Posted by: Aamir Attaa on September 3, 2008 at 6:31 AM
Geo TV has been airing a famous Islamic TV Show named as “Aalim Online”, which in fact inspired me to name this post as “Peer Online”. (I just took the name, other wise there resembles nothing between this particular show and my this post)
Businesses in Pakistan are in state of transformation, which are turning their concentration towards the internet now, where they obviously get more target audience, hence more leads converting into sales. Though we lack extensive e-commerce infrastructure in our country, but even though medium and large sized businesses are demonstrating their existence on web.
Similarly, our Peers have started adopting internet too, and now they are broadcasting their publicity messages on internet; mainly through BULK emailing; but soon we may expect plenty of websites dedicated to these Peers and their quick solutions to every problems.
Apparently, these Peers spend handsome amount of money for broadcasting their email messages (let me mention here that many email broadcasters charge Rs. 5000 for 10000 emails). These heavy advertisement budgets actually leave a question mark on their legitimacy and the claims they make in emails such as
Solution to Every Problem
Meet your love in only 7 days
Make your husband obey you for rest of life and so on…
These emails normally leave a Mobile Number at the end as a point of contact…! While one must provide a physical address while doing a remote business. So things are quite confusing here…!
This is a very sensitive issue, so I don’t want to discuss it more, but I advice my readers to act sensibly when you get such an email with high claims and low rates.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 27, 2008 at 6:31 PM
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is now capable of automated blocking of Internet Protocol Addresses (IPs), that carry illegal voice traffic that is termination and/or origination of voice packets in a bid to check grey traffic flowing into the country, as reported in ‘The News’ PTA says that the facility will be operational within the next few days.
Paper says that PTA Chairman Dr Muhammad Yaseen announced this during a meeting with the CEOs of major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of the country.
Chairman requested all the Internet Service Providers to declare their IP addresses along-with the antecedents of their customers so that illegal telecom traffic could be monitored. It was emphasized that the operators should oversee their customers to make sure they are not involved in grey traffic termination. He sought the operators’ cooperation to stem the menace of grey telephony.
It merits mentioning here that PTA announced publicly that all (registered) call centers should provide their IP addresses to PSEB to make sure that their voice traffic is not blocked.
I am not sure if this system is capable of detecting voice packets sent by Yahoo, Skype, netmeeting etc… Hope these programmes would be allowed for home users.
Since the inception of technical facility in May 2008 at the PTA, the IP addresses found to be involved in illegal activities were being blocked manually and in the process, over 14 million minutes (worth around Rs100 million) have been saved on monthly basis. Now these would be automatically blocked if any IP, not authorized to carry voice, is found doing so. Under the current policy, only LDIs and international call centers are authorized to carry voice across national boundaries.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 26, 2008 at 7:53 AM
Guest Post by Changez Khan
4th InfoSec 2008 International Conference on Information Security, co-organized by National Response Center for Cyber Crimes (NR3C), FIA is going to happen tomorrow (August 27, 2008) at Marriott Hotel, Islamabad, Pakistan. This time, the audience will be really shock to see a controversial person in Pakistani Internet Community delivering his presentation on a topic named as: “Cyber Crime Prosecution: Investigation, Forensics Procedure and the Court”.
The organizers of the event may lack the information that this person, a legal expert, named as Zahid Jamil is behind the self proclaimed Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre (DNDRC); who is allegedly involved in very serious kinds of Cyber Squatting activities by forming DNDRC under the domain names of DNDRC.com, DNDRC.net, DNDRC.org, DNDRC.info, having confusingly similar domains to the ADNDRC.org the ICANN approved organization.
He has allegedly hijacked .PK domain names such as BUDGET.COM.PK and DJUICE.PK to earn easy money of about 800 USD per case but after receiving tough time by original registrant of DJUICE.PK on his unilateral and biased decision, Zahid Jamil has reportedly closed this business due to severe loss of credibility among the Internet community of Pakistan.
When E-Crime Bill was introduced in the country, he opposed it aggressively on different forums but on the other hand, he is misusing it by threatening the Pakistani people with it. At ICANN, Zahid Jamil admits as “I have also been working informally with the Federal Investigation Agency’s National Response to Cyber Crime Cell (NR3C) in certain cyber crime cases.” http://gnso.icann.org/council/soi/jamil-soi-28jun08.shtml
The real owner of a hijacked domain had said on a public forum as: “Yesterday I have received some serious threats via telephonic calls from the DNDRC (Domain Name Dispute Resolution Center for .PK) domains regarding my complaint on the domain; they have pressurized me to withdraw my complaint. As a matter of fact I had already proved them that I have never been contacted by them on this domain dispute…” The DNDRC should have no right to make phone calls to the victims of their decisions to further threaten them.
Zahid Jamil is apparently also involved in Typosquatting, also called URL Hijacking, which, according to Wikipedia, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Zahid Jamil owned the domain name of DOMIANNAMEDISPUTERESOLUTION.COM (with misspell of DomAin as DomIan) to redirect visitors of DOMAINNAMEDISPUTERESOLUTION.COM, registered by a US based Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu, P.C, a Top IP Law Firm of the world located at UN Plaza, New York. http://www.frosszelnick.com
Zahid Jamil also used to impress the Pakistani community as a member of an ICANN constituency (the only member in that constituency from Pakistan) with voting rights in the ICANN structure” but very few people know that Mr. Tim Ruiz of ICANN has replied him while discussing Revised Community Travel Support Procedure for FY09 as: “Zahid, If the policy work of ICANN is not core to your business, why are you involved?( Reference: http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/council/msg05345.html)
There are also reports circulating that Zahid Jamil is involved in another illegal online Business at www.dotpk.pk which holds Domain Names of Pakistani Business Community illegally like: ARYDIGITAL.PK, DAEWOO.PK, HOLIDAYINN.PK, BEACONHOUSE.PK, LUMS.PK and many more. He is securing the money by selling those held domains, eg: GEONEWS.PK, GOOGLE.PK, NOKIA.PK, etc. By registering .PK Domain Names of Trade Mark Holders with proxy names, he don’t left any option to the business community but to buy domain names at DOTPK.PK or to consult his DNDRC whose fee is 800 USD per case.
Thus, due to his controversial role in cybersquating of his illegal businesses, we should object his any role at national and international level which could harm public interests at the large. A person who himself is violating internet law and openly examples cybersquating should be discouraged to represent at InfoSec 2008.
If someone is interested to know more about him, just type in Google Zahid Jamil DNDRC.
Disclaimer: I found this article of controversial nature and ProPakistani.com does not own and may not agree with discussion carried away in this article by the original writer. Furthermore, I also discovered that some of the content in this article was taken from Pakpoint.com and mobizong.com
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 19, 2008 at 7:23 PM
Naseer Ahmed Mughal has announced the availability of the urdu phpBB 3.0.2 [RC3] package. He says that this latest version has seen numerous stability fixes, performance tweaks and general bugs fixed.
Additionally one minor security-related bug was fixed With this release. The development team has also included the urdu version of Administration Panel.
Due to the different codebase in phpBB3, these are a lot bigger and a lot more complicated than they ever were in phpBB2 - also the reason why the team has introduced the automatic update package and automatic updater in phpBB, which is able to handle modded boards too by merging differences. Naseer does not recommend the use of the code changes tutorial - those are meant for professional users and support teams to help assist users having problems while updating.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 19, 2008 at 7:07 PM
As we see internet usage tremendously growing in developing countries, which have normally confined bandwidth to share with its users. Pakistan is one of such countries, which is putting a lot of (traffic) pressure on its international gateways, which at times exceeds the available limits in terms of capacity, consequently slowing the browsing amongst the masses.
Technology Review has published this article which reveals that computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. The basic idea behind the research is develop a system that chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.
Here is the selected excerpt from article
In developed countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) create Web caches–machines that copy and store content locally - to boost their customers’ browsing speeds. When a user wants to view a popular website, the information can be pulled from the cache instead of from the computer hosting the website, which may be on the other side of the planet and busy with requests. Similar services are offered by content distribution companies such as Akamai, based in Cambridge, MA. High-traffic sites pay Akamai to host copies of their content in multiple locations, and users are automatically served up a copy of the site from the cache closest to them.
Umar Saif’s team at LUMS is developing DonateBandwidth, a system inspired by the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol that is popular for trading large music, film, and program files. With BitTorrent, people’s computers swap small pieces of a file during download, reducing the strain placed on the original source.
DonateBandwidth works in much the same way but lets people share more than just large files. When users try to access a website or download a file, a DonateBandwidth program running on their machine checks first with the peer-to-peer cache to see if the data is stored there. If so, it starts downloading chunks of the file from peers running the same software, while also getting parts of the file through the usual Internet connection. The software could allow people in countries that have better Internet connections to donate their bandwidth to users in the developing world.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 15, 2008 at 8:03 AM
Hanif Khan Pars (one of my devoted readers) today sent me an email asking me to help him setup a blog where he is interesting in sharing his views and thoughts like i am doing for last couple of months.He is not the only one, i got couple of mails from my other readers including Maria and Syed Asad who were looking for a blog but didn’t know much about it.
This much interest in Pakistani readers about having their own blog is very encouraging and i can envision huge activity from Pakistani bloggers in coming months. By the way i was inspired too, by Babar Bhatti and started this blog. And believe me blogging is a fun thing to do. It helps your personal branding, make a community of readers around you, and also you can earn good money out of it. (One thing, don’t expect happenings very soon, i will discuss this point latter, but be sure that you are not going to get traffic for 3 months, but afterwords… Its fun)
Getting back to Hanif Khan’s query, in response to what i have decided to start a series of posts in which i will try to make readers familiar with steps and must do things for a (successful) blog. Input from experienced bloggers (in comments) would definatly help us all.
So lets start with very first thing that you should think about, and it is “Topic of your blog”
Choosing a Topic for Your Blog
This is going to be the the first and most crucial decision in your blogging career. Yea think atleast 10 times before your finalize your blog’s topic. Keep reading to know why it’s so important….!
Many of bloggers try to do variety of stuff on their blogs. For instance a blogger is trying to cover Search Engine Optimization topics and at the same time he/she is discussing some sports, entertainment and the fashion.
This can lead to a very confusing situation for you, specifically, when there will be a time when you wont be able to maintain balance amongst your all covered topics, and your readers may start getting bored (who were actually expecting more from you about this particular topic)
So focus keenly on a single topic, that you feel you are good at. Defining the purpose of your website gives a clear direction to your visitors, thus making them subscribe to your feeds and ultimately you will get more traffic.
Always select the topic that you like, and you feel you have inborn germs about the topic. Don’t write on medicine if you are not a doctor. In case you start a blog with a topic that you don’t know much about, you will run short of ideas very soon; untimely you will start looking for other blogs or Wikipedia to get the content. (Which is not a good idea at all)
Once you are done with these initial things, give yourself a good start and afterwards there is an un-ending world of possibilities for your blog…!
Please make up your mind until Saturday, when we will discuss about the blogging tools (programming free + easy to use tools) that you can use to setup your blog. Let me mention you that blogging website is so easy to maintain (unless you are not looking for advance features) its just like using Microsoft Word…!
Want to discuss anything regarding your new blog, drop your comments below or contact me via “About Us” Page.
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM
ITCN Asia 2008 was concluded today after running a three day show at Expo Center Karachi. I hope this mega technology event of Pakistan remained superb. It’s a matter of fact that I don’t know much about what actually happened there, either due to my poor googling capabilities or there is actually no material available online about what went on at ITCN Asia 2008.
Unfortunately, few of my previous post (in row) were not with positive views, and now my readers have started asking me to think good instead of just pointing out the bad elements; so I will try to not to criticize the ITCN Management (PR Department in particular) to higher extent, but I just wanted to ask them “Where is the coverage?”
Expos are meant to popularize business entities and the products they launch there, but you may get disappointed to know that there is just nothing available to know about ITCN. Only few links on google’s first page, and all of those have almost the similar stories. Netxpress Media were their online media partner; they have a corner designated where you can watch one video at a time.
There is maybe another reason, that our media men are so busy in political stories that they are no more interested in covering such issues.
And about ITCN’s official website… don’t ask me about just view the image below…!
By the way, here is another video of LG’s Stall ITCN Asia 2008 – You may regret of missing the expo after viewing the video : P
Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 9, 2008 at 8:26 AM
It often happens that we are interested in knowing the approximate location (city name at least) of the person who have sent you an email on your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account.
Well, many may not know, but yes you can have the city name of the sender using certain information that comes with your email. When you receive an email, you receive more than just the message.
The email comes with headers (that are normally not displayed in the message) that carry important information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it. For that, you would need to find the IP address of the sender. Okay let’s start learning on how you can find the IP address of the sender.
Finding IP address With Gmail
Log into your Gmail account with your username and password.
Now open any email from your inbox (or the one you want to track the location)
On the left side of the To panel, click on down arrow button, that will open a drop down menu.
Click on “Show Original”
A New window will open, which will have plenty of raw material. Don’t get confused here…! try to find out following line
Look for “Received: from” Received: from [69.138.30.1] by web4587.mail.***.yahoo.com
[69.138.30.1] can be different for every mail, as this is the IP address of the sender.
You may find more than one Received: from patterns, in that case select the last one.
Now that you have an IP address, you can locate this IP address by puting it in who.is
open www.who.is and enter this ip address without brackets
the query will give you the city name of the sender…!
Finding IP address with Yahoo
Log into your Yahoo! mail with your username and password.
Click on Inbox or whichever folder you have stored your mail.
Open the mail that you want to track back.
If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers
Click on Options on the top-right corner
In the Mail Options page, click on General Preferences
Scroll down to Messages where you have the Headers option
Make sure that Show all headers on incoming messages is selected
Click on the Save button
Go back to the mails and open that mail
You should see similar headers like above
Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between square brackets [ ]. Here, it is 202.65.138.109.
That is be the IP address of the sender.
If there are many instances of Received: from with the IP address, select the IP address in the last pattern. If there are no instances of Received: from with the IP address, select the first IP address in X-Originating-IP.
7. Track the IP address of the sender
Finding IP address in Hotmail
Log into your Hotmail account with your username and password.
Click on the Mail tab on the top.
Open the mail.
If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers,
Click on Options on the top-right corner
In the Mail Options page, click on Mail Display Settings
In Message Headers, make sure Advanced option is checked
Click on Ok button
Go back to the mails and open that mail
You should see the email headers now.
If you find a header with X-Originating-IP: followed by an IP address, that is the sender’s IP address Hotmail headers. In this case the IP address of the sender is [68.34.60.59].
Look for Received: from followed by IP address within square brackets[
In this case, the IP address of the sender is [69.140.7.58].
Or else if you have headers like this
Look for Received: from followed by IP address within square brackets[].
In this case, the IP address of the sender is [61.83.145.129] (Spam mail).
10. If you have multiple Received: from headers, eliminate the ones that have proxy.anyknownserver.com.11. Track the IP address of the sender
When E-Crime Bill was introduced in the country, he opposed it aggressively on different forums but on the other hand, he is misusing it by threatening the Pakistani people with it. At ICANN, Zahid Jamil admits as “I have also been working informally with the Federal Investigation Agency’s National Response to Cyber Crime Cell (NR3C) in certain cyber crime cases.” 
Umar Saif’s 
