Over the last year and half a lot of companies and specifically telecom companies have gotten heavily into all types of social media. They are active on blogs, in events, facebook, and twitter and other platforms that they can expand on. I’m honestly proud that these companies see the value of social media in Kuwait and its strength, we are ahead in the region on this aspect and we keep moving forward which is a good thing.

It feels like more companies are taking social responsibility and they are giving people more direct access to them and it helps resolve issues. Also it does expose them to more criticism which most companies don’t like, and there are those who don’t care at all. Now a lot of companies, especially the Telecom companies have been sponsoring blogs which is a good step, it supports the community and it gives them an air of legitimacy. But then also brought another creature to evolve which are the Blogs For Cash movement, they make blogs just to sell off ad space and make money, and usually they don’t last too long or their content is crap but still they keep popping up.

Now Telcos are getting more and more involved with lots of events, I keep seeing people post about them and I do get invited but 99% of the time I don’t have time to go and other 1% I would rather do other things. They are handing out iPhones like they are candy and pretty much the next hot item, which is great and good for people to review and experience their service. But recently a lot of these gifts and sponsorship come with strings, string that I for one would never accept. At this point they tell you can talk about their competitor, you can’t attend their events, and you can’t really bad mouth their products. When the money comes with strings such as those I wouldn’t want it no matter how much they are offering. Whats funny is that recently I have noticed blogs which are Team Zain, or Team Wataniya, or Team Viva some keep trying to buy out the other. In reality it isn’t a bad thing but when they interfere with the content to this degree its unacceptable and its a very bad path they are choosing, some still don’t apply it but some companies are. At the end it is the choice of the blog to make the decision of which sponsor they would like on board.

What Happened To Me:
The last few days my site was acting weird and then the second day it tried to redirect me to some Russian site which then got flagged by my Google Chrome browser as malicious code. I tried to figure out what was going on but didn’t know where to look, and my WordPress was just update so I wasn’t sure what was wrong with it. After a good hour of Googling and checking forums I would a few things to look for in the index page and several other pages but still I was getting redirected. After looking at a few forums I found Sucuri which is a company that does exactly what I was looking for it identifies and monitors websites using any time of platform, and in my case WordPress, and they help you remove the malicious code.

What is Sucuri and What Do They Do:
The Sucuri Web Integrity Monitor detects unauthorized changes to your websites, DNS, Whois and SSL Certificates. They Scan your web site for malware, virus, spam and many other security issues. Even if your using WordPress, Joomla or Mediawiki. With the support

What I Did:
I found some scripts here and there, and deleted them but they were still all over the place. After a good amount of Googling I found that Sucuri is one the good Malware monitors and removal services for a very reasonable price, for $90 a year they monitor and update your site after 3 hours and if something is wrong you just submit a ticket and they get right to it. After giving them my login information and my ftp information I sent my trouble ticket for Malware removal since I couldn’t find it all myself and Chrome was still flagging my website and trying to install malicious software from a Russian website. AFter submitting the ticket and a set of questions I got an email back about 4 to 5 hours later with an update on all the areas that were cleared and that we are good to go and I have not been blacklisted by any website yet which is fantastic. Honestly I recommend anyone who faces a malware issue to get Sucuri right away and let them handle, they did a fantastic and smooth job with me.

Next Steps After Clean Up:

• Update All Your Website Software – Which They Were Thanks To Jacqui
• Change Your Website Login Passwords – Making Them Even More Complex To The Point I Might Forget Them

Link: Sucuri

The story follows two young security guards who work at an unusual corporation, and they end up having one hell of a bad night fighting off and destroying the dangerous monsters that the Corporation engineers.

An awesome short sci-fi film called Cost of Living, written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski. This great little movie stars Brandon Routh (Superman Returns, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and Bret Harrison (Reaper, Breaking In), it has this gritty feel to it with a touch of comedy and serious at the same time, and a lot of sarcasm, I loved it.

Link: GeekTyrant

Over the last year there has been a dramatic change with the telecommunication companies and luckily in Kuwait we have companies changing and increasing their services. I have had extensive experience with several companies over the past 18 months, some have been very good, some have been bad, and some disastrous. These are my rankings based on my experience, data usage, and customer service. I have left out pricing since all the wired companies are offering the same price and the rest can be found out easily. This isn’t a comparison based on price but based on experience and service level. I broke down the categories into two, one is based totally on speed and connectivity, and the other is based on interaction with the sales and customer support.

WIRED
Data Connectivity

• Fasttelco
• Qualitynet
• Kems
• GulfNet

Customer Service

• Fasttelco
• QualityNet
• Kems/GulfNet

Comments: Fasttelco has improved vastly over the last few years and what I like is that they keep trying to improve their customer service and improving themselves technically. QualityNet has gotten complacent since they got to the top, its like they are full and don’t feel like giving good customer service. Kems is pretty bad in my opinion because they still somewhat constrict usage from what I can see, and they insulted customers directly last year, complete slander and that is the worst for a company. GulfNet is still at the bottom of the barrel I don’t know how anyone can sign up with them, zero customer service and they blatantly lie about their services. Prices have been unified and connection speed is based on government services and not the ISPs, they can only work with what they have so really its based on consistent speed and customer service.

WIRELESS
Data Connectiivty

• WIMD
• MADA

Customer Service

• WIMD
• MADA

Comments: WIMD is brand new company but overall my experience has been very good with them even though its only been a few weeks. I hope they continue to maintain their services and speeds as they currently are, right now I am very happy with them. Right now their install schedule seems to be very slow since they were overwhelmed with requests from people but I think if you are patient with them you will be happy you installed their services. MADA was a great service when it initially started and they are genuinely trying to maintain their services, and for 20KD a month its relatively cheap for 10 MB but in reality you are getting a range from 2MB to 7MB these days. They got too many subscribers and their main towers are too sensitive in regards to your location, you have to be next to the window to get full signal and 2KM from the tower to get any speed, and any modification on their part can affect your speed drastically. Overall I think they are very good and hope that they improve their services.

MOBILE
Data Connectivity

• Viva
• Zain
• Wataniya

Customer Service

• Zain/Wataniya
• Viva

Comments: There has always been a scuffle going on between the three mobile providers in Kuwait, they are always in competition which is good for us. Over the last two years there has been some drastic changes in regards to services in the data field. When it comes to Voice Wataniya would be ranked by far at the top, then its Zain, and if you can get in more then 20 seconds into a phone call with Viva I would be surprised. When it comes to Data Viva threw all their money at it and have one of the best data networks, with Zain and Wataniya trailing behind them. Wataniya and Zain need to upgrade their data networks to deploy something faster and better reaching, and I hope at some point they both remove their Data Caps but I can understand it. As for Viva they got a lot of people to sign contracts and join them up with the unlimited package only to enforce a data cap and change the contracts without notification which is illegal in my opinion, I’m surprised nobody sued them.

Sometimes I’m paranoid as hell about my website and that something is slowing it down, but in reality I’m not really sure and its always a matter of trial and error. Recently I stumbled upon this testing tool from Pingdom, you enter your website and they give you the time to load, whats slowing it down, whats taking more resources to load, and lots of other details. You can see what is loading first and a variety of items which is very cool and keep on testing it every once in a while, I didn’t even realize my website is 1.8 MB worth of data to load back in the day that which is even more then a floppy disk. I liked how they organized the data and they let you organize the data, very useful free tool, and I keep getting 88/100 for my average score, not bad. Check out the tool linked below.

Link: Pingdom

I’m one of those people who are always skeptical about what companies say, so when WIMD was offering high speed wireless connectivity to homes I wasn’t sure what to expect from them. I spoke to an engineer and sales person, they basically said they would bring the equipment, connect it and try it out before they would bill me. The engineers came about 4 days later, they started installation, they had a few initial issues but after a few hours everything was ironed out. They use a consumer grade Cisco router that you can buy from any electronics shop like XCite in Kuwait but the Wireless Broadband is through Proxim.

They are using Wireless Broadband technology which has been tried and tested for a while now. It is excellent but there a few minor drawbacks, one of the major ones is that it isn’t consistent. So even if you have a 10 MB connection it can be 10 MB then drop to 4MB then back up to 8 MB then back to 10MB again, its just the reality of the Wireless Broadband Solution, but overall any speed even if it isn’t consistent is better then 1 MB. In my case it hit 20 MB so I went for the 20 MB package without a thought, I live off the internet and now I shall be very happy.

Requirements:

• Line Of Sight (Your house has to be visible to One of Their Towers)
• Close to a Tower (They have lots of Towers)
• You can mount a small tower to the exterior of the house

They are using Qualitynet as their backend provider, I think or hope they would expand on that. Now that people are starting to find out about them and they have coverage around Kuwait I hope they can still manage to provide the speeds they have promised even when their subscriber base increase dramatically.

Link: WIMD

Pricing:

• 6 MB – 325
• 7 MB – 355
• 8 MB – 390
• 9 MB – 473
• 10 MB – 523
• 11 MB – 590
• 12 MB – 660
• 13 MB – 730
• 14 MB – 800
• 15 MB – 870
• 16 MB – 940
• 17 MB – 1010
• 18 MB – 1080
• 19 MB – 1150
• 20 MB – 1220

Fasttelco has been going through some changes over the last 6 months and mostly for the good. One of thing they are doing that I like is that they are looking for creative Kuwaitis to joining their team and I like that they are looking for people with or without experience. Its good when companies such as these takes this step, and its the step in the right direction.

I only recently joined Twitter in April of 2011, a late baby boomer. And when I joined I felt lost in this huge realm of information not knowing what the hell was going on. But within a few months I figured out my way about and honestly I’m loving it. Different then the blog and you get to interact with people right away and get information quickly if you need it. Its like a burst of energy for me, and to me its an addition to what I do online. I do love blogging and I love what Twitter has introduced, and nobody can deny that it is a huge phenomenon in the region but I for one am enjoying it yet not taking things too seriously. A surprising thing that I heard recently is that we make up a small percentage of twitter but the more interesting part is that Kuwait makes up almost 20% of the activity of twitter in the region even though we are so little in comparison.

Now with all of this a lot of people use twitter for different reasons and in my opinion some people take it so seriously. I recently found a way to see who follows and unfollows me and I find it very interesting especially these bots that keep on following and unfollowing, and also people who unfollow, and thats about it for my interest. I recently had friend unfollow me and I called him up and told him that I caught him and laughed, he said he didn’t expect me to see that I did, he was somewhat embarrassed. I told him who cares I just found it funny and I was surprised that he didn’t unfollow, he said I tweeted too much! I just started laughing, but I realized that a lot of people really get insulted when you unfollow them when reality its nothing at all. Seriously with life online or offline people need to have thicker skin, this craze started with Facebook friend and unfriending, and now with the unfollow and follow, come on don’t take things too seriously.

@Z_District

GBI and FastTelco agreement – The agreement will provide FASTtelco with connectivity on routes both within the Gulf and onward to Europe. The GBI Cable System will provide FASTtelco with greater choice, value, diversity and resilience for their traffic.

Scheduled to it launch its operations at the end of 2011 and designed to operate for up to 25 years, the GBI cable system will connect to all the Gulf countries and provide onward connectivity to Europe and Asia. The cable system is designed around a core ring, which can re-route traffic thereby increasing resilience. With a design capacity of up to 5 terabits per second on certain cable sections, the GBI cable system will have the capability to meet the rapid growth in demand that has been forecast for traffic originating and terminating in Gulf.

For those who don’t know GBI or Gulf Bridge International is a multinational company established in the Gulf for the sole purpose of providing connectivity to all the international carriers and the Gulf Nations. Participating nations are Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iraq. Basically large amounts of fiber connected by all these countries so if the cable gets cut you still have connectivity and its like negotiating with these large providers but with a lot more users then one ISP and big ISPs in the US, Europe, and Asia.

I have seen Fasttelco vastly improve over the past two years and especially the last 9 months. I have been using them and very happy with their service, and especially since they were the first to remove those ridiculous Data CAPs from the ISPs. And now with this addition it will help maintain their service, increase their capacity and provide them with a fallback plan if the cable in Gulf Sea or Mediterranean gets cut since GBI has a lot of routes and connected to a lot of carriers.

I am very careful with my machines, I update them constantly and I do regular scans. Sometimes some software crashes or a machine crashes, that happens every once in a while. But I am very careful of what I install or download, so when something weird starts happening I go into lock down mode. The day before my machine was acting fine when the next day any website I enter gets redirect to “Yandex.ru/blahblahblah” I didn’t know why. Some websites would stay but regular websites get redirected.

Googling it on the infected machine was useless because it kept getting redirected so I used a different machine to Google if this happened to anyone. Turns out there is a hostile bot that hijacks websites and automatically redirects them to Yandex.ru which is a Russian search engine/mail provider.

First Step:

• Turn Off All Add-Ons on Firefox and Chrome
• Run AVG Virus Scanner & Windows Maleware Defender

Result:

• The scanners didn’t find anything and the websites didn’t find anything

Next Step:

• Update Windows, Firefox, Chrome, AVG Definitions, Windows Defender, Chrome & Firefox Add-Ons, Flash, & Java

Result:

• Still getting redirected

Next Step:

• Deleted All Cookies, Cleared All Forms, All History from Chrome, Firefox, & Internet Explorer

Result:

• Thing went back to normal

I won’t lie I was a bit freaked out after each step and I was getting pissed, I thought some random Russian was messing with me and I wanted to punch him. So these are the automatic steps that I took and luckily things cleared up. And usually if worse comes to worse, I would format the machine after trying everything, I would have gotten paranoid that somebody really got into it, but it didn’t reach that point.