Extempore

All hail, newspapers and radio’s stated that VoIP calls are now allowed in the UAE, but.. -and there’s a catch always- only “through licensed operators”.

In layman terms, VoIP calls will be billed and the prices will be set by those operators. So we’d have to wait and see if there will be big savings on VoIP calles, if any at all. The licensed operators would be:

• Du
• Etisalat
• Thuraya
• Yahsat

Of course, skype and vonage and the likes remains blocked, as they don’t generate revenue for the local market. Normal for a country with a large number of expatriates, whereby the telco’s main revenue is from overseas calls.

Thank you,
Michael

Hi all,
Just got back from the second Dubai Twestival that took place today at 8 PM. Organized by a wonderful team (PK, Woo, esperanca, Stephanie and Baher and Abhamalpani – please let me know who I missed), it was a success.

Thanks all,
Michael

Dubai Police arrested a gang of Arab men, who stole over 200 million dirhams using credit cards doing online shopping, Gulf News said.

They were tipped off in August about the guys, and caught most of them now (one out of four is out of the country).

An Egyptian secretary guessed the password of a yahoo account of an Emirati UN employee, and was sentenced to three months in jail and deportation.

The “hacker” emailed the victim that he broke into her email account, and was going to release pictures and “other secrets” of her, according to GulfNews.

Not the cybercrime caliber of russian extremist webmasters being “accidentially” executed, but still.