Monday, October 31, 2005

sri lanka cuts phone links to 13 countries

telecommunications regulatory commission of sri lanka(trc) has requested sri lanka telecom(slt) to cut idd to solomon islands, vanuatu, the cook islands, the wallis and futana islands, papua new guinea, nauru, tuvalu, tokelau, western samoa, niue estonia, and kiribati.
block will be there for 3 months from next week.

why?
according to director general of trc: "We have decided to do this because of modem hijacking," .

imo this is stupid. just because a small number of customers fall victim to this sort of easily preventable scam should whole countries be cut off? if customers get billed for calls they never made they should sort it out with their phone company and follow the simple procedure needed to prevent this.

you might object that since countries concerned are small and unimportant this is no big deal. well for one, sri lanka is small and unimportant, how would you feel if same was done to us by usa ? second, it is the principle that is important. if this sort of attitude prevailed internet itself would be banned eventually.

what's next? government blocking of all emails with word 'nigeria'?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is just deja vu for me. Our governments seem to continually mismatch problems and solutions. The last time this happened was the whole nightclub thing when the murder and Malaka Silva's antics resulted in the whole close at 1, don't serve alcohol after 12 etc. They just want to give the impression that they see there's a problem and they're doing something about it.

Over here as well, as you point out there's such a simple solution (getting SLT to code your IDD call output) but the govt. goes for impractical, over the top regulation.

Anonymous said...

Excellent decision on the govt's part. All hail NGO dickcheese Dilan Perera.

ivap said...

Sure sounds like the actions of a "mummy state". Are there any votes in this or did some ministers son ( or daughter ) run up a large dialer based pr0n bill ?

BTW, who is Dilan Perera and what does he have to do with this?

ivap said...

sittingnut - BTW, how about turning on the spam filter?

Anonymous said...

The government made a good decision. It's time to end all the scams.

Stop whining sittingnut when something's done for the best.

sittingnut said...

update: slt has refused the trc's request. see new post.

ddm:
you are right look at what happened to those silly regulations on clubs, everybody ignores them again now and they are right.

ivap:
it just overzealous bureaucratic activity i think.
as for dilan perera he is a minister of something or other and also deputy minister of media. a cbk loyalist and anti jvp hence the anons. i don't think trc comes under him.

as for spam filter i was holding out as long as can bc i consider it to be very off putting but the first comment here(posted almost before the original post) made me change my mind so it will be turned on from now on.

carolis:
The government made a good decision. It's time to end all the scams. :-D but my dear caro, the government is the biggest scam!