, in an attention-seeking piece, carried some dire predictions from some 'analysts' to this effect), which is just what it has in fact done. Honest. Take a look here.

Given that Google's own site contained text to the effect (the text displayed if your IP is non-US) that you can't access this service which is only open to subscribers in the USA, blocking it did seem a tad redundant.

Presumably Google will be seeking to introduce the service legally to the many different jurisdictions around the world in which it is active. In many of these, this will involve seeking a telecommunications operator licence of one sort or another, working with a local telco or braving the country's regulator and any action (if, indeed, any) it chooses to take against unlicensed telecommunications services.

Poor old Google didn't say a word about bringing this to the UAE. But the UAE seems to have sent an unequivocal message to Google just in case it was thinking about it. And all, I suspect, because of a sloppy piece of journalism...

For what it's worth, as far as I can see, the move is unlikely to affect Gmail or any other part of Google's services unless Google starts to integrate the voice platform with other Google properties - which is something you could actually see makes a great deal of sense in the long run. Don't forget, bits of Google (Orkut) have long been blocked here without losing the rest (see also Yahoo!'s Flickr). So it's not time to hit the panic button quite yet... 

Meanwhile, I have to say I think the TRA is looking increasingly Canute-like...

Your Call Is Important To Us

Image via WikipediaGreeting the Caller
When answering the phone, say ‘Hello’. When the caller says ‘Hello’ back, keep saying hello until the caller becomes angry. Alternatively, give your name and ask in a bright, sparky voice, ‘Is there anything I can do for you today after you tell me your inside leg measurement?’

If you can, pronounce your name oddly so that the caller has to ask for it several times. Ideally, change your name to TikkiPikkapukka.

Time on Hold
If the caller has been on hold for a significant time, it is likely that he or she will have been forced to listen to distorted music, several advertisements for your organisation's brilliant customer service award track record and several repetitions of ‘Your call is important to us but we’re busy helping other customers.’ It is likely that the customer will be angry or at the least mildly irritated at this stage, so don’t forget to place them back on hold. Ideally, pick a line that doesn’t have music on hold but that does have a strange echo on it, something like an ultrasound recording played backwards or a slowed down recording of the Doppler effect from a pea being shot through a wind tunnel.

If the caller asks you to call them back, assure them that you will and forget to take their number.

Asking For Security Information
Make sure you always ask for the customer’s security information even if the call is a routine request for something like your branch opening hours. Be particularly sure to ask for this information if your call system has already asked the customer to key in his or her PIN number, unique caller number, Memorable Information and Call Repeating Access Password number in order to get put on hold for twenty minutes to talk to you.

If your call centre has initiated the call, don’t forget to fail to identify yourself properly and then go straight into asking a range of insane security questions. If the customer answers these, don’t forget to end the call with a warning about identity theft.

Putting the Caller on Hold
Never, ever tell the customer you are about to put them on hold. Just drop the line and leave them in limbo to stew for a while. Ideally, have a colleague pick up the line and insist on going through the whole process again. If you put a caller through this until every seat in the call centre has talked to him/her and have the recordings kept for training purposes to prove it, you could be eligible for a Callie – the global call centre awards. The link to the application form is here.

Keep the Caller Informed
If it is taking a huge amount of time to dig into the customer’s records or get a line to the department that has the answers, don’t forget to sigh a lot and make plentiful tapping noises on your keyboard. You can save the risk of RSI or chipped nail polish by making a recording of this sound on a cheap Dictaphone and just replaying it. Then ask the customer if he/she is there, say ‘Just one minute’ and transfer the line to the night service message. If your call centre is 24/7, transfer the call to the ‘Sorry, extension 43 is not available. Please leave a message.’ This should then route through to ‘This mailbox is full, please try later.’

Never Guess the Answer
If you don’t know the answer to a customer’s question, don’t guess the answer, just lie. Say anything that comes into your head. Some good holding lines are: ‘That’s against our policies’, ‘My manager has said I can’t do that’, ‘The system is down’ and ‘That department has been disbanded.’ A great all-purpose lie is, ‘Yes, that’s finished now. The thing you want is in the post and will be with you within two working days.’

Always Keep the Promise to Call Back
When you are forced to promise to call the customer back, always ensure that there is, indeed, a subsequent call. Route the call request through to another department, security is always a good one, or a totally unrelated department in another continent is always good to place a call back to the customer.

How to Deal With an Angry Caller
If a caller becomes angry, repeat the thing that has made them angry in a slow voice. It is important at this stage to tell the customer that you are trying to help them. Continue speaking slowly and say ‘I’m sorry’ as frequently as normal grammatical usage will allow. A good phrase to use here is: ‘There is nothing you can do. It’s just the way things are.’

Passing the Caller On
If the caller asks to speak with someone more senior, block this request at all costs in case it might get you into trouble. At first, always try telling them that the manager will just tell them the same thing. If they are insistent, you can point blank refuse, say that it’s not possible or put them on hold in the Doppler pea chamber.

Never End the Call if the Customer Wishes to Continue
It is important never to hang up on a customer, even if they have been tried to the point of insanity and are having a major coronary incident. That is what the Doppler pea chamber is for. However, it is vitally important that you have the last word in every call, so don’t forget to ask ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ It is, of course vitally important to do this when you have been totally unable to help the customer. If you have been able to help the customer, you may need to apply for retraining.

Keeping Customers Happy
If your employer wanted customers to be happy, they’d hardly outsource their most important relationships to a bunch of disempowered dunderheads in a room who don’t have the authority to crap without a triplicate form let alone actually do anything that a customer would actually want. The words Your Call is Important To Us are actually a sophisticated code that translates to ‘We don’t care about you’ and the more aware of this you are as a call centre operator, the better it will be for all of us.

Happy customers are a myth. They’re all whingeing time wasters and it’s your job to make sure they know they haven’t a hope in hell of getting anywhere. After all, if customers started to dictate what the company did, what kind of world would it be?

(The inspiration for this was colleague Alec Harden - @alecharden - who bowled into the office this morning screaming at Skywards. Skwards won, but then that's what call centres always do in the end, isn't it? So This article, "Ten Golden Rules for Call Centre Operators", subsequently had me in helpless stitches of hooting laughter and demanded parodying.)

Labour to let

Image via Wikipedia
Driving past the infamous Sonapour labour camp, you can only be struck by the To Let signs up on the accommodation blocks. A closer inspection reveals a large number of the blocks have gaps in the walls where window ACs should be. It's almost quiet on the roads around the camp in the mornings and evenings, where once clouds of dust would be thrown up by manic bus drivers taking shortcuts or slinging their loads of tired workers around the sandy parking spaces around the cluster of blocks that sits north of the big graveyard (the roadsigns used to read 'Labour Camp / Graveyard' until someone finally worked out that this was a form of irony) on the Emirates Road.

We're seeing the occasional 'labourers stranded' story in the local press still, although the worst of these recently, 700 labourers stranded with no money or resources after the Dubai-based construction company's chairman fled, relates to labourers in Sharjah's labour camp, not Sonapour.

A lot of the projects that still went ahead when the recession hit (or, to be more accurate, when Dubai stopped pushing its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala rather than accept a recession had hit) did so because they had gone too far to cancel - it simply made more sense to finish them than kill them off. Those projects are starting to be finished now and as each one does, it is likely that there will be precious little to replace it. So many of the construction workers who got a reprieve over the past couple of years are likely to get laid off and sent home.

That second wave of redundancies will see even more To Let signs up in Sonapour. Let's hope it doesn't lead to another wave of 'workers stranded' stories.

All Change For Authonomy

Image via Wikipedia
Warning - traffic destroying writing post follows...

One of the infamous, shadowy international writers group, the Grey Havens gang, alerted us to a blog post on Harper Collins' Authonomy site which heralds major changes to the site. The post recognises that Authonomy has major structural issues and appears to be a heads-up that changes will be made in the near future that will address these.

Authonomy is a peer-review site for writers to post samples of their work for others to read, criticise and, if they think it is of oustanding, publishable quality, to 'back' it. The most backed books each month are skimmed for a read by Harper Collins' editors. I have written much in the past about authonomy, if you're interested in all the background it's all collected at this here link. Probably the most controversial - and widely read and linked - post is this one, which led to this guest post on Eoin Purcell's blog, apparently so contentious that Eoin froze comments on it. I still think the post I did for Eoin best defines my view on authonomy at that time.

Just to be abundantly clear before I toss my hat once again into the ring of Authonomy debate - I am not sore that my book 'won' but didn't get published. I recognise, more now than ever before, that the book was funny and popular  but very, very badly written. I get that. However, I invested a lot of time, energy and thought into Authonomy and have gained much from my experiences with the site - both personally as a writer and professionally as someone who consults on communications - particularly in the digital/social space. (I have to add this caveat every time, depressingly, as the first response to anything I have to say about Authonomy is so frequently, 'that's just sour grapes cos you didn't get a contract', which isn't the case at all.)

At the time I left authonomy, I wrote:

We've never seen people - even the editors who review the books are anonymous. I'm sure HC thinks its being terribly funky and Web 2.0, but it's not. It's missed the first rule of these types of engagements with a community. Foster a community, be part of a community, engage with the community. HC hasn't, because it doesn't respect that community enough... Many people have had enough of being treated like the carvers in front of Gormenghast - even more so when it's become clear that the Groans don't want any of our carvings.

I liked the Gormenghast analogy so much I used it again in this post on the future of publishing, in which I pointed out that:

With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop.

The changes that Harper Collins are making to authonomy will refocus the site, the company says, on that idea of rewarding quality rather than the messy cronyism, begging and whoring that has come to characterise the site. As Harper's blog post says:

In recent months, we'll admit that the site has been suffering from a kind of 'vote inflation' where support was given (or traded) very freely and as a result the rank of all books has been somewhat cheapened... We want the charts to mirror more accurately a community consensus, and for the feat of reaching an editor to be based on something other than months of superhuman networking effort. 

That's great, but I can only hope that my silly little voice (and others like me) got heard to some degree in the hallowed halls of Harper Collins: 


A site like that needs the active participation in the community of the organisation behind it. With sincerity that wins the trust of the community. You cannot run online communities, you have to be part of them. You have to accept the principle that you give up ownership in favour of participation. Putting up a patronising blog post every week or so from an editor, or the occasional forum intervention from an unnamed contributor in response to critical threads is not really what Web 2.0 is about, is it? Even the critiques on Authonomy are from unnamed editors. But then my argument is that it was never about critiques.

(that extract from my post on Eoin's blog)

Part of the problem has been, I am quite sure, 'old world thinking' - it's something we come across professionally pretty much every day these days - companies bring us in to consult on social media, digital and community programmes and want someone to provide the content and populate the profiles/communities for them because their own key staff are doing more important stuff, like talking to clients and partners - but the whole point about this stuff  is that it's not an ad campaign. You can't just book it and walk away from it, it's all about engagement and talking to people using new tools and a new degree of accessibility. Sure, it involves being exposed, taking some responsibility and actually engaging with customers and other stakeholders. But those concepts are core to this stuff, not peripheral. You need to be there yourself - just getting some developers or an agency to do it won't work. And running a community site with faceless camp guards policing it won't work either.

If the changes to Authonomy include Harper Collins' editors actually engaging in the site, being named members and helping authors, influencing debate, mentoring work they believe to be of merit, being kind to work that is fifth rate and telling authors, gently, that this is the case - wouldn't that be wonderful? If real world editors actually were part of the community, if books that rose to the top were taken, for instance, into a manuscript development program similar to the Hachette program that got my pal Phillipa Fioretti into print, wouldn't Authonomy very quickly become THE place for any aspiring author to go? Wouldn't it give Harper first dibs on pretty much every emerging talent in the world today?

Yes it would. 

The one thing Authonomy has ever lacked has been the active community participation of the people that created it. If that's about to change, it could be very big news indeed for publishing. And I would welcome it with open arms - it would become what I believed Authonomy was to start with - a vital, energising response from the publishing industry that embraced and leveraged the powerful democratisation of the Internet. 

Sunshine, you are my Sunshine

Image by higlu via Flickr
Went for a routine checkup recently as I mentioned the other day. One interesting result from this (apart from the news that I am going to live, apparently) was that I have vitamin D deficiency. It's not quite rickets, but the Doktor has given me some vitamin D bombs to bring me levels back up.
Why should I even bother sharing this mundane detail? Because it is apparently widespread here, so much so that health check-ups didn't used to include it as a routine test and now do. I watched others being prescribed the same supplement down at the pharmacy, so that gives us anecdotal evidence that a) there is a genuinely widespread incidence of vitamin D deficiency or, possibly b) there's a company making vitamin D supplements that pays whopping backhanders to doctors that prescribe them. Given the pills weren't hugely expensive, I'm going with a). And yes, I know I'm cynical.
Vitamin D is not, apparently, really a dietary thing. Your main source of the stuff is sunlight - it's synthesised by the skin in unfiltered sunlight and doctors recommend that you be exposed to something like 15 minutes' sunshine a day. Allowing that two minutes in the current heat and humidity would render you a gasping, sweaty heap, it's no surprise to find that we're none of us* getting enough sunlight and so many of us in the UAE and, presumably elsewhere in the GCC, have low vitamin D levels..
Low vitamin D levels won't cause you to break out in blotches or grow extra fingers, but it will over time affect the health of your bones and can lead to osteoporisis and other brittle/weak bone conditions later in life.
When was the last time you had yours checked?

* Apart from the labourers, of course, who are likely getting plenty of the stuff, although precious little else...

People Above The Place

There used to be a sign on the jail by the Dubai Petroleum building in Jumeirah that read something like, 'The Person Above the Place'. It always struck me as a tad odd in that context, a little like putting 'Arbeit Macht Frei' on the front of a concentration camp, although it's nothing like as strange as the heading on Dubai Police's website, 'O, mindly people consider', which has always rather tickled me.

I interviewed prominent Emirati businessman Ali Al Bawardi some years ago and recall being struck at the time by his assertion that all too often, businesses here invested in the place over the people - throwing up world class infrastructure but then bringing in cheap, unqualified and under-empowered people to operate that infrastructure, often with poor management to oversee them. Result: world class infrastructure that doesn't work very well.

It's a thought that came to mind over the weekend as a routine checkup once again brought me into contact with the excellent medical staff, superb facilities and bumbling, plodding administration of the American Hospital in Dubai.

It's an odd type of materialism, this belief in the solidity and value of physical infrastructure rather than human capital. In part, it must be driven by the transience of the human component - you don't invest in people or develop them, you just buy them in when you need them. Because they're only temporary, they're not trusted (and only trusted staff are empowered staff) and so they are forced to conform to rote systems and have no power to deal with any eventuality that falls outside that system.

This is all very fine and dandy, but we're left to deal with the result of this process as it gazes at the screen, drooling and clicking away listlessly, trying to avoid coming to the moment when it has to look up and accept that yes, they've goofed everything up and no, there's nothing that can be done.

Re-intermediation

Image by Daniel Wilder via Flickr
I often speak at conferences, workshops and things and rarely miss the opportunity to laud Emirates Airline, typically using it as an example of advocacy (the fourth step in communication, wake up at the back). I advocate Emirates passionately - it has long been my airline of strong preference.

Perhaps interestingly, EK has my loyalty despite its customer loyalty scheme, Skywards, rather than because of it. For some reason Skywards always manages to make me feel like a beggar. I will never forget my first attempt to redeem airmiles, which resulted in me being thrown out of the business class queue at QAIA in Jordan and told to queue in economy (the upgrade they had confirmed to me wasn't on the system), turning to find one of my clients standing behind me and witness to my seeming pathetic attempt to scab an upgrade I wasn't entitled to. And I will never forgive them for the fact that we should have been checking into Emirates' rather lavish and wonderful Al Maha desert resort this afternoon for Sarah's birthday, but will be going out to dinner instead.

Skywards ticks all the right boxes - it's got a funky website, has lots of 'rewards' and is pleasingly automated - to the point where it's not really a hassle and can even provide the occasional pleasant surprise.Similarly, it can also let you down totally and really screw things up. The latter is a shame, but it's made even worse by the high levels of automation that Skywards employs. When the going gets tough, you get re-intermediated.

I have often wittered on about dis-intermediation, the phenomenon whereby technology removes the middle man and gives us direct access to the stuff we want. It's something I have come to think of as an empowering process - I can research and book my own holiday online, for instance, rather than depending on a travel agent. Similarly, you can buy music online rather than have to go to a shop and buy a CD.

Dis-intermediation is not only empowering for the end user, it also cuts out 'gatekeepers' - the people who sit in the middle and make choices for us - it's the threat hanging over the heads of record companies, publishers and newspaper proprietors. The democratisation of consumer choice, Internet advocates will queue up to tell you, is a positive benefit of technology.

But technology has introduced a new class of intermediary: the call centre. The thinking goes something like this: "Our staff are beings of pure energy who have jobs to do and can't be constantly interrupted by base, carbon based life-forms. Let's outsource talking to our customers and then our people can get on with doing useful things that make us money."

This is why you can't actually speak to anyone who works in your bank's branch anymore, why a call to your London telco routes you to Bangalore and why someone sitting in front of a terminal in Cairo is looking through your credit card statement 'to try and help you resolve this, sir'. These are the re-intermediators, the new middlemen.

So when Skywards fails to make the booking at its Al Maha Desert Resort and Spa despite the failure being clearly and wholly on their part, the people responsible for the booking suddenly fail to respond to emails. Your only recourse is to the call centre, which is staffed by people that can't actually do anything, they can only route requests over the system. They can tell you that they're sorry (how awful, to have to be constantly sorry for others' mistakes) but they can't actually let you talk to anyone responsible. They're the new front line troops, the poor saps that have to sit in a soulless room filled with other operators, being abused by irate people while the incompetent buffoons who are screwing things up never even hear the howls of agony from frustrated, unhappy customers and obviously feel completely free to totally ignore any other form of communication.

The technology that is empowering us is also disempowering us, taking away our choices and our right to expect people executing transactions on our behalf to respond to us and for them to take some sort of responsibility for their actions. And while automating customer service is no bad thing 98% of the time, there surely has to be a better way of dealing with the 2% of instances where rote, scripts and process will not do the job. It's one of the reasons why companies using Twitter as a customer service tool are finding they are met with an initial wave of frustrated customers and then a collective sigh of relief followed by cheering. We just need someone to take some sort of responsibility and fix the mess that's making us unhappy.

We're all missing a human to talk to.

Hiked

Image by Qiao-Da-Ye賽門譙大爺 via Flickr
Sharjah taxi fares are on the rise again - today's papers  carry the joyous news that a minimum fare of Dhs10 will now apply for any taxi journey and that the tariff will increase from Dhs1 per 650 metres to Dhs1 per 620 metres. The reason is, apparently, the franchise companies (who always seem to get cited when the fares are raised rather than Sharjah Transport, the body that is responsible for deciding the hikes).

The Dhs10 minimum charge has been in place in Dubai for some time, but it does seem a tad odd that in Sharjah we are now going to pay a minimum of Dhs10 for any journey when, back in the good old days of yore, private taxis were regulated to having to accept Dhs5 for any journey within the emirate. Ah, the good old days of yore, eh?

Sharjah Transport told Gulf News and others that the rises in the petrol price were to blame, which isn't unreasonable given that fuel prices have gone up by something like 25% this year (based on my Dhs80 going up to Dhs100 to fill up da Paj at ADNOC). However, this is the second price hike this year, the tariff used to be Dhs1 per 800 metres - and with drivers' fuel expenditures and empty/fare ratio carefully capped and monitored by the franchise companies, the new price rises should more than offset any fuel price rises.

Interesting, perhaps, that the anecdotal evidence of regular cabbie Mr G is that it's the bus services that are hurting more than the fuel price hikes. With the merry little yellow Brazilian 'Busscar' buses steadily plying their routes all over Sharjah for no more than a handful of coins, many people have been opting for public transport. With these rises, you could only draw the conclusion that more will join them and the drivers are going to get squeezed even harder.

I can't see the normally somewhat lugubrious Mr G being too happy about this one...

Spangles

Image by Johnny Grim via Flickr
The tradition of scattering little pieces of glass all over the roads during Ramadan sadly seems set to continue this year. Driving past a smashed car on the Deira side of Business Bay bridge this morning, the driver apparently alive but nursing a nasty nosebleed, I was only surprised that it was the first major accident I have actually witnessed in the first days of this long, hot fast. I know it won't be the last - in fact, three people have already died on Dubai's roads in the first three days of Ramadan.

This Ramadan is a trial indeed - the Fajr prayer which commences the fast takes place at around 4.30am and Maghrib, the prayer that marks Iftar, the breaking of the fast, takes place at around 6.50pm - so people are fasting for something a little over fourteen hours a day. The fast means that nothing may pass your lips, so we're talking no eating, drinking (no, not even water) or smoking. When the ambient temperature's creeping into the mid forties (that's 110F to Americans), fourteen hours is long, long time. And it's debilitating - as the days pass, the cumulative effect on people's systems is plain to see.

A road full of tired, distracted and physically weakened drivers means that everyone has a huge additional duty of care - not only those fasting, but those who are not but who could give their fellow drivers a little more leeway than usual.

Dubai's Road and Transport Authority has launched an awareness campaign designed to highlight the extra care that drivers should take in Ramadan, which appears to consist of some leaflets (according to this story in Gulf News) and using the traffic information system displays. The need for these huge and no doubt expensive displays have long mystified me, although I'm sure I'm alone in thinking of them as Mostly Pointless. Everyone else no doubt likes the occasional aphorism, national day greeting and, very occasionally, advice that the traffic is slow - usually the only entertainment while waiting in the tailback stretching under the sign.

Today's message reads, in English, "Take care of other's fault" - and yes, I am so small-minded as to complain about the illiterate rendering of the message. Whether you should be exhorted to take care of others' faults or looking to take more care yourself is also worthy of debate.

But a few leaflets and a wonky message are simply not enough. Between the tolls and fees it raises, the RTA must surely have the resources to launch a serious public awareness campaign that could at least have a chance of alleviating this awful and totally avoidable carnage.

One component of it could be a concerted effort to create a strong moral climate condemning the fools putting others' lives at risk when they dash carelessly home for Iftar, seemingly convinced for some reason that they are rendered temporarily immune from the consequences of their selfishness.

The UAE BlackBerry Ban: Barmy

Image via Wikipedia

Why does all the fun happen when I'm away? Woke up today to the news that the UAE is to block BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry web-browsing following a ruling by telecom regulator the TRA.

Gulf News online reports the story, which WAM broke today as far as I can see from over here. The National's story is here. Etisalat has made a statement which includes the immortal words, "BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation."

Oh, the LOLs, from a country where all requests to browse the web are immediately referenced to, errr, foreign, commercial organisations. Unless something's changed since the McAfee acquisition, US security company Secure Computing used to parse all searches to make sure that we weren't being exposed to all the naughtiness and stuff that's out there. We weren't so shy about 'foreign commercial organisations' then, were we folks?

BlackBerry customers were, infamously, not subject to the arbitrary restrictions of the block list. Many will remember the furore that erupted, extensively discussed on this very blog, which appeared to be a muckle-headed attempt on the part of the Telco That Likes To Say Ugh, Etisalat, to cludge security software intended for other purposes into an attempt to introduce surveillance and monitoring capabilities to the otherwise hard to intercept BB.


It's interesting for telecom regulation watchers that the customer is to be harmed extensively as a result of this move by a regulator, a class of organisation that is everywhere in the world tasked with holding the customers interests as one of its primary goals. The Telcos are being forced to breach their compact with their users (The vast majority of people bought BlackBerrys precisely with this very functionality as their primary reason for buying in) and tens of thousands of devices have been rendered basically unfit for purpose overnight.

I look forward to this move being 'clarified'. As it stands, it's yet another attempt to bomb ourselves back into the digital stone age. The madness of it all is that nothing has changed about the BlackBerry or the way in which the device works - and nothing has changed (correct me, please, if I'm wrong) in the 'moral and cultural' environment, or indeed the regulatory environment, since the BB was first introduced to the UAE - it has always worked using the company's own servers which underpinned the very services that CrackBerry users find so very appealing. If you can't live with it now - you shouldn't have sold it to us back then.

Will customers be offered refunds for the now barely functional hunks of black and chrome plastic they hold in their hands? Or will Etisalat and Du be offering free plastic covers that say 'I am browsing happily. Carry on as normal.'???

PS: In a move that appears to highlight that this move is being prompted by security concerns more than anything else, WAM has published an odd document that purports to 'compare the existing telecom regulations of the US, UK and UAE' but which is actually something of a 'dossier' that appears intended to justify the idea that a regulator can just turn around and delete a service being accessed by tens of thousands of consumers. It's a long read, but it's here.

Right. I'm going back on holiday...