After a 20-day state of emergency was declared in Armenia when clashes between security services and supporters of the former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, broke out on the streets of the capital following the disputed 19 February presidential election, access to the media has been severely restricted. According to presidential decree, local media outlets can now only publish official news and political propaganda is banned.

[…]

Nevertheless, pro-Ter-Petrossian activists outside of the country have seized upon the opportunity to instead use blogs to disseminate information during what is to all intents and purposes a media blackout in the country. Interestingly, one such blogger, Artmika at Unzipped, likens it to the old Soviet practice of “samizdat.”

Samizdat (Russian: самиздат) was the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries. Copies were made a few at a time, and those who received a copy would be expected to make more copies. This was often done by handwriting or typing.

This grassroots practice to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials.

Vladimir Bukovsky defined it as follows: “I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and [may] get imprisoned for it.”

The full post is available on Global Voices Online.

A few weeks ago PanArmenian.Net reported that two representatives from Armenia will observe the 5 January 2008 presidential election in Georgia as part of the OSCE/ODIHR international observation mission. The web site of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of the Republic of Armenia named at least one of those representatives as Atom Mkhitaryan from the CEC’s Department of Foreign Relations.

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Following on from problems sending emails because ArmenTel is on an international blacklist for spam, it now seems as though I can’t access or update my main Oneworld Multimedia site or the Armenia Election Monitor 2008 blog. Instead, I have to use any other internet provider other than ArmenTel. For now, I’m not sure why I can access other sites inside and outside Armenia, but not my own. Whereas before I couldn’t send emails via an ArmenTel connection, I now also can’t receive them.

Anyway, this blog is thankfully not affected, but if anyone has any ideas as to why this situation has arisen please leave a comment. I’d also like to hear from other ArmenTel ISP users if the same is true for them. The URLS I can’t access are the following:

http://www.oneworld.am
http://blog.oneworld.am

After much speculation and earlier denials, RFE/RL reports that Armenia’s second mobile telecommunications network, VivaCell, has been sold to Russia’s main operator, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), for $430 million in a takeover bid that should raise some questions about its timing just months before the 2008 presidential election early next year. The takeover is already raising concerns about Russia’s dominance and monopoly over key strategic areas of the Armenian economy.

The deal came after weeks of negotiations reportedly involving the governments of the two countries. According to reports in the Armenian press, the authorities in Yerevan have played a large role in convincing K-Telecom’s official owner, Lebanese tycoon Pierre Fattouch, to sell his rapidly expanding VivaCell network to MTS.

The Armenian government was similarly said to have been a driving force behind last year’s sale of the ArmenTel national telecom company, which operates the country’s second cellular network, to another Russian wireless firm, Vimpelcom. The $500 million acquisition came shortly after President Robert Kocharian’s visit to Moscow.

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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.

For nearly a week now, ArmenTel’s IP address that is used by all of its dialup customers has been blocked by CBL presumably because of spam coming out of Armenia. Each time it’s manually unblocked a few hours later it’s blocked again. Bad enough, but even worse is the fact that ArmenTel don’t appear to give a damn. Well, it’s how most organizations and companies are run here, but for a country that places such a priority on the development of the IT sector.

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For the past four days I’ve been unable to send any emails through Thunderbird and Outlook Express. Each time I try my mail server rejects the messages and says that my IP address has been blocked.

http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=212.73.64.41

Interestingly, this IP address is not one specific to my computer. Other ArmenTel dialup users I know also have the same IP address although as they use web-based mail services such as Yahoo and Hotmail the blacklisting doesn’t appear to affect them.

However, if the situation is as it appears, it’s quite outrageous and one that ArmenTel should address immediately. According to CBL, this is not the first time that such blacklisting has occurred.

IP Address 212.73.64.41 was found in the CBL.

It was detected at 2007-07-29 04:00 GMT (+/- 30 minutes), approximately 4 hours ago.

It has been relisted following a previous removal at 2007-07-07 21:57 GMT

If anyone else is experiencing similar problems or knows anything about this situation please leave a comment. If someone from ArmenTel is reading this post, please look into this situation immediately.

I can request a removal via the CBL site, but I find that such a situation existing for four days without the largest telecommunications and Internet company doing anything about it is quite ridiculous.

Given that my 2.5 year old Siemens CX65 mobile died on me a few days ago thanks to an apparently inherent design flaw with the circuit board, time for some mobile phone humour. Myrthe at The Armenian Odar has more.

Earlier today I met a girl from Lebanon who had brought some things from my boyfriend’s parents for us. We didn’t know each other and we were supposed to meet on the Republic Square. This is part of the phone conversation we had when we were trying to find each other.

She: Are you standing in front of the museum?
I: Yes.

She: Are you wearing a black summer dress?
I: Yes.

She: Okay, I think I see you. Are you talking on the phone right now?
I: ….

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Well, I never thought I’d say this, but ArmenTel is getting better since they were taken over by the Russians. Before, Internet was a pain, but I just received some telemarketing phone call alerting me to ArmenTel’s new internet service. Given that they supply the line to the other ISPs in Armenia it makes sense, and not least because they can also undercut them in terms of price.

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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.

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.