Category: Pakistan

Pakistan

Wateen Spampaign on Pakistani Blogs

Sohaib Athar16 Comments

I can’t say that I’m disappointed with Wateen, as I don’t really care at all about that brand or whatever they sell, be it bandwidth, cell connection or water-balloons. I do have a serious problem though, when there is an intrusive attempt by corporations to use my belongings (this blog being one) or my surrounding to  sell their products – and Wateen did just that!

Today, around noon, I received a comment spam from Wateen advertising their broadband packages on a post that has nothing to do with broadband.

Exhibit A - Spam by Wateen
Exhibit A - Spam by Wateen

The spam was sent by a certain H. S. Kiani (probably a desi John Doe) from the IP 116.71.34.205, with the email waristerrorism@yahoo.com.

I whois’ed the IP to verify that it was official Wateen spam generated from their own servers (and not a negative marketing campaign by one of their competitors), before trying to call their tollfree number and asking them about a certain Mr. Kiani, and was amused to see that the IP belonged to PTCL.

Despite being a very satisfied PTCL customer, I sent an email to Mr. Kiani, showing my interest in their amazing offer, and I also added him up on Yahoo Messenger, but so far there has been no response from him. If he does reply (one can dream, no?) I intend to ask him a LOT of questions.

A quick look at my analytics plugin (Open Web Analytics) revealed that the visitor had hit the same post twelve times before submitting the spam.

Rasala Group Spam
Wateen Spam

In parallel, I was also asking my tweeple on Twitter if they had received the same spam today, and not surprising, many of them confirmed their blogs, or the blogs that they read, were targetted by Wateen today as well. Here are a few tweets from this noon, recording things as they were uncovered. The ones in italics are mine.

  • Nice! Wateen (or some Wateen rival) just sent some comment spam about their broadband on my blog, including their URL and phone #! about 2 hours ago from TwitterFox
  • Has anyone else from Pakistan received comment spam from Wateen about their 1mbps package today? about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox
  • UzEE @reallyvirtual Lol. Tell them you wont remove the comment if they give you 6 month subscription free. about 2 hours ago from mobile web in reply to ReallyVirtual
  • @uzee I’m emailing the guy who spammed me, and calling the Wateen # mentioned afterwards. Funny thing, they used PTCL IPs to spam! about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox in reply to UzEE
  • phpgurru @ReallyVirtual I also received wateen spam from the IP 116.71.34.205 40 minutes ago from TwitterFox in reply to ReallyVirtual
  • aqeeliz @ReallyVirtual Quite a few other Pakistani blogs I read have gotten comment spam about Wateen package. less than 5 seconds ago from web in reply to ReallyVirtual
  • harisn @aqeeliz @ReallyVirtual I also got that Wateen spam comment. Infact I still have it in my pending comments hehe 8 minutes ago from m.slandr.net in reply to aqeeliz

Shafiq from Shafiq.pk also shared that the text in the comment spam is the same as the one broadcast in Wateen’s radio ads, so this is a coordinated campaign. Aamir Atta pointed out this article by Bites85 on his blog propakistani.com that notices the recent rise in spampaigns by Wateen and other telcos very recently, so at least a few other bloggers have noticed as well.

This is the normally the point in the post where I start my rant, but it is almost my bedtime so I will not spread a lot of negativity, and instead, I will just ask a few questions and hope that the relevant people (read Mr. Kiani & Co.) will step up and answer them. What I really want to know is:

Wateen:

  • How could you possibly conceive a spampaign in the Pakistani Blogosphere and not worry one bit about it backfiring? Do you think the Pakistani bloggers are so naive that we will let your comments pass by unnoticed and let them stay on our blogs?
  • How can you support bloggers’ meetups all over Pakistan one month and spam the same bloggers the very next month?
  • I wrote down my email and blog URL on paper during LBM08 , which was supported by you. Did you take the URLs so that you may add me to your spam list? Did I opt-in? or are you spamming all the blogs aggregated on bloggers.pk ?
  • Do you think I will trust your brand in the future, after you abuse my contact information?
  • I was all praises for LBM08 and still think its effect as a catalyst was significant, despite whatever motivations you had as a supporter. Do you think that I’ll feel the same way the next time you support any event?

PTCL/PTA:

Bloggers:

  • Did you receive the same spam from Wateen this week? Care to share your  blog URL?

Enough questions. Time to sleep.

The Answer is 200 Million Kilograms

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

Keep Calm
Since we usually have a bomb blast or two every other week in one of the major cities of Pakistan, and as there is nothing happening right now to hope for things to change in the near future, so I think that it is about time that we started some research on how to cope with the FUD in our “Land of the Pure”.

We can begin by looking back a few decades and learning from how our ex-rulers (that would be the British, for those who have forgotten/never knew) did it, and try to “Keep Calm and Carry On”. Meanwhile, we do need to ask some questions and gather statistics to help us survive the next few days, weeks, months or years, depending on how far ahead you usually plan.

This is probably the real reason why one of the “Breaking News” headlines after today’s Peshawar bomb blast (which claimed 20ish lives) was:

“The explosives weighed 15-20 kilograms.”

I doubt that the people who died in the blast would have given a damn about HOW they died, but the question that popped up in my mind was, how many kilograms of similar explosives will it take to kill us all – and by us, I mean Pakistanis.

As the 20Kg. killed 20 people , so 1Kg. of explosives kill approximately 1 person – by simplifying our model and ignoring most variables like population densities, people’s tendency to run away from hazards etc. etc., and as the population of Pakistan is roughly 200,000,000 (We are the 6th largest nation of the world by population) – so we can safely say that around 200,000,000 kilograms of explosives are needed to blow away the entire Pakistani population.

While I do not have any visualization aids or images handy that would help you imagine what they would look like, trust me when I say that it is a LOT of explosives.

If the current bombing patterns are the best that the terrorists can do, then Pakistan is not going anywhere soon. Sure, a few thousand people will die due to explosives, but when you ‘zoom out’ and adjust your focus (at the risk of being called insensitive/inhuman), it is not much, statistically speaking.

And so, there is one less answer that is blowin’ in the wind…

Pakistan Problems Propaganda and Prejudice

ReallyVirtual6 Comments

Two months ago, this Urdu + English “sponsored link” ad for a website worstnation.com started showing up in my Gmail every day. I will not link to it for obvious reasons, but here’s what is says:

دنیا کی سب سے بدترین قوم

www.WorstNation.com

پاکستان سے زندہ بھاگ آپ یقیناً اتفاق کریں گے۔

The Urdu text translates roughly to “World’s Worst Nation“, “You will surely agree” and “Get out of Pakistan Alive” – the later is a wordplay on “Pakistan Zindabad“, which means “Long Live Pakistan“, and has been in use to ridicule Pakistan for atleast a decade. On the site, there is an almost exhaustive list of the many things wrong with Pakistan, in Urdu.

The first time I saw the ad, I checked the whois information out of curiosity and found out that the domain was registered to some guy in Faisalabad. I assumed that the owner was just another Pakistani frustrated at being born with brown skin, and that he was just utilizing the free adword credit that some hosts offer. The ad and the website were mildly irritating, but so is 90% 99% of the world, so I moved on.

Two months have passed since I first saw this ad – many bombs have exploded and hundreds of people have been killed in all four of our provinces – by terrorists, by our army, by the Americans and recently – by our ordinary(?) citizens – in the name of nationalism, peace, honor, ethnic cleansing, and various variants of God as well. The killings are still going on in Karachi as I write this.

The worstnation.com website, meanwhile, is still advertising relentlessly – I see its targeted message more than a dozen times a day, with its cryptic “About us” page that says “our identities really don’t matter, just listen to our message or go do something else”, and the owners of the website are still spending money to make their voices heard. A Google search tells me that atleast one other person noticed this last month and rightly recognized the demoralizing effect of such propaganda material, but blamed it on “international efforts to demoralize our nation”. He also mentioned seeing an indian flag favicon on the domain, a domain that is registered under a false name – after all, Indians are the real enemy, right?

After two months, the owners of worstnation have learnt from their mistakes, there is no indian flag and the whois information has disappeared from the database behind a privacy protection service though the clocktowercity website is still alive and clicking.

If you check the server for worstnation.com on http://www.myipneighbors.com/ , you will notice half a dozen websites that can have a relationship with Pakistan and are hosted on the same server – a few of them are:

http://oururdu.com/forums/index.php

http://irfan-ul-quran.com/quran/index.php?tid=12

http://www.minhajforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29

The irfan-ul-quran website has this favicon that was mistaken for an Indian flag. The forums page on the last link lists 40 websites that they run, and mentions with a smile that they have (created and are running)

..and a lot more that cannot be listed here smile.gif

So, My dear brethren in Islam (who are stuck-in-the-worst-nation-of-the-world through no fault of your own), I respect your opinions regarding the state of our nation and even agree with many of the points on your website, but hiding behind private websites and talking about revolutions is no way to start a revolution!

When you say we are the worst nation, please speak for yourself, not me – and please publish your identities on your website, don’t just hit and hide… who knows, you might get lucky and start a revolution by mistake – or you might get lucky and get the death penalty (read ‘heaven’) for disrupting national harmony in cyberspace – at least that is what the new cybercrime law asks for. Either way, it is a win-win situation for you, you lucky guys! So please don’t be shy and reveal yourselves to the public. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

I love your bitterness and sarcasm, but after identifying all the problems of this nation in a couple of months, I was expecting to hear the solution to those problems from your own anonymous-yet-expert beaks. If getting out of Pakistan alive (Hijrat to Canada perhaps?) is your thing, then let me know if I can help you in any way. But whatever you do, for Allah’s sake, please stop the frigging advertising on GMail – it is irritating!

PS. and change your flag – it does resemble the indian flag.

Bomb Blast in Lahore Targets Jews and Barbarians

Sohaib Athar10 Comments

Last night, some terrorists succeeded in planting three time-bombs in the Garhi Shahu area in Lahore, an area that is 4-5 kilometers away from my house. Thankfully, nobody had died until the last update.

I  had to turn on the idiot box (after many months) to catch the live report, and was lucky enough to witness the uber-intelligent reporters standing inside the shop that was destroyed. Using their extremely intelligent brains, and standing on top of the scene of the blast without caring about forensic evidence, they decreed that “The bombs were planted to create panic in the common citizens”.

I think they are wrong, and I have an alternate theory. It involves the terrorists’ big boss telling them to Read more “Bomb Blast in Lahore Targets Jews and Barbarians”

Have a Sombre Eid Everyone!

Sohaib Athar6 Comments

Aren’t you tired of the monotonous “Happy” and “Mubarik” Eids year after year? Why not try something different, like a “Sombre” Eid, for a change?

Don’t hand a 1000 rupee note to every one of your ten nephews. They already have plenty and will blow the money up in a day. Give them each a 50 Rs. chocolate instead, they would be just as happy. Use the 9500 rupees to feed a child. Like this one. For many months. Take your nephews with you. Compare.

Eidi Candidate
Eidi Candidate

Do you really need those new clothes? Isn’t your wardrobe full already? They’ll go out of fashion next year. Or next month. Wear your best clothes on Eid. They don’t have to be new. Buy milk for this child instead. Before he dies. Realize.

Hungry Child
A Pakistani Child

Skip one Eid visit to a friend who lives 20 kilometers away. Save 500 rupees in fuel and the eid cake that you were going to take with you. Drive around your residence until you find a child like this one, or this one. Give the money to her. Your friend has a cellphone, wish him over the phone. Tell him what you did. He’ll understand.

Hungry Girl
A Pakistani Girl

Turn the TV off for a few hours. It will only make you crave more stuff to buy. Instead of wasting time on the special Eid broadcasts for a few hours, read a book with your child – or read The Book. One more day won’t hurt. Learn.

A change may do you good.

http://edhi.org/contacts.htm

http://www.azadfoundation.org/

http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/sponsor-a-child/asian-child-sponsorship/pakistan.htm

http://www.uwt.org/Countries/Pakistan_Charity.asp