ALKHOBAR, 1 October — My disdain for Saudi Telecom Company is well known. In the past I wrote time and time again about the misery this company has caused to its grudging subscribers. It got to the point that I felt like I was constantly beating my head on the wall and my blood pressure maxed-out whenever I heard the letters STC. So for a while, I have been quiet, out of concern for my health.

But now I must take up my megaphone once again and shout about the load of misinformation the company is currently shoveling out to the citizens and residents of this fine land. A few weeks ago STC started a massive advertising campaign with the slogan, “Once again... we reduced our prices.” I must ask, “So what?”

It is a terrible pity but just a 30-minute drive from my office there are people paying significantly lower prices for their international telephone calls than I am. For years I have wished that the Kingdom’s Eastern Province could cede from STC and join up with Batelco’s network in Bahrain. We are prevented from doing so by certain legal restrictions, the wisdom of which I do not wish to discuss.

I was in Bahrain when Batelco published their new international direct dial (IDD) prices and the next day it was STC’s turn to do the same. I rushed out that morning to get a newspaper, hoping to see STC advertising new rates similar to Batelco’s. For clarity on this issue it is important to note that the exchange rate of Bahraini dinar to Saudi riyal is BD1 = SR9.9670. For the purposes of quick comparison, just use SR10 = 1 dinar or even better, BD .100 = SR1.

Let’s check out the new rates together. All rates given are the peak rate per minute. India STC SR4.50 Batelco BD.320. Pakistan STC SR4.50 Batelco BD.380. UK STC SR3.80 Batelco BD.250. USA STC SR3 Batelco BD.250. Germany STC SR5 Batelco BD.300. Italy STC SR3.80 Batelco BD.330. France STC SR3.80 Batelco BD.300. Philippines STC SR4 Batelco BD.320. Egypt STC SR3.80 Batelco BD.270. Yemen STC SR3.80 Batelco BD.270. GCC STC SR2.20 Batelco BD.200.

I think everybody gets the idea here. That being the case, go and beat your head on the wall, because there is nothing else you can do about this situation. If by any chance you are a supporter of lost causes, then visit stc.com.sa and in the right side menu click “feedback” and type in your complaint about these miserable price reductions. My only comment to Batelco is that in their call rate schedule, they listed Alaska and Hawaii separately from the United States — even though the rates for all three were the same. The last time I checked, these two locations were part of the United States.

Now, let’s move on to some more amusing stuff. I read a fascinating article about Linux, which was posted at ZDNet.com. The editorial by Charles Cooper was called, “Microsoft Spying? Linux is looking better.” Cooper is the executive editor of commentary at CNET News.com. The article was discussing that for a variety of reasons Linux is being viewed very favorably in China. It also mentioned that the German government signed a deal with Linux vendor SuSE over the summer and that the British government is also considering “open-source software alternatives to Microsoft because it’s concerned about getting locked into using proprietary applications.” While this is all very interesting, the phrase I loved most in the entire article was “operating system agnostic.” This means not choosing an operating system based on whose it is, but rather on whether it makes sense for the job. What a concept! I wonder when businesses and organizations in the Kingdom will open their minds to such an efficient, cost-effective idea?

Next, I found an article that made me laugh for days. Most of us have received those e-mails from shysters in Africa telling us that we can share in all the millions of dollars that are owed to them if we will just ante up a little cash to pay the fees to get the money out of some bank. I wondered what person on this planet could be crazy enough to believe such lies. Apparently there are some.

According to an article at wired.com, “How a bank got e-mail scammed,” by Michelle Delio, a secretary at a law firm in Berkley, Michigan, embezzled $2.1 million from her employer to assist in transferring $18 million from a bank in South Africa to the United States. Amazingly, her employer didn’t notice for seven months that the money was missing. Currently, both the secretary and the law firm’s bankers are facing legal action.

The scam, which is called Advance Fee Fraud, has been around for decades. Most of the scam attempts originate in Nigeria and the Nigerian government claims it is trying hard to clamp down on the criminals behind the fraud. According to the wired.com article, statistics presented at the International Conference on Advance Fee Frauds show that about one percent of the millions of people who receive the e-mails and faxes from advance fee con artists are successfully scammed. The article also stated that “annual losses to the scam in the United States total more than $100 million, and law enforcement officials believe global losses may total over $1.5 billion.”

P.T. Barnum said: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Unfortunately, he was so right.

And speaking of people who have been fooled, I went out to the 19th Communication and Computer Exhibition (CCE), which opened on Sunday at the Dhahran International Exhibition Center. A large group of exhibitors were there from Pakistan and I felt sorry for them. CCE is a shopper show and a small one at that. It’s nothing like the IT trade exhibitions held in Jeddah or Riyadh and it doesn’t get the massive number of business visitors that those shows attract. The exhibitors from Pakistan were basically either educational institutions looking for students or businesses in search of investment. CCE is the wrong place to promote either activity.

One good thing I will say about CCE is that I love the exhibition’s timings. When I called and asked about the “family hours,” I was told that the show didn’t have “family hours.” It only has “normal hours” for everyone. I wish that in the future all exhibitions anywhere in the Kingdom would have “normal hours,” with everyone welcome. That said, if I were the owner of a small IT business in the Eastern Province, I would definitely be unhappy about CCE. There is nothing on sale at CCE that can’t be bought on the local market, except that at CCE the products are being sold for 15-40 percent less. Large consumer-focused vendors brought in big quantities of a limited number of low-cost items for the show plus they are selling off old stock.

Some large resellers and distributors such as Samir Kodak, Abdullah Fouad and Waseet are able to afford the costs both financially and otherwise, to participate in CCE. However, the cutthroat nature of the consumer market for IT products these days means margins are slim and consequently it would be unprofitable for small IT businesses to take a stand at CCE. And yet, the exhibition itself will probably impact the sales of small IT vendors over the coming months. CCE creates a lose-lose situation for small computer shops in the Alkhobar-Dammam area and their owners should let their discontent be heard loudly at the chamber of commerce and the Ministry of Commerce.

Before I leave you this week, since I obviously got up on the wrong side of the bed today and this column is already full of complaints, let’s have one more. Take the time to read a truly incredible report titled, “Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia,” by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman produced under the auspices of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School. It is an excellent piece of research. I only wish that one of our Saudi professors had authored it. Find it at cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/.

According to the abstract of the report, the authors connected to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia and attempted to access approximately 60,000 web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to some requested web pages; the authors tracked 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. The authors concluded that the Internet Services Unit (ISU) actively filters and restricts substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit web content for Internet users within the Kingdom, with much of this content consisting of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world.

I’ve long suspected that the Internet Services Unit at King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology was protecting me from more than online pornography. Now I need to find out what could possibly be so harmful at an ISU blocked site such as the Women in American History section of Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

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