afrotechie

A tale of two internet blockers.

In Ethiopia, you start suspecting your website has been blocked when it suddenly disappears from your screen. Your suspicion grows as you try to log on from different internet connections at different times of day, during weekends, public holidays - and the site is still gone. You don’t bother phoning Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp (ETC) to ask what has happened because you know what the monopoly operator will say - the official position remains that there is no online censorship in Ethiopia. You never really know for certain that you’ve been blocked because - given the state of ETC’s overloaded circuits - who knows, it might still be a technical glitch. But over time, as your site fails to reappear, you gradually accept that your site has been blocked. (At least this was the situation when I left the country earlier this year. Has anything changed?)

In Sudan, you know you site has been blocked when a big message fills your screen saying: “Sorry, this site has been blocked by National Telecommunication Corporation” (see image). It even gives you links to follow if you want to protest about the blockage or, better still, suggest other sites that deserve to be blocked. As censorship systems go, it is pretty open.

So why the difference?

The most obvious reason is that the two countries are blocking for different reasons.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) recently identified Ethiopia as the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to carry out widespread blocking (although Zimbabwe seems to be joining in now as well). In a report on the region it said:

ONI research has found that Ethiopia focuses its filtering primarily on political bloggers with oppositional views by blocking two major blog services, blogspot.com and nazret.com. This blanket ban of these blogging domains results in extraordinary overblocking, filtering thousands of Weblogs that have no relevance to politics or Ethiopia. In addition, the government blocks Web sites of opposition parties, sites representing ethnic minorities, sites for independent news organizations, and sites promoting human rights in Ethiopia.

Sudan, on the other hand, is one of a large collection of North African and Middle Eastern countries that blocks for cultural and religious reasons before political ones. According to OpenNet:

Most of the sites targeted for blocking are selected because of cultural and religious concerns about morality…Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen … not only extensively filter political content but also pervasively block content that is perceived to be religiously, culturally, or socially inappropriate.

Political blocking is something you do in secret - it is almost always a covert attack on your opposition enemies to undermine their support. That is why state-run Ethiopian Telecoms, despite open ridicule, sticks to its story that the disappearance of opposition blogs is just a very targeted “technical problem”.

Religious blocking is something you do out in the open - it is almost always a proud and principled stand against what you see as corrupting influences on the internet. That is why Sudan’s telecoms regulater practically boasts about its blocking.

So, one more puzzle. Why is the light-hearted and non-corrupting uber-blog Boing Boing blocked in Sudan (see pic), while it is open to all readers in Ethiopia?

That is to do with another difference between the two countries - a difference in the techniques they use to block websites.

Ethiopia, according to OpenNet, used a pretty ham-fisted approach. It goes to its servers and tells them to block access to websites linked to certain words like ‘blogspot’ or ‘nazret’. It is easy for ETC to do this. As the only operator in the country, it controls the only telecoms pipes in and out of the country. But the technique is a blunt instrument and very easy to circumvent. All you have to do is to move to another blogging platform - Wordpress for example - or buy your own web address. Ethiopia has to keep up with you by blocking each new name you choose. Boing Boing has survived so far simply because no one in ETC headquarters has thought of adding it to the list of blacklisted websites.

Sudan uses what is, on the surface, a more sophisticated technique. It uses commercial software, produced by U.S. companies like Secure Computing and Websense. According to OpenNet:

This software allows ISPs (internet service providers), often acting on the behest of governments, to filter lists of pages updated by the company, by category.

The trouble is that these filters are only as sophisticated as the people who set them up - i.e. not very. Here is Boing Boing itself on how it got blocked by Secure Computing’s SmartFilter product:

At fault in most of these cases is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn’t very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo’s David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a “nudity” site, which means that customers who block “nudity” can’t get through.

Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a “nudity” site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692 — that’s 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618 — 0.65 percent.

In fact, out of the 25,000+ Boing Boing posts classed as “nudity” by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They’re stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn’t wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.

So you picks your country and you takes your choice.

If you want to read Boing Boing’s posts on ukelele casemods, Bigfoot sightings, Lego constructions, vaginas and lobotomies, you’re fine in Ethiopia. If you want to keep track of opposition politics in Ethiopia, you had better stay in Sudan.

At the end of the day, it is good to know that those anonymous men, fine-tuning their servers in the back rooms of ETC and Sudan’s National Telecommunication Corporation, are out there protecting us from one kind of online nasty or another.

Technorati Tags: boing boing, sudan, ethiopia, censorship, africa

Categories : africa - all, africa - east, africa-north, blogging, censorship, ethiopia, internet, sudan // 3 Comments »

Hash of White African last week mourned the current poor state of African software development.

In a post titled The Quandry: Building Web Apps in Africa, he said:

While there is a need for region-specific applications, there is no reason why African developers cannot create global products.

Well, he won’t be cheered to read this interview between Balancing Act’s Russell Southwood and Joe Jackson , CEO of Ghana’s SOFTtribe. Jackson talks about the difficult decision to shift focus from developing home-grown Ghanaian software to becoming a reseller for tweaked versions of Microsoft products:

When we started in 1991 our dream was to sell our own products. The target was to create an ERP product for West Africa. We were going to build the components and put them together…

The first thing that changed was that IT purchasing decisions began to be made offshore…

Would you buy from a local software house? If I was in that position, I wouldn’t buy from me. The purchase of software is like a marriage. Divorce is very painful and if you have something well-known, you have something you can complain about.

We started to lose sales and what started as a trickle turned into a flood…

Categories : africa - all, africa - west, ghana, software // Add Comment »

Most people would think it was a bad thing to have poor customers. But in the African telecoms market, the low disposable income of mobile phone users is actually becoming a spur to innovation.

So what if up to a third of your customers can’t afford to buy top-up cards and overwhelm your circuits with “missed calls” to try and persuade their friends to call them back.

Your first step is to minimise the problem - see my article in the entry below on how mobile phone companies are coming up with a range of low-weight “call me back services” to stop their networks getting flooded with missed calls.

The second step is that you work out a way to encourage richer customers to pay for the calls of poorer customers. Balancing Act reports on a new service from SICAP called Pay 4 Me. This allows prepaid customers (i.e. most African mobile users) to make collect calls to richer friends. So you don’t have to count on the richer customer taking the trouble to call you back. You ask him or her there and then to accept the reverse charge of the call. And it doesn’t stop there reports Balancing Act:

Another innovative payment solution by Sicap is the 1-to-1 TopUp. It cuts out the voucher or “scratch card” system altogether, making the whole process of credit transfers electronic. The solution allows subscribers to pre-pay for airtime directly from other prepaid accounts, in small amounts. The creditor simply sends a USSD string or SMS with the amount to be credited to the subscriber account. Both parties are notified of the successful transaction and an updated account balance is provided to the customer by SMS. The cost for a reseller of handling an electronic credit transfer of very small amounts is much more financially viable than issuing vouchers of an equally small amount. For operators, physical prepaid voucher cards carry significant production, distribution and system management costs. It is hard to market a denomination low enough for users who get by on a day-to-day basis.

Categories : africa - all, mobile, telecoms // 2 Comments »

Here’s an example of a blog entry that grew into an article.

I would never have known that some Ethiopians call ‘missed calls’ ‘miskin calls’ if it hadn’t been for the comments on this old entry.

Thanks to Jonathan Donner for giving me an early glimpse of his paper “The Rules of Beeping”. See the full thing in the October issue of the online Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”

By Andrew Heavens

KHARTOUM, Sept 26 (Reuters) - If you are in Sudan it is a “missed call”. In Ethiopia it is a “miskin” or a “pitiful” call. In other parts of Africa it is a case of “flashing”, “beeping” or in French-speaking areas “bipage”.

Wherever you are, it is one of the fastest-growing phenomena in the continent’s booming mobile telephone markets — and it’s a headache for mobile operators who are trying to figure out how to make some money out of it.

You beep someone when you call them up on their mobile phone — setting its display screen briefly flashing — then hang up half a second later, before they have had a chance to answer. Your friend — you hope — sees your name and number on their list of “Missed Calls” and calls you back at his or her expense.

It is a tactic born out of ingenuity and necessity, say analysts who have tracked an explosion in miskin calls by cash-strapped cellphone users from Cape Town to Cairo.

“Its roots are as a strategy to save money,” said Jonathan Donner, an India-based researcher for Microsoft who is due to publish a paper on “The Rules of Beeping” in the high-brow online Journal of Computer Mediated Communication in October.

Donner first came across beeping in Rwanda, then tracked it across the continent and beyond, to south and southeast Asia. Studies quoted in his paper estimate between 20 to more than 30 percent of the calls made in Africa are just split-second flashes — empty appeals across the cellular network.

The beeping boom is being driven by a sharp rise in mobile phone use across the continent.

Africa had an estimated 192.5 million mobile phone users in 2006, up from just 25.3 million in 2001, according to figures from the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union. Customers may have enough money for the one-off purchase of a handset, but very little ready cash to spend on phone cards for the prepaid accounts that dominate the market.

Africa’s mobile phone companies say the practice has become so widespread they have had to step in to prevent their circuits being swamped by second-long calls.

“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”

…more

FACTBOX-Commandments of “beeping”

(Reuters) - “Beeping” — calling a contact on their cellphone then quickly hanging up to prompt them to call you back and spare you the charge — is one of the fastest-growing phenomena in Africa’s booming mobile telephone markets.

The following rules for the practice are extracted by Reuters from a forthcoming paper on the subject by researcher Jonathan Donner:

1. “The richer guy pays.” It is acceptable to beep someone if you are short of cash and they are flush with credit. Never beep someone poorer than you.

2. Do not beep too often. Two beeps in a row is just about acceptable if you want to request an urgent call back. Any more and you risk becoming a pest.

3. Maximise the efficiency of your beeping by prearranging shorthand codes with friends, family and contacts — for example, two beeps to be picked up by a taxi driver, one to say you are coming home.

4. Never beep someone if you are trying to get in touch to ask a favor. You don’t want to risk annoying the person you are trying to win over.

5. Never flash your girlfriend, unless you want to look cheap. One Rwandan interviewed for the paper said “No self-respecting man would dream of merely flashing his wife or girlfriend … Never mind the fact that it was Sugar Daddy himself who bought the phone and regularly buys her units.”

(Source: “The rules of beeping: Exchanging messages via intentional “missed calls” on mobile phones”)

© Reuters

Categories : africa - all, article, ethiopia, mobile, sudan, telecoms // 1 Comment »

Bright yellow banners sprang up overnight along the banks of the Nile then spread along the ten-lane highways and crowded market streets of Sudan’s traffic-clogged capital, Khartoum.

They were the first steps in a campaign by South Africa’s MTN to stake a claim in one of Africa’s last big undeveloped mobile phone markets.

Foreign investors have steered clear of Sudan in recent years, following the international uproar over the crisis in Darfur and subsequent strengthening of U.S. sanctions against Khartoum.

Britain’s Rolls Royce announced plans to pull out in April, joining Germany’s Siemens , Switzerland’s ABB and Canada’s CHC Helicopter in the queue to exit.

But the newly booming telecoms market in the oil-rich east African country has proved too tempting for mobile phone companies to resist. For them, the vast expanses of Sudan’s western Darfur region are not so much a disaster zone as one more unexploited mobile phone market waiting to be tapped.

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Categories : africa - east, article, infrastructure, mobile, sudan, telecoms // Add Comment »

Sudanese mobile company Mobitel urged the government on Sunday not to issue a further mobile phone licence, saying a new competitor might force it to reconsider a $690 million expansion plan.

Khaled Muhtadi, chief executive of Mobitel, wholly owned by Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co. (MTC) , told Reuters he had received reports that the country’s telecoms regulator was preparing to issue another nationwide licence in the next 12 months.

“If we are going to get competition from yet another mobile operator then that limits our appetite in terms of spreading aggressively as we are,” Muhtadi said. “We have shared our concerns with them. We have informed them [the decision] could backfire.”

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The morning after flying into Khartoum, I dropped into the nearest Mobitel store and signed up for one of their ‘eeZee’ accounts. Five minutes later, one sim card, one working account with - wait for it - a full texting service.

Five minutes walk away from our new house are at least two cafés bathed in the rays of free wireless broadband connections.

We are currently choosing between a domestic 512kbps ADSL connection or two Sudatel MDSL laptop cards, offering connection speeds of up to 2.4Mb/s.

Right now, I am on what appears to be a nationwide, free ‘Freenet’ dial-up service - no registration, no request for a pre-application covering letter from your employer with accompanying approval from your sponsoring government department, no password. Just a three-figure phone number that anyone can use and a passable 46.6Kbps connection. Fine for text. And - as far as I can tell - no blog blockage.

Unless you have spent several years living with the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation and all its works, all of this probably means very little to you. For someone who has spent several years with ETC, it all seems to be too good to be true. I had even forgotten how to text.

As soon as I get my head around Sudan’s new currency, I’ll tell you how much all of it costs. Broadly, it seems to be just a little bit more expensive than what you would get in the UK/Europe/US, but way, way cheaper than anything on offer in Ethiopia.

Categories : africa - east, blogging, broadband, ethiopia, internet, mobile, sudan, telecoms // Add Comment »

So I’m standing in line for a lukewarm chicken curry with Bono, Jane Goodall and Google gazillionaire Larry Page. [Sorry, the name dropping only gets worse from here on in.] And I’m asking myself one question.

It is about three years since we started living in Africa. Since then I have attended 40 to 50 special events and conferences on the continent covering everything from cross-border security and arms control to youth and developmental technology. The question is, why is this the only big set-piece event that I can think of that has not been a mind-deadening, life-consuming, jargon-spreading waste of everyone’s precious time?¹

The event in question was TEDGlobal 2007 – sub-title ‘Africa: The Next Chapter’. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and is usually a big-deal big-ideas conference in Monterey, California. From Monday to Thursday last week it traveled to Arusha, Tanzania.

It has taken this long to write about it for two main reasons. The first is that I spent almost all of the conference hiding behind a camera on the edge of the stage, more worried about getting the speakers in focus than in listening to what they had to say. The second reason is that even now I have caught up on the content (thank you Ethan and others) I am still struggling to take it all in.

There was simply so much of it. And even the bad speakers were worth listening to – who needs rhetoric when you’ve actually got something to say?

So why was this so good when almost everything else that happens in a conference hall in Africa – and lots of other places – has been so bad?

It is nothing to do with funding. African governments, UN bodies and big NGOs have deep deep pockets when it comes to ogranising prestige events in big conference halls.

Hardly surprisingly, the answer lies in the invite list.

TED programme director Emeka Okafor won’t be offended if I say that what he did was quite straightforward. He spends a big chunk of his time searching for African entrepreneurs and pioneers and mentioning them on his blog Timbuktu Chronicles. He picked his favourites, got some of them to stand on stage and give speeches and got the rest to sit in the audience, ask questions and go to all the events. And that was it. TEDGlobal 2007 was Timbuktu Chronicles made flesh.

So how does that differ from a typical tech conference here on the continent? Picture any of a dozen that have been hosted in Addis Ababa’s UN complex or African Union HQ over the past year or so. Imagine a parade of government officials and state-appointed telecoms execs spouting phony African proverbs and development platitudes. At the last one I went to, the keynote speaker spent an hour going through his ten priorities for African development – “Last but not least let us remember the need for capacity building…”. At the one before that, the event only came to life once a day after lunch, as people rushed to the front desk to receive their DSAs (daily subsistence allowances – the lifeblood of any UN-funded conference circuit).

The difference between all that and what happened in Arusha was best summed up by TEDGlobal speaker and Africa Unchained author George Ayittey when he talked about:

The Cheetah Generation - made up of the youth, specifically the TED Fellows present here, the saviors of Africa who are not going to wait for government and aid organizations to do things for them.The Hippo Generation - the current political and business leaders who are happy to wallow in their water holes, complaining about colonialism and poverty, but doing nothing about it. [Thank you White African for the summary.]

I have only ever attended conferences with hippos on the centre stage. Arusha was full of cheetahs. There was barely a government official in sight – apart from Tanzania’s president Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete who rushed in on the last day, mesmerising the crowd with his diamond-studded watch. I only heard the phrase “capacity-building” mentioned once, and I am sure that was a slip of the tongue.

There were no fewer than four Ethiopians on stage – Eleni Gabre-Madhin of Ethiopia’s coming commodity exchange; Ted Kidane, the man behind the Feedelix service that lets people compose and send instant messages in Ethiopic; Noah Samara, the man behind the WorldSpace satellite radio; and Zeray Alemseged the paleontologist who dug up Lucy’s baby.

Here are some of my other highlights:

William Kamkwamba, the Malawian schoolboy who built a windmill out of spare parts to power his rural home at the age of 14. He followed instructions from a book. “I tried it and I made it,” he said to a standing ovation.

The talk by Nigerian novelist Chris Abani and his closed-eyes recitation of Yusuf Kumanyaaka’s poem “Ode to the Drum”. If anyone can source me a copy of Graceland, I would be more than grateful – it is out of stock on Amazon.co.uk.

Ory Okolloh’s combination of gratuitous baby pictures with an investigation into the damage caused by overly-negative presentations of Africa.

Tales from the front line of African technolgy from Nigeria’s Florence Seriki, Ghana’s Herman Chinery-Hesse and DRC’s Alieu Conteh.

British-Nigerian Dr Seyi Oyesola, inventor of the Hospital in a Box, describing carrying out open heart surgery in a typical Lagos hospital. “Does he look happy,” he asked, pointing to a picture of one of his assistants after their fifth power cut/surge during the set up to the operation. “No, he does not look happy.”

Ron Eglash, the “ethnomathematician” who sees fractals everywhere he goes in Africa.

And of course, the Bono vs. Mwenda & Ayittey & Shikwati development debate
Simplistic it make have been – as argued by Nigeria’s former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the end of the conference. But when was the last time you heard an unstaged, honest clash of views at a set-piece conference?

The answer is, according to my own experience, up to now, never. Spend too long with the hippos at the UN and the AU and you could easily give up hope for the future of African technology. Spend some time with the cheetahs in Arusha and you begin to wonder whether there is actually something behind all this talk about an African Renaissance.

**********
¹ Actually, that’s not quite fair. Last year’s Digital Citizens Indaba on Blogging in Grahamstown, South Africa was also good. Possibly because it included some of the same speakers.

Technorati Tags: tedglobal2007, ted, arusha, tanzania, ethiopia

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An Internet watchdog on Tuesday accused Ethiopia of blocking scores of anti-government Web sites and millions of Weblogs in one of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest cases of cyber-censorship.

Web monitor, the OpenNet Initiative, said the Horn of Africa country was stopping citizens from viewing opposition-linked Web sites, and blogs hosted by Blogger, an online journal community owned by Internet search engine Google Inc.

Ethiopia dismissed the report as “a baseless allegation”.

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Categories : africa - east, article, blogging, censorship, ethiopia, internet // Add Comment »

The plain clothed police officers swooped on three shops in Namibia’s bustling Waldis Bay soon after opening time. Inside they found three women and two men and piles of electronic equipment.

The suspect gear, police said, included PCs, headsets, cables, modems and a handful of sleek, white plastic boxes called IPStars – all the tools of the trade of Africa’s latest generation of cyber criminals.

The cyber-crime in question had nothing to do with spam or viruses or fraudulent emails or any of the other well known online nasties. The five suspects had, according to an official statement put out later that day, been caught “red-handed” offering cheap international phone calls to the public over an internet connection.

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Categories : africa - southern, article, namibia, telecoms, voip // Add Comment »