Screenshot of the hacked page I found on Zone-h.org

La Libanaise Des Jeux Official website (www.lldj.com) has been hacked by Anonymous today. Website is still inaccessible until this hour [Link].

Thanks Alex!

Funny and useful app. You can download it [Here] or from the App store on your iPhone.

I got this message from Alfa while having lunch in a nearby village (Kawlabé If I am not mistaken) to Kobayat (Akkar) during the weekend.

Noting that I was still inside Lebanese soil, how is that possible?

The Lebanese banks infected by the “Gauss” virus are Bank of Beirut, EBLF, Blom Bank, Byblos Bank, FransaBank and Credit Libanais.

The malware, which steals system information but also has a mysterious payload that could be destructive against critical infrastructure, has been found infecting at least 2,500 machines, most of them in Lebanon, according to Russia-based security firm Kaspersky Lab, which discovered the malware in June and published an extensive analysis of it on Thursday.

The spyware, dubbed Gauss after a name found in one of its main files, also has a module that targets bank accounts in order to capture login credentials. The malware targets accounts at several banks in Lebanon, including the Bank of Beirut, EBLF, BlomBank, ByblosBank, FransaBank and Credit Libanais. It also targets customers of Citibank and PayPal. [Article]

More info on the malware [Here].

via BeirutSpring

NASA team showing Lebanese Charles al-Achi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s a great honor to have a Lebanese at such a high position especially that this is the first time NASA has successfully put together a video of a landing on Mars.

NASA’s latest adventure to Mars has given the world more than just glimpses of a new alien landscape. It opened a window into the trip itself, from video footage of the landing to a photo of the rover hanging by a parachute to a shot of discarded spacecraft hardware strewn across the surface. And the best views — of Mars and the journey there — are yet to come. [Link]

[YouTube]
NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover descent

First Pictures from NASA’s Mars Curiosity over [Link]

I’ve been very pleased with the connection and speed ever since I switched from Wise to DSL few months back, but I’ve been having some weird issues that I was only able to figure out on Sunday.

When Ogero first came to install the modem, they put filters on all the phones in the house to prevent any internet disruption, mainly on handy-phones for some reason. This however did not stop the connection from going down occasionally but I always thought it was a problem with Ogero as we are used to frequent short internet outages.

However, internet was down all day on Saturday and on Sunday as well. It would go up randomly then go down few minutes later. I called the support like ten times and they would re-assure me every time that there’s no problem from their side and that my connection is working fine. They would also ask me to check the cables or unplug everything and plug them back. I tried everything and the connection was still dropping until I noticed something. Every time I placed a call with the living room’s handy phone, the internet signal on the DSL modem would go off. I thought it was a coincidence at first but then I tried it 4 times and it would disconnect over and over again.

As a result, I unplugged the phone line from this specific handy phone and the connection stopped dropping. Noting that the phone has a filter, and we barely use it, I don’t understand why it would cause a drop in the internet connection and have no clue on how to proceed to fix it. I guess I will have to call back support today.

I’ve had the Nokia Lumia 900 for a few days now and so far I must say it’s been more than a pleasant experience. With its Windows-powered OS, its great build quality and gorgeous design, the Lumia 900 is one of the best smartphones out there and a strong contender to Apple’s iPhone 4/4s, Samsung’s S2 and S3. Its release date was a few months back but the Lumia 900, 800 and 710 models will be available for sale in Lebanon this week. The Lumia 900 will be priced around 600$ from what I’ve heard.

There are a lot of technical and detailed reviews of the Nokia Lumia 900 online that you can check on [CNET], [TechRadar], [Engadget] and [T3]. So, not wanting to come about this review in the same way I will pinpoint the key features, advantages and disadvantages that I noticed and are relevant to me.

Operating system & Performance

The Windows Phone OS is quite intriguing and very different from the iOS and Android systems. It provides easy e-mail access, social network integration, task-switching, office tools, and voice and Bing searches among other things and organizes the key functionalities in big shiny and colorful tiles. What surprised me the most is how quick and smooth the phone is despite the fact that it’s running on a single-core 1.4GHz processor clocked with a mere 512MB of SDRAM. I thought the tiles were a bit too big and there’s a lot of wasted space around them, but that ought to be fixed with the 7.8 version. Nevertheless, the two big advantages of the tiles are that you can pin not just apps but specific features and even groups of people as well, and the personalization is very easy to do. I downloaded and used Wiztiles to configure the Batman theme and organize its tiles as shown below.

Last but not least, if you are worried about piling up more than 50 apps on the main screen, Microsoft has figured that out and displays letters of the alphabet (Once you reach 45 apps) to separate the lists. [7.8 version]

Note that you need a valid Windows Live account to be able to log in to the “People” tile and setup your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Outlook, and Google) and other email accounts. You also get 25 GB of free cloud storage (SkyDrive).

Design & Hardware

Almost all the reviews mentioned how beautifully designed is the Lumia 900 and I can’t agree more. It feels wonderful when held in your hand and is tougher, yet heavier, than the iPhone and Samsungs. The 4.3-inch screen is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass which has passed the Hammer test. [YouTube]

One thing I did not feel comfortable with at first was the arrangement of buttons. In fact, there are only buttons on the right side, two for controlling the volume, the power/lock button in the middle and below it the camera button. When you hold the phone with the right hand, you need to twist the phone in your hand a bit to hit the power/lock or the camera key which is a bit annoying.

In terms of size, it matches the Samsung S2, is smaller than the S3 and bigger than the iPhone 4/4s. [Iphone 4s vs. Lumia 900] [Samsung S3 vs. Lumia 900]

The Lumia comes in three colors, black, white and blue.

Apps & Maps

Since the Lumia 900 is a Windows phone, you get the Bing-powered Nokia maps instead of Google maps, however there’s an additional free of charge navigation app provided, the Nokia Drive which could come in very handy and offers a wide variety of languages and worldwide maps in 2D and 3D. The good thing about Nokia Drive is that it doesn’t require a data connection to render maps, and could save you some time and precious Mbytes especially with the lousy mobile connection and low cellular data quotas in Lebanon.

I downloaded the English navigation voice and tried the turn-by-turn navigation system between Jounieh and Beirut and it wasn’t bad at all considering that we don’t have proper road maps. I will try uploading a video later on showing how it works maybe with the Arabic navigation voice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Abdallah

The idea sounds great at first but as one of our readers pointed out, he was unable to connect to this alleged “free internet” provided by the government from 3 different phones (Iphone, Blackberry, and Nokia).

Photo by Abdallah

I hope he doesn’t end up in courts like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did.

Twenty-one-year-old college student Nadim Kobeissi is from Canada, Lebanon and the internet. He is the creator of Cryptocat, a project “to combine my love of cryptography and cats”. Cryptocat is an encrypted web-based chat. It’s the first chat client in the browser to allow anyone to use end-to-end encryption to communicate without the problems of SSL, the standard way browsers do crypto, or mucking about with downloading and installing other software. For Kobeissi, that means non-technical people anywhere in the world can talk without fear of online snooping from corporations, criminals or governments. [Link]

Via Patrick

Cool offer from Touch.

I found this funny comic on twitter on how Telecom Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui was able to restore the internet back to normal in Lebanon.

Nevertheless, we still need a sustainable solution to prevent any future internet outage from happening. We need to be pro-active and have contingency plans instead of reacting to a disaster when it occurs.

Lebanese Minister of Telecommunications Nicolas Sehnaoui just tweeted from Cyprus that changes were done to restore the connection back to normal in Lebanon. This doesn’t mean that the IMEWE cable malfunction was fixed but that we were able to route our connection through a different line until the problem is solved.

It’s too early to tell but we can only hope it’s true. It’s good to see the parties concerned following up this matter properly, even if we shouldn’t have had an internet outage in the first place.

Update: Mobi is working now but 3G has been disconnecting for the past half hour.

Update2: According to Sehnaoui, Cyprus has agreed to give us 10 Gbps free additional bandwith until our problems are resolved.

Ogero Telecom General Director Abdul Monem Youssef revealed on Friday that the internet services breakdown will last for not less than a week. [Link]

Even though there’s a problem on the IMEWE cable in Alexandria, Egypt, I believe our problem is elsewhere. Check what both our Minister of Telecom and Ogero are saying in the papers:

Ogero

Youssef lashed out at the Telecommunications Ministry, stressing that Ogero is the only side that is exerting efforts to provide internet, denying that the ministry is playing a role in resolving the crisis. He reiterated that Ogero isn’t accountable for the malfunction, pointing out that the Telecom Ministry is directly responsible for all the issues linked to the IMEWE submarine cable.

Ministry of Telecom

Internet connectivity was lost due to an upgrade in the IMEWE cable which Ogero did not notify anyone about.

To sum it all up:

Mahmoud Haidar, one of the consultants at the MoT, mentioned in a quick chat with Wamda that by international standards the glitch shouldn’t last longer than a couple days, yet “since there is a lack of comunication between the MoT, OGERO and IMEWE, we do not have more details to share for now.”

So basically not only we need to wait for the cable to get fixed, but also for both Ogero & MoT to settle their differences and find another solution.

I got this SMS last night and from what I read and heard on damaged cables, such an issue could take few days if not more to get fixed. Added to that, Lebanon is the only country affected as all other countries have backup cables.

Here are few articles about the internet outage from LBC, DailyStar, SubSea and Wamda.

The internet outage Lebanon is going through at the moment is the worst in years as it is nearing the 24 hours mark. The cost of downtime is hard to estimate as there are many parties involved and no decent reports on that matter, however it is possible to have a near estimate by using the available statistics and numbers.

outage cost is usually estimated as follows:
Outage cost = downtime hours X cost/hour of downtime

In order to compute the cost/hour of downtime, we need to know how much does the internet sector contribute to Lebanon’s GDP that was $41.484 billion in 2012.
Let’s take the GDP as being $40 billion dollars and the ICT sector contribution as being 5% of it as of 2012. It was 3.8% back in 2008 according to this report and the market has been growing ever since. Given that 70% of the ICT sector contribution to GDP comes from Hardware companies, we can assume that web companies contribute with around 2-3% of the overall GDP.

We need to add to that the number of credit/debit cards online authorizations. Knowing that there are around 2 Million cards in Lebanon (given the yearly growth) with a yearly spending of almost 9 billion dollars (Byblos Economic Report 2011), let’s say 5% of the total transactions are online, which gives us 5% * $9Billion = 450 million dollars per year.

2.5% * $40 billion + 450 million = 1.45 Billion Dollars yearly or 120 million dollars per month which gives us around 4 million dollars per day.

Assuming there are many additional factors that are internet-related, let’s add an extra 2 or 3 million dollars which gives us 7 million dollars lost in one day of internet downtime. To be honest, I thought the number would come out much bigger than 7M but again this is not a scientific or economic study. Nevertheless, I strongly doubt that it would be less than 5 million per day.

On the other hand, what I am sure of is that we only need $10 million dollars to setup a backup line and avoid what has happened in the past three days.

NB: As I stated in the post earlier, my estimate was based on general knowledge, common sense and few numbers and stats and is NOT a reliable economic study. Corrections are more than welcome.