Pakistan

A year or so ago the Pakistani Government decided to block access to the entire blogspot and blogger domains in response to inappropriate content placed there by sick foreigners. This blanket ban meant that a lot of Pakistani bloggers could not access their own blogspot blogs and they started a "don't block the blog campaign". My opinion on this ban is that it is a good thing. My reasons are as follows:

• Blogs containing inappropriate content should be blocked. If this can be done so that other blogs are not affected then its better. Otherwise.. well thats life!
• This ban has forced bloggers to wise up and look to new ways to host their blogs. Some have turned to wordpress.com others to purchasing their own domains and hosting. This is a good thing because they will learn to never rely on anyone else to safeguard their valuable content.
• Every Pakistani blogger seems to be carrying this "don't block the blog" badge on their blogs. I don't like following the crowd. So I say do block the damn blogs!

Stuck as I am on an ancient slow as molasses dialup connection, I find myself rather annoyed by the new practice by some Pakistani ISPs of redirecting scrath/prepaid card user's requested pages to their own ad filled pages. Cybernet and gerrys are the two biggest culprits. Both of them randomly redirect you to a page filled with their ads and a continue link. The people at Gerrys advertise their stupid dsl service. Fortunately I am smart enought to use firefox and adblock plus which prevents the fat ads from squeezing my bandwidth. Nevertheless its damn annoying to have to refresh a page multiple times just to see a website.

I have however discovered a few solutions to preventing these redirects. For cybernet you either use any of thier dial in numbers NOT ending in 65 or you configure a proxy server. Often their other numbers don't work so you have to use the one ending in 65. Using a proxy always works. You can find many online lists of proxy servers by googling for them. In the case of gerrys you have to use their proxy server proxy.gerrys.net. Of course you should still use FF and adblock plus because cybernet is fond of pop ups as well. Sigh....

Yessiree! Throw us a few a billion dollars in "aid" and you'll own the sixth most populous country on the planet. Think about what you could do with such a large body of human resource. Checkout some of our recent "projects":

• A few years back we helped the americans invade a neighbouring country. We betrayed our own people ! We'll do anything for a few dollars.
• Why just yesterday we murdered 80 innocents studying in a maddressah in Bajaur among them many children. Will any other government murder its own people for such a cheap price? No! If you like we will even let you send your own terrorist helicopter gunships to do the job! And if your worried about public perception we'll even claim we did it ourselves! You won't get a better deal than this anywhere else.

And remember we pay you back your "aid" with interest so you actually make money!

I visited Lahore and Murree on vacation recently. My sister took some pictures of the shahi qila or fort of Lahore and the mosque built inside it.


The size of the shahi Qila cannot be truly appreciated in these pictures. It is truly massive with the minarets towering high. Compare the minaret in the picture above with the houses in the background to get an idea of its height.

The mosque's domes are huge and imposing. Inside the mosque there are large open spaces underneath the domes. Indeed these magnificient buildings say a lot about the glory days of Lahore.

I usually connect to the Internet using dial up prepaid scratch cards. For a long time now I have been using supernet cards despite their cost. Supernet Rs. 100 cards cost around Rs. 13 per hour for most of the day. But things get really bad at night. After ten their charges drop considerably and everyone dials in creating massive congestion. An already slow dial up connection slows to a crawl.

There is some good news though, recently I discovered cybernet student cards. These cost around Rs. 4/hour for most of the day which is great. Unfortunately their charges for the congested 10pm - 1am block are around Rs. 5, significantly higher than supernet's.

One thing that I find really strange is that supernet blocks SMTP port 25. This means that I am unable to send mail using my hotpop.com account. I have to use my gmail accounts with a hotpop reply to address. I have no idea why supernet does this. Maybe it's to stop people from using other POP email providers or some sort of anti-spam initiative. Now that I have switched to cybernet things may just get a little simpler.