What if Internet access on your mobile phone for one month cost you HK$ 14,000, or about US$ 1,800? The following story occurred in Hong Kong, but this is a problem common over much of the planet. As recently reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP):
Mobile-phone users are facing big bills for internet services they thought were free, the consumer watchdog [Hong Kong Consumer Council] warned yesterday. One customer ran up a HK$14,000 bill in a month.
…
The complainant hit with a HK$14,000 bill told the watchdog he thought he was using free Wi-fi services to access the internet.
However, he claims his service provider connected him to the Net through its fee-paying service without warning him first.
“Charges for Web surfing catch out phone users”
South China Morning Post, June 17, 2008
Mobile networks face an important self-imposed obstacle: metered data service charges that are unclear, unrealistic, and often rather opaque to the consumer. While most companies now understand that promoting third generation mobile services requires clear and friendly flat rates, some operators still extract value from their customers the hard way, by selling them voice service plans with Internet access charged extra by the *byte. This is supposed to be the Internet age; regardless of whether the user in question understood he was on Wi-Fi or 3G or 2.5G, a 14,000 dollar bill is exorbitant from any point of view.
This is not a new occurrence. In the April 1, 2003 issue of the SCMP [unfortunately, the SCMP does not support direct linking to articles and requires a subscription] Neil Taylor reported on much the same topic:
… operators know that if their customers were to actually use data services to their fullest capacity, they might suddenly notice what over-priced luxuries these things are.
Last week, I spent three days with Sony Ericsson’s P800 smartphone….
And after three days of happy surfing, I received my phone bill.
If that HK$400 [US$ 51.41] GPRS charge had been for a month’s downloads, I might have been irritated. But I was appalled at what I was charged for three days of sporadic surfing.
By any measure, GPRS charges are extortionate. They are also confusing. Just as we saw with voice and Internet services, the operators appear to have conspired to make their charges as hard to compare as possible.
“Guinea-pig users losers with punishing GPRS charges”
South China Morning Post, April 1, 2003
Neil Taylor was writing about GPRS, the forerunner of 3G, but the business model sounds depressingly similar. Where is the incentive to get a 3G handset and subscription, one may ask? In the July 2005 issue of Receiver Magazine, Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu spelled out his view:
The 3G incentive
Serious mass usage of 3G applications will occur when service fees become fixed and subscriptions become attractive and affordable for most users. In Japan, for example, 3G brought about the development of a vibrant and active content download culture that emerged following attractive consumer pricing of 3G bandwidth. Some telecoms may resist the idea, but ultimately they should pay heed to the lesson learned from broadband: charging a service on a usage basis discourages subscription, and will generally limit utilization to early adopters and technophiles.
Many operators who rolled out 3G services erred in setting exorbitant pricing, thus discouraging regular consumers from utilizing expensive 3G bandwidth services. 3G downloads of products such as video streaming, applications, or large emails are fairly substantial and therefore incur a greater cost on a pay-per-use bandwidth model; clearly, this is discouraging to potential customers.
Yat Siu, in Receiver Magazine, July 2005
There is the argument that 3G network operators were fleeced by their governments, but regardless of who bears responsibility for high 3G prices, several operators used confusing metered pricing to transfer the high 3G entry costs to their customers. And that’s not the only way in which the consumer loses: the high and often confusing costs of 3G services keep adoption rates low and indirectly hamper 3G technology. Until the majority of operators offer attractive flat rate data usage plans as well as “common sense” plans that prevent gigantic Internet access charges, consumers in most of the world will continue to be confused and outraged at the end of the month. That is, if they make use of data services in the first place, which is something many people avoid.
This brings us to Wi-Fi: it’s cheap, available across a growing multitude of devices, supported by just about all operating systems, and growing fast. Consider FON, a network of hundreds of thousands of members around the world who share their bandwidth with other FON members. In Hong Kong FON coverage is getting quite good, and you’ll find a free FON signal at Starbucks, McDonald’s, and major shopping malls just to name a few. FON has even been reviewed by the government of Hong Kong.
Outblaze operates FON in Hong Kong and we might have a slight bias, but there are local alternatives in most cities. Although FON is a global service, in Hong Kong Y5Zone is fairly prevalent and well organized, with over 800 hotspots. PCCW also offers Wi-Fi around the city.
Service plans with hidden or secret rates simply cannot compete with affordable flat rates. We’ve seen the shift from metered to flat charges in traditional telephony, television, and fixed line Internet access; isn’t it time the latest generation mobile network operators modernized all their fee structures to match their handset line-ups? You too can help discourage those network operators who maintain confusing charges: just have your mobile device connect via Wi-Fi when you need the Internet, and avoid data service charges entirely. In a city like Hong Kong Wi-Fi is available at most locations, so you’ll avoid astronomical bills while sending an important message to your provider.
Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine’s top stories list (here is McAfee’s press release on the subject). But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published.
McAfee’s study seems to be based on a year’s worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk country code top level domain (ccTLD; a generic top level domain is a gTLD).
These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards, and contained bogus information in the “whois” records (which show domain ownership). The contact email address for each domain was usually an email address at a random free webmail site like Yahoo, Hotmail, or some of the Outblaze clients.
This certainly turned out to be a gigantic reputation problem for the .hk ccTLD - far more scam domains were being registered under .hk than legitimate domains. Even worse, these scam domains were being hosted on botnets (large networks of infectedPCs, remotely controlled by criminal gangs).
The .hk domains started turning up in spam for porn, fake prescription medication, phishing (identity theft) and many other illegal schemes such as “money mule recruitment”, where people are conned into running an “export agency” and unwittingly become conduits for money laundering and receivers of goods bought with stolen credit cards.
A botnet is a very large, highly failure-tolerant and distributed network. It is also international in nature, so that a child pornography website hosted on an infected PC in Hong Kong could turn up the very next minute on an infected laptop in Brazil. With distributed peer-to-peer botnets the domain name used by a botnet is sometimes its single point of failure.
Registrars (which provide domain registration services) and Registries (which administer gTLDs and ccTLDs) are therefore crucial to any attempt to mitigate botnets.
HKDNR, the registry for the .hk ccTLD, was initially slow to react to this problem, prompting antivirus and antiphishing researchers like Gary Warner (now Director of Research in Computer Forensics & Cybercrime at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) to declare a “crisis situation” in a March 2007 email to a mailing list that discusses phishing. In the email he accused HKDNR of inaction and insufficient response to the concerns of the antispam community.
HKDNR and the Hong Kong CERT (HKCERT) were accused of responding to complaints with canned letters that promised to investigate, but appeared to take no action at all. The response letters encouraged complainants from outside Hong Kong to “report the matter to their local law enforcement agencies”.
By late 2007, the number of .hk domains registered by scam artists numbered in the tens of thousands. Action by various groups (independent technologists, antispam block list providers, CERT teams, law enforcement and regulatory agencies) then seemed to convince HKDNR of the need to take immediate drastic action against scam domains registered in the .hk ccTLD.
As the Postmaster and Head of Anti-spam Operations for Outblaze, I contributed to the effort by providing a feed of several thousand .hk domains from spam reported on our network of 40 million hosted email users.
The results were astounding. Over 10,000 scam domains were terminated in a matter of days. Long term measures were also put in place, such as
Credit card fraud prevention, including Verified by Visa (most of these scam domains were registered using stolen credit cards)
Due diligence measures to detect fake domain registration
Closer cooperation of HKDNR with relevant authorities and agencies.
International cooperation is vital for two reasons:
as an early warning when scam artists attempt to set up shop again
as a way to share best practices with groups, associations, government regulators, and law enforcement agencies working on the prevention of spam and cybercrime.
In a matter of days, the huge concentration of scammer domains in the .hk ccTLD scattered, shifting to other countries and ccTLDs. Some moved to China (as the McAfee report indicates, a large number of scammer domains still exist in .cn space) and others went onto .biz, .info, and even ccTLDs like .ma (Morocco).
The botnet problem is clearly international, and registrars and registries around the world are vulnerable to what HKDNR suffered last year. While it might be stale news in that HKDNR has already dealt with this problem, it serves as a reminder that botnet criminals are still out there and still causing trouble. Spam and cybercrime are hitting record levels and that there is a need for constant awareness and joint efforts to mitigate the menace that botnets have evolved into over the last few years.
I have written a long and detailed paper on botnet mitigation for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as part of the ITU’s Botnet Mitigation Toolkit. It discusses the threat that botnets pose to the worldwide community of Internet users, and describes an interlinked set of policy, technology, and civil society approaches to the problem of botnets. Most of what I have written in this blog entry is already present in the ITU paper, so I will stop here and encourage people reading this to glance at the paper as well. It is 100 pages long so probably not bedtime reading, but I’d still appreciate your comments!
Over the last week announcements of the Turner Entertainment and Outblaze project called TurnOut have generated quite a few questions. We’ve taken a video of Thomas Crampton video-interviewing Outblaze CEO and Founder Yat Siu a few days ago on the subject of this cooperation. Thomas Crampton is a former correspondent for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, currently working for Next Media Hong Kong and of course on his own blog.
Thomas came for a tour of our offices and to catch up on all the exciting work Outblaze and Outblaze sister companies are doing. We recorded the conversation about the Turner / Cartoon Network project in order to illuminate those who may have questions not addressed by the announcements of the last week.
The video is about 8 minutes long. In it, Yat Siu explains how TurnOut is bringing together Turner’s impressive library of brands and characters with Outblaze’s digital services to create compelling Web 2.0 offerings.
On Monday, I got a few hours’ notice that Joi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons and board member of the Mozilla Foundation, was arriving to our offices en-route to a visit to Macao. This initiated a flurry of activity in the office since Joi is also a board member of Outblaze affiliate SanrioDigital, and it was thus a great opportunity to give Joi some insight into what the team at SanrioDigital has been up to, and to pick his brain and see what else we could be doing.
Joi is a fascinating person and has tremendous insight into popular culture. His ability to absorb information at a rapid pace and provide succint yet insightful comments was extremely valuable to the team. In spite of his pressing schedule, he was also able to meet up with Pindar Wong, Chairman of the Asia & Pacific Internet Association and co-founder of the first licensed ISP in Hong Kong. Pindar and Joi have been associated due to their involvment in ICANN.
Pindar is a big proponent of bringing Creative Commons to Hong Kong along with others such as Rebecca MacKinnon, Charles Mok, and Oiwan Lam . My apologies if I have failed to mention other prominent Hong Kong fans of Creative Commons.
I had the privilege of spending some time with Pindar and Joi and gaining insight into why they think Creative Commons is valuable to Hong Kong and what challenges are faced in localizing CC for this territory. I hope others can help promote the advantages of Creative Commons and provide assistance to the Hong Kong Fans of Creative Commons who at this point are looking for a lawyer specializing in intellectual property to review their draft.
Enjoy the video content and don’t forget to spread the word!
Post interview whilst we were discussing random things, discussion again veered towards Creative Commons and its relevance to Hong Kong and thanks to our intrepid cameraman Jacky Yuk who kept the camera rolling I have another snippet for you to enjoy
The 2007 Hong Kong ICT Awards ceremony and gala was a lavish affair held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre last night, January 21st, 2008. Outblaze competed in the Best Business (Product) stream, and took home the Gold Award with our white label social video service, OutblazeVideo. It was a pretty positive start to the new year. As you may remember, just last November OutblazeVideo won the APICTA award for the Tools and Infrastructure category, so it’s almost time for us to buy a new display cabinet.
The Hong Kong ICT Awards were established in 2006 as a collaborative effort among industry support organizations, ICT professional bodies, academia and the Government to establish a large scale and internationally recognized brand of ICT awards for Hong Kong. By the way, congratulations to our affiliates Dream Cortex and Sanrio Digital, who took home a Merit Award in the Digital Entertainment award category (read the press release on their web site).
You can peruse the Outblaze entry to learn more about OutblazeVideo, or browse through the other winners of Best Business awards. The winners for Best Business not only show the tremendous breadth of Hong Kong expertise and potential, but also indicate a few of the things Hong Kongers are passionate about. OutblazeVideo needs no explanation since Hong Kong has always been crazy about movies - especially free ones.
Not to be missed is Team and Concepts Limited, who won a Gold for EditGrid, their fantastic online spreadsheet. This clearly suggests that Hong Kong people put great value on efficiency and organization, and we all know that is the case. (more…)
Aaron Marcus is the founder, President and Principal Designer/Analyst of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A). He is well-respected in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field and has been working in this field for more than 30 years. In the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of ACM/SIGCHI’s Interactions magazine, in his “Fast Forward” column titled “The Sun Rises in the East”, he stated that professional development in user-centered software practices in Asia is expanding rapidly, and the level and quality are rising quickly [1].
This year, the User Friendly conference was held in Beijing from Nov 23 to 25. The number of participants of User Friendly conferences increased from 50 to more than 700 participants in just four years! This is an evident sign of the field’s rapid expansion and confirms Aaron’s observation in his column.
I met Aaron Marcus at the User Friendly conference in Beijing, where we posed for a photo. He was curious about the “flower pin” on his suit and asked me the meaning of the Chinese word “嘉賓” (Guest) printed on the red ribbon.
Aaron gave a keynote at the conference. His workshop titled “Cross-Cultural User Experience Design for Mobile User Interfaces” covered one of his favourite research topics: the impact of cultural differences on user interface design. He introduced the five dimensions of culture identified by the cultural anthropologist Geert Hofstede (more details can be found in his book “Cultures and Organization: Software of the Mind” and website). Based on Hofstede’s framework, Aaron and his colleagues studied corporate websites in different countries and identified patterns of how the cultural dimensions affect the uses of metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance in the Web user interfaces. He mentioned that the common approach to software localization is limited to accommodating local language and data display formats such as date, time, and currency formats. However, localization is far beyond translation and needs to consider deeper cultural issues. Aaron also showed some innovative mobile user-interface design and explained how they addressed the cultural needs.
Cross-cultural user experience design is gaining more attention as many western software companies are swarming into potential markets like China and India. In the beginning of the workshop, Aaron showed us a 2005 article in Fortune magazine titled “Bill Gates as Anthropologist”. The article cited Microsoft’s Bill Gates as promoting anthropological study of its products. I think this may be an indicator global software companies have realized that recognizing the cultural differences is important to their businesses. Lada Gorlenko of IBM predicts we will see a significant part of UX design being offshored and carrying out by local professionals [2]. Maybe this is happening now. Many global companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Autodesk have already set up local design teams in China.
References:
Marcus, A. “The Sun Rises in the East,” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol. 14, Issue 6, November/December 2007, pp.52-53.
Gorlenko, L. “Offshoring usability: The moment of truth: how much does culture matter to you?” Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol 13, Issue 2, March/April 2006, pp. 29-31.
Do you know about FON? You should - FON is the largest WiFi network in the world and it’s growing at a healthy rate. Get yourself one of FON’s La Fonera routers, set it up so that it begins sharing part of your Internet connection with other FON members (Foneros), and enjoy free WiFi access at hundreds of thousand of hotspots around the world.
Outblaze operates FON in Hong Kong, and we are extremely pleased to announce that FON is now enabled at a number of malls (such as IFC and Times Square) as well as McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets throughout Hong Kong, Kowloon, New territories, and even the Outlying Islands! Roughly 400 retail shops, restaurants, bars, malls and other public spaces and businesses are now serving Foneros, and that’s just the public hotspots - there are thousands of private hotspots all over the city. (more…)
With pfingo, leading Sinagporian info-communication company StarHub has launched the world’s first fully converged VoIP, email, messaging, and mobile Internet service that is device-independent. This is a development to keep an eye on.
pfingo offers users email (mobile, desktop, and webmail), instant messaging, mobile VoIP service, contacts synchronization, news feeds, and a respectable 400 MB of storage space in addition to several premium options. The email, synchronization, and webmail components used by pfingo are powered by Outblaze.
pfingoACTIVE, the application that enables pfingo functions on your mobile device, is a compact piece of software with built-in pushmail, push news and stock quotes, instant messaging, remote webcam feed, and remote file management. It’s already compatible with hundreds of models of mobile phones.
pfingoMAIL, provided by Outblaze, is the central messaging component of the pfingo concept and the launchpad of the pfingo experience. pfingoMAIL allows you to collect email from your other email accounts in order to deal with all your email in one single convenient and mobile-friendly location. With it you can unify your various contact lists, manage your tasks and schedule, and instantly synchronize your Outlook calendar and contacts.
Check out the press release to learn more about this launch.
That was the reply of Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu when asked what he thought of “Web 2.0″, a term that is over-used, over-hyped, and often associated with obscure companies. The idea behind Web 2.0 - interlinked platforms, social software, and online services that encourage user contribution - is one of the most powerful, promising, and appealing aspects of the evolving Internet, but surely we must retain some perspective. Let us not forget the late ’90s bubble heyday of the prefix “e-”.
Yat was being interviewed at the sixth Web Wednesday, held at Lotus on Pottinger Street in Hong Kong on Wednesday November 7, 2007, for an audience of 130 or so hailing from diverse technology and marketing backgrounds.
The podcast of the interview will be available shortly on the Web Wednesday web site. We’ll update with a direct link as soon as possible.
Open Source: live it and love it, as we’ve said since 1998. Outblaze CEO and Founder Yat Siu was interviewed by CIO Asia magazine on the region’s growing use of open source. Read the article here (October 2007 issue).
Extract:
Outblaze has a strong in-house programming capability and focuses on web technology, which is why it has profited from open source software ahead of most Asian enterprises. But the company’s success with open source may point to the future of Asian IT.
You may remember Forrester Research senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang’s visit to Hong Kong last month and particularly his photographs and commentaries on the ultra spicy Szechuan dinner he enjoyed his first night here. At the time Jeremiah interviewed Outblaze CEO Yat Siu on the state of the Web industry in Hong Kong and the video is now available - go to Jeremiah’s video post to watch it (or click the screenshot below).
Jeremiah is clearly a fan of the Cyberport, the high-tech facility where Outblaze has its headquarters. Take a look at his write-up and photographs.
FON is a fascinating concept in this age of Web 2.0. We’ve all heard reams about user-generated Web content: Wikipedia, YouTube, and many others have become household names. FON goes a step farther and brings us a global user-generated WiFi network, and what’s more it does so free of charge. Or, rather, for USD 39.99, the price of a small proprietary WiFi router called La Fonera that grants you entry to the world’s largest (and free!) WiFi community.
Now the Net is abuzz with the news: FON has joined forces with BT to make FON accessible to over 3 million of BT’s Total Broadband customers, creating a potentially unrivalled WiFi community. (more…)
On the evening of September 18, 2007, bloggers and members of the Web community in Hong Kong gathered for drinks at one of Hong Kong’s most exclusive establishments, the Prive’ lounge on Wyndham street, in the city’s hottest entertainment district. The event was kickstarted by Angus Lau and Jeremiah Owyang, and sponsored and hosted (and ultimately organized) by Outblaze. The turnout was good: over 80 people signed up at the wiki event page and around 70 showed up. For nearly three hours industry people and enthusiasts mingled, drank, ate, and made merry.
Jeremiah, whom I met at the event for the first time, turned out to be a pleasant and insightful fellow who genuinely cares about social media communities everywhere - traits that will no doubt serve him well in his new role at Forrester Research as social computing senior analyst. He blogged the event and took numerous photos, so have a look at his post.
Do you think this Flickr picture is indecent? The Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) and the Obscene Articles Tribunal (OAT) of Hong Kong argue that it is, and are ready to prosecute Oiwan Lam over it. Oiwan Lam is a Hong Kong woman who posted a link to the photo in question on a Hong Kong web site. TELA received one complaint about the link from an unknown prude, and the two agencies collaborated to bring indecency charges against Oiwan Lam. Oiwan’s purpose in linking to the photograph was to protest against the archaic laws that the Obscene Articles Tribunal and TELA unilaterally decided apply to Internet links in an earlier case.
Oiwan certainly proved her point. The indecency charge she now faces in court (probably in September) carries a maximum penalty of HK$ 400,000 (US$ 51,160) and one year in prison.
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