Ismail Dhorat » UAE

Why is shaunokes.com banned in the UAE?

Ismail Dhorat — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:07:00 +0000

So, I innocently followed the top most link on muti hot and i get thrown this:

“The page you are trying to access may contain content that is not consistent with the moral, social and cultural values of the UAE” Does the site contain pr0n? Hate speech? Hacking? What? If you know respond in the comments!

Access Denied in the UAE, Dubai

Ismail Dhorat — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:27:00 +0000

Somethings seriously wrong with internet access in the UAE, majority of the sites that i click through throw up the following error.

Publish Post

“Access Denied (license_expired)

A license has expired on the Proxy, and your request is not permitted: “The SGOS license has expired”

A new license must be obtained.”

It seems that someone forgot to pay the licensing fee’s for the proxy thats being used to control access to the internet. Some sites are working fine though, for example Google, Gmail, Google Reader, Facebook, Plurk, muti, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch.

Sites that i have tried that do not seem to be working, Twitter, ping.fm, The Economist, Wikipedia, IOL, Wired and several other blogs that i access.

Get the 3G Iphone without a 2 year contract, Cheaply

Ismail Dhorat — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:11:00 +0000

So, you waited up, sat at your computer and eagerly awaited the news on the 3G IPhone. You have drunk the cool aid:

You cant wait to get your hands on your iPrecious….

But the launch date is only the 11 July. You have to wait a month more if you are in one of the 21 countries, what if you want to get your hands on the phone and you happen to live in the countries that are not part of the list or you want an iPhone without a 2 Year contract? What if you cant wait?

The price of the 8GB is set to $199 with a 2 year contract, so expect the prices of phones without a contract to be much higher. There have been discussions on twitter that the price may be as high as it was for the first IPhone 4000-5000 AED(R8000/R10000) in places like South Africa and UAE. Well i am going to tell you how to get it at the normal retail price without being ripped off (Just between us ok?) .

Some major shipping companies have a service(often not well advertised) where you pay an initial sign up fee and they allocate you an Address/P.O Box in any country(i.e US/UK). They then monitor that mailbox for you, collect the mail and ship it to your normal mailing address.

So as an example, here in the UAE i could pay 40 AED(+-R80) per year, i get an Address in the US. They charge +- 200 AED(R400) per 500G to ship whatever arrives at that mailbox in the US to me.

Signup for the service with an address for a country which has an existing apple online store(i.e US/UK). Use the address given to you by the shipping company to order your brand new 3G iPhone. The shipping company will handle the rest. Some of the companies even insure your mail as well as giving you a shipment tracking number. (You can also use the same address to sign up for an Itunes store account if your country is not supported)

What about the 2 year contract you ask? Well, when you buy through apples online store, and you are a new customer they send you an AT&T sim card. You are are supposed to use the sim card to Activate and sign-up for the contract once you receive your phone. (Which you don’t necessarily need to do)

So if you are in a country which does not even have a deal yet like the UAE or South Africa where the phone will be reserved for 2 year contracts and do not feel like being tied down with a contract and do not feel like paying high prices, take a look at this option.

P.s This is based on current online ordering process for the iPhone, which may or may not change.
P.P.S This method could also be used to order electronic items that Amazon and online companies do not ship out of the US.

****** Update 7: The following countries sell the 3g iPhone officially unlocked South Africa, Italy & Hong Kong.

****** Update 6: The following countries sell the 3g Iphone without a contract (Prepaid) South Africa, Italy & Hong Kong, UK.

This means, if you purchase the 3G Iphone that is officially unlocked and without a contract from South Africa, Italy or Hong Kong, it can be used in any country.

***** Update 5: It seems O2 UK, will be offering it on prepaid, however no pricing announced. I think this would be a good step however i suspect the way things are in South Africa, Vodacom may try to milk as much as they can out of the hype and keep it ‘exclusive’ so you have to take out a High End/Costly package. If they do, You could still use the method in this post to order it from O2 UK.

**** Update 4: Engadget is also reporting in-store activation

And yes… Another update

*** Update 3:
Reading the comments at Gizmodo, it seems some people state its not required to activate the phone in store you can still activate online and order online. The instore activation for apple stores is a new option offered to customers. Lots of conflicting stories, the best is just wait it out and see what the order process is when it launches.

** Update 2:
According to Gizmodo, Penalties will be applied if not activated within a specified time frame, and it will only be available for activation in store. So it seems they have changde the process, though until the launch we can never know for sure and i will update here once i get more details.

*UPDATE 1:
According to one of my plurk friends, if you dont activate the phone within 30 days they penalize you by charging your credit card.
However:
firstly, this would be illegal unless they informed you in advance and 2nd, this method was used to import the original Iphone with no penalties. Monitor this plurk post to see if there are any updates.

The reason behind Apple Iphone shortages & the business model

Ismail Dhorat — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:54:00 +0000

There have been numerous reports of iphone shortages in Apple stores in the US. Check out news24 for the latest article on this or this article which speculated the shortages were due the launch of a 3G version. The main reason seems to be unexpected demand from the grey market (Imported via improper channels) and a large portion of these phones are displayed in stores here in Dubai.

The owner in this store even put a little sticker on the boxes with contact details and ‘distributed by’. I asked him if he could get me 100, he said he would need two weeks. I wonder if Apple stores in the US can match that?

Suddenly everyone seems to have an Iphone, everyone seems to be walking around with those signature white buds in their ears.

This though does come with its problems other then Apple stores with out stock. Take into consideration that most people are buying the phone on the grey market knowing the following:

- There is no support or warranty
- The battery cannot be changed and has to be sent back to Apple, without it being bought via the official channels this could possibly mean the phone cannot be used if the battery is faulty in the phone or recharge cycles being used up
- You have to ‘unlock’ / ‘hack’ the software everytime a new update is released
- Uncertainty if a particular update will brick your phone

Yet people are still buying the phone. Apple has created such a brilliant phone that even people who dont own Macs, ipods and are not Apple fanatics are jumping at the chance to pick one up. Even with no advertising or marketing.

When you consider the business model used in the US / UK, exclusivity and the operator paying Apple for each new customer, you realise this model may not work everywhere. Lets take a look at some of the reasons:

- AT&T pays Apple for customer acquisition. Now consider a case like the UAE, where mobile penetration is in excess of 110% (People have more then one phone) there is no reason to use the phone to drive customer acquisition. Also in most other parts of the world there are a few operators with significant market shares who do not need exclusivity with a particular handset to drive market share like AT&T did.

- Operators tend to subsididze mobile phones, even offering them practically at no charge. With the additional costs, the model of subsidizing the handset fully by operators is unlikely.

- With the demand for grey market iphones, operators are receiving the benefit of increased data usage without any payout to Apple. They could also capitalize on this market by offering a flat fee on data usage without ever signing up for a deal with Apple.

- The mobile market has been plagued for years with unlocking, operators subsidize handsets the customer signs up for the contract, unlocks the phone and stays on his original network. Also to date there has never been phone that was not successfully unlocked within a short space of time. The battle against the unlockers is a loosing one.

- Every manufacturer out there is planning an Iphone Killer, and if the handset is just as good without the Apple business model who do you think operators will choose?

All of this makes a deal with Apple very unattractive, hence my statement in this post about Apple needing a more attractive business model. They need to rethink their business model in the rest of the world. Especially if they want to achieve a healthy market share in the mobile market and knock the likes of Nokia out.

How?

They could drop the entire business model of the operator paying them back for each acquisition as this does not make sense for an operator who already dominates the market. They concentrate on offering consumer services such as ITunes (Music,Applications & Conent). They should also integrate the phone more with the network, as they did with visual voicemail which is unusable in other parts of the world, an example would be location based services and content delivery.

With the release of the 3G iphone, they could offer Youtube / ITunes over 3G, making the deal more attractive and with this a revenue sharing agreement based on data usage of iphone users. Operators would also benefit as they could finally start seeing some ROI on their 3G roll out & licensing costs.

Now…. that would be a winning formula and when ill be investing in Apple stock.

Twitter banned in Dubai?

Ismail Dhorat — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:25:00 +0000

I was pretty surprised to find waiting in transit had a post on twitter being blocked in Dubai. He basically questions the authenticity of a post at techtree.

I personally just logged on to twitter this morning and as you can see i have been posting tweets regularly. However my internet is provided by Du and the post seems to refer areas covered by Etisalat.

Now, If it is in fact true, this is perhaps the silliest censorship i have ever seen due to the varied ways you can access twitter. As a last resort you could still use SMS. They would need to block sending SMS to the twitter number in the UK as well to achieve this, but i fail to understand WHY would they even want to?

If anyone has trouble accessing twitter let me know, i will be going out later and will test the site from one of Etisalats hotspots.

Free zones now face censored proxy

Ismail Dhorat — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:49:00 +0000

The run of uncensored internet enjoyed in UAE free zones is over. Today being the first day that the du proxy was switched on i wondered how long would it be before i received the dreaded error message for visiting a ‘Questionable site’.

After a ton of frantic sms this morning from friends with ‘Is (insert social networking/torrent) site working’, i decided i would test how long it would take for me to see the message below.

I logged onto blogger this morning to post some thoughts on twitter business models, read the first blog entry from blogger about a staff member leaving. Clicked the blog link and was served up with the dreaded message.

Basically the first link i followed this morning was blocked. I am curious to actually see why the content on this site is blocked as it seems like a personal blog. The confusing part though, The blog Secret Dubai Diary is blocked but not Sex and Dubai?

Now, considering this proxy will be affecting most of the ‘Free zones’ with all the big name media companies (CNN, BBC etc.) and Internet/Technology companies (Cisco, Microsoft, Google etc.) how will this be affecting their business? There are bound to be sites that should not be blocked or sites that are blocked but could be used for legitimate reasons. An example would be a security professional checking known hacking/exploit archives or a journalist visiting ‘Political/Terrorist’ sites. I am certain it will cause some amount of frustration amongst the companies based here and possibly even hamper some media companies.

If you have been to a web site for a legitimate purpose and was blocked, feel free to post a comment or link to your blog post. You could also send an email to safesurf@du.ae to lodge a complaint.