Well, it now appears as though ArmenTel is blocked for good. Given that the IP address is a generic one for all or most of its internet customers, I’m amazed that a company such as this could allow such a thing to happen.

Specified IP (212.73.64.41) has been removed an excessive number of times from the CBL already. Please contact cbl@cbl.abuseat.org for assistance.

I’ll email these guys, but I don’t see why I should have to. Makes me think that ArmenTel — Armenia’s main telecommunications company — is run by a bunch of cowboys.

cow·boy (kou’boi’)
n.

[…]

3. Slang A reckless person, such as a driver, pilot, or manager, who ignores potential risks.

If anyone out there is an IT specialist perhaps you can check to see what’s going on. Whatever the reason, this should not be happening.
I’ve already asked a friend to check whether the same thing happens for him from his computer via ArmenTel’s dialup service and it does.

Like I said — cowboys.

Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisyan, Central Election Commission (CEC), Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia for EurasiaNet 2007

After last week’s visit to the Central Election Commission (CEC) to photograph the arrival of transparent ballot boxes from Syria, I returned yesterday to photograph the signing of an agreement between IFES, the U.S. Embassy and the Armenian Government for the provision of 10 computers and related equipment for the election.

IFES will handover the equipment during a ceremony at the CEC headquarters at 12:00 pm on Wednesday, April 25. Several high-ranking dignitaries will attend the event, including Armenian Prime Minister Serge Sargsian, U.S. Charge d’Affaires Anthony Godfrey and the Chairman of the Central Electoral Commission Garegin Azaryan.

IFES Chief of Party to Armenia Chedomir Flego said the equipment should greatly improve the transmission of elections results and the speed of communication between the CEC and Territorial Electoral Commissions.

“This equipment will modernize and make more efficient the process and will have a very significant impact on the clarity of the polls because it is during the process of transmitting election results from the Territorial Electoral Commissions to the Central Electoral Commission that it must be as accurate as possible,” said Flego.

The donation of computers and other equipment is part of IFES program to provide technical assistance to the CEC. IFES’ program aims to promote elections reform and the adoption of technology in order to improve the voting process for Armenian citizens.”

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I’ve just found that NowPublic.com have posted a story on the development of blogging in Armenia in time for the 2007 parliamentary election. It seems that Mary Joyce’s post as well as news that we’ll translate the Election Blogging Guide into Armenian has attracted the attention of many e-democracy pundits outsde of Armenia.

Thanks to Global Voices I have discovered a significant project called the Election Blogging Guide. Armenia of course was part of the Soviet bloc which discouraged corrupt forms of bourgeois democracy such as blogging.* The elections are scheduled for May 12, 2007.

[…]

* OK, so there was no blogging available to anybody during the Cold War. That’s a minor quibble.

The full story is here.

What with the elections I’m a little slow in posting a link to this article, but it’s definitely a precedent for me in that it’s co-penned with an Azerbaijani writer. The story, published on EurasiaNet, details and analyzes recent tit-for-tat attacks on Armenian and Azeri web sites as a continuation of the Karabakh conflict.

The differences between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh may at times seem never-ending, but in their response to what appears to be an ongoing cyber conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani hackers, residents of both countries are standing united in a push for peace.

Clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani hackers are nothing new, but the most recent “cyber war” has gained greater resonance. As was the case in 2006, international observers have forecast that 2007 could witness a breakthrough in negotiations between the two sides over Nagorno-Karabakh. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. At the same time, the potential for online debates about the territorial dispute is growing rapidly, as the number of Internet users in both countries continues to expand.

The latest cyber conflict began on January 22 when Armenian hackers attacked the website of Azerbaijan’s public television station. The attackers, who identified themselves as members of Armenia’s security services, posted Armenia’s state emblem on the site’s home page, and warned that they would kill an Azerbaijani hacker identified as “Bacioglu” (a slang Azeri word for “nephew”), if the individual did not stop sabotaging Armenian websites.

But the threat did little to dissuade “Bacioglu.” On January 29, the Azerbaijani hacker attacked five Armenian websites (openarmenia.com, openarmenia.ru, tamanyan.org, homeopathy.am, photoblogs.am). He posted Azerbaijan’s state emblem and images of Azerbaijani civilians killed in Nagorno-Karabakh on the sites’ home pages, along with a pledge to “fight you and all Armenians on earth as long as I live” and a threat to destroy the official website of Armenian President Robert Kocharian.

The full article is here.

What Democracy Means has an interesting post on the shape of the media in the run-up to the 2007 parliamentary elections. It’s particularly interesting because of the way it examines the state of the print media and compares that to its online counterpart. This is also particularly relevant considering the fact that the authorities control all the TV stations.

[…] the incumbent authorities in Armenia are persistently pressurizing the traditional media, using a combination of hidden economic incentives and tax/legal pressures. The latest point can be illustrated by looking at the ownership and financing patterns of most media outlets in Armenia (some examples: Kentron TV owned by Gaguik Tsarukyan, AR TV by Hrant Vardanyan, H2 TV by Samvel Mayrapetyan), while contrasting that with recent cases against Arman Babajanyan editor of very oppositional newspaper and the newly imposed annual fee for servicing the broadcast frequency brought against Radio Companies, who enjoy a relative degree of economic freedom).

[…]

A number of widely recognized organizations have recently posted reports on the state of freedom and democracy in Armenia, in which the country repeatedly ranks among partly free, oppressive towards journalists, etc. (See reports by: Freedom House; Reporters without Borders; Global Integrity).The following conclusion of the Freedom House is especially worth mentioning: “Systematic efforts to control media in countries of the former Soviet Union have intensified in 2006 indicating further erosion of civil liberties.”

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Well, it’s an interesting way to see in the New Year, with controversy surrounding the release of footage of last Thursday’s execution of Saddam Hussein on the Internet. Certainly, the video phone has come of age although as only two senior Iraqi officials were apparently allowed to have their mobiles with them as the ex-dictator went to the gallows, it’s perhaps a perverse form of citizen journalism, I suppose. Nevertheless, it’s quite a moment for the online world as The Huffington Post explains.

The execution happened, the coverage began, and the inevitable question arose: would the networks air full video clips of Saddam Hussein’s hanging? Those thirsting for gory details that potentially squeamish networks wouldn’t provide needed to look no further than YouTube, which held versions aplenty of the now infamous camera phone video within hours of the execution (an occurrence that surprised just about no one). Meanwhile, networks wrung their hands over whether the value of the context and authenticity shown in the videa outweighed the material’s gruesome nature. Even Fox, which teased viewers with early footage that stopped just short of the moment of death, balked at showing the dictator’s neck breaking on air (though, as Gawker pointed out, they wasted no time in ponying up the full video on the Fox website). Blogs and independent news sites nabbed and posted the unofficial video (which was reportedly more graphic and detailed than the brief clip released by the Iraqi government) in droves, and soon the question of whether or not to run it became somewhat moot.

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Following the sale of Armentel by the Greek OTE, RFE/RL reports that an agreement has been reached to finally end ArmenTel’s controversial monopoly on internet connectivity into the country. However, no word in this article if this is in return for the 10 percent of shares in ArmenTel the Government owns, but anyway.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s been frustrating to be sitting here in Yerevan paying $45-50 a month for a dialup when ASDL costs $35 a month in Tbilisi. Hopefully, that will now soon change. It’s really about time.

Exclusive rights to all forms of telecommunication were a key term of ArmenTel’s 1998 takeover by OTE. The Greek telecom giant was forced to abandon its grip on mobile telephony two years ago after its dramatic failure to develop the wireless service in Armenia. But it resisted strong pressure for a similar liberalization of the Internet market.

Armenia’s external Internet traffic has until now been carried out through a single fibro-optic cable running to neighboring Georgia, with ArmenTel failing to develop alternative satellite channels of communication. Local Internet providers say this is why they have been unable inexpensive high-speed service to corporate and individual users. That has in turn been widely regarded as a serious obstacle to the development of information technology, one of the most promising sectors of Armenia’s economy.

Samvel Arabajian, a member of the state regulatory body, said the end of the monopoly should remedy the situation. “We expect that competition will lead to a drop in prices and an increase in quality,” he told RFE/RL.

The full story is here, and Raffi at Cilicia.com also has something on this long overdue news. For once it appears as if we have some genuinely good news for a change, and so far there doesn’t seem to be any strings attached.

It’s 3am in the morning and I’m not even half way through sending 40 high resolution images to a magazine in the United States. And it’s no wonder. I’m sitting at my computer in Yerevan where we have to make do with crappy dial up connections costing around $40-50 a month because of the damn ArmenTel monopoly. In Tbilisi, ADSL costs $30-35 a month — five times cheaper than in Armenia — for God’s sake. I really think it’s about time this situation changes — and soon.

For those of you that don’t know, Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 7. Although I prefer Firefox to IE, I do have to admit that there are some nice features in it. Of course, one of those — tabbed browsing — has been available to users of Firefox and most other browsers for some time now. However, for reading pages and making web sites look nicer there’s no doubt that IE 7’s anti-aliased text comes into its own. Hope Firefox has this in the next update.

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Reporters Without Borders is organizing an online campaign against net censorship. The campaign focuses on 13 countries with particularly bad records in this area as well as Yahoo who have self-imposed restrictions, as well as worked with the local authorities to persecute dissidents and journalists, in China.

More than 60 cyber-dissidents around the world are currently in prison for expressing themselves online. Something that is fairly simple for anyone to do in most countries is nonetheless banned in 13 of them. You can go to prison for posting your views on a blog or website in China, Tunisia or Egypt, for example. In order to combat this kind of censorship and to make as many people as possible aware of the situation, Reporters Without Borders is for the first time launching a major protest: 24 hours against online censorship. The general public, Internet users, bloggers, journalists, students - everyone is invited to register their opposition to censorship with a simple click.

More information on RSF’s campaign, scheduled to take place between 11 a.m. on 7 November and 11 a.m. on 8 November Paris time (2pm in Yerevan), can be found on their web site.

Via iArarat, news that 24-year-old Armenian-American computer science student Christopher Soghoian has had a run-in with the FBI for highlighting an airline security flaw. Soghoian was responsible for creating a web site that generated fake boarding passes for Northwest Airlines.

BoingBoing reports that Soghoian stopped responding to instant messages after 3.50pm on 27 October when the FBI paid a visit to his home. The visit followed calls for Soghoian’s arrest by U.S. Congressman Edward Markey.

The Bush Administration must immediately act to investigate, apprehend those responsible, shut down the website, and warn airlines and aviation security officials to be on the look-out for fraudsters or terrorists trying to use fake boarding passes in an attempt to cheat their way through security and onto a plane,” Markey said in a statement. “There are enough loopholes at the backdoor of our passenger airplanes from not scanning cargo for bombs; we should not tolerate any new loopholes making it easier for terrorists to get into the front door of a plane.

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