One of the things you learn when you write and release free software is that every now and then, you will come across users who have no idea how hard it is to write software and to maintain it. They write in with some really stupid complaint or another, and when you reply politely that it is not possible, and that what they want might require a significant investment of their money, they go ballistic and downright start making accusations and cursing you.

I had exactly such a case today. Someone had downloaded Slyberoam and was having trouble installing it on Win98SE. Here is the correspondence log:

> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: [CENSORED]
> > > Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2004 18:20
> > > To: admin@rasteroid.com
> > > Subject: win98se problems
> > > Importance: High
> > >
> > >
> > > i installed .net redistribution package after
> > updating IE and
> > > everything
> > >
> > > slyberoam doesnt install on win98se. it says "a
> > windows
> > > service cannt be installed on this operating
> > system. i can
> > > only be installed on NT, 2000 or later" and roll
> > backs the
> > > installation.

Fair enough, the reason of course is that Slyberoam installs as a Service, and Win98 doesn't support services. You need NT, 2000 or XP for that. so I replied:

> > Hi,
> >
> > Thanks for your email. Sorry about the trouble, but
> > perhaps it is
> > time you considered doing an upgrade for your
> > operating system?
> > Except of course if your computer is several years
> > old, and has less
> > than 256 MB RAM. It is good to know that the
> > installer is rolling
> > back correctly on Win98se :)
> >
> > - -R

Now I don't know what was offensive about my email, but it blew the socks off this guy:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [CENSORED]
> Sent: Friday, March 5, 2004 20:47
> To: Rahul Mittal
> Subject: RE: win98se problems
>
>
> wow u are ignoring around 40% of user who are still
> using 98
>
> hum...why dont u give us poor 40% users money to
> upgrade to winxp and buy new hardware (which we dont
> need anyway) and we will happily do it.
>
> yes sir, very kind of you for your microsoft approach
> to a problem.

And unfortunately I lost my cool too:

----------------
I am ignoring who? I am ignoring nobody. I did not write Slyberoam
*FOR* anybody, but myself. I *CHOSE* to make it available *FREELY*
for anyone to use, and even took the pain to write up a brief
document on how to set it up and make it work. I took the pain to
make the source code for Slyberoam publicly and freely available, and
released it under the GPL, an open license, meaning that you can
freely modify the program in any way you want as long as you also
release your changes openly under the GPL. And *I* am ignoring 40% of
users? I am ignoring nobody. I wrote it only for myself, and I am not
ignoring myself. I do not own nor use nor care for Windows 98.

So according to you I should *GIVE* you money to upgrade your
computer, after I have already *GIVEN* you my program, my source
code, and documents on how to set it up. I should *GIVE* you money
even after using *MY* time and ability to hack the protocol, to
publish a document about it, and to release a program that WORKS for
me. I should *GIVE* you money even though neither you nor anyone else
paid me for my time to develop the program and write the documents?
You make me laugh.

In your first email you asked politely about Win98SE support, and I
replied politely that you should consider an upgrade, since there is
no way I can support Windows 98. Perhaps *YOU* should donate money to
me to buy another PC and install Win98SE on it, and then pay me
additional money for my time so that I can develop and fine-tune
Slyberoam to work for *YOU*. Frankly, in all reality I doubt even you
give a damn about 40% of the users who use Win98SE, except yourself.

My *Microsoft* approach? Hah. Pay me $300 for Slyberoam first then
complain about my Microsoft approach. You paid me nothing. You have
no claim over what I should and should not do with Slyberoam. What do
you know about Microsoft anyway? If you're so pissed off at Microsoft
why the hell are you using Windows 98SE in the first place?

By the way, did you buy Windows 98SE? Or did you pirate that
software? Since you most likely pirated it, you have no right to
bitch about Microsoft anyway. Or about any of the companies whose
pirated software and games that probably reside on your aging
pathetic little hard disk.

I have published my source code. I have published an additional
document describing the protocol in detail. For FREE. If you have
half a brain, go write a Win98SE client for 24Online yourself. And
quit bitching.

I put in the effort to reverse engineer a closed protocol, build
software, and made it freely available for anyone to use. I have
never made any guarantees about how the software ought to work on
*YOUR* computer with *YOUR* configuration settings and *YOUR*
computer viruses. If you had any doubts about it, you should have
read the GPL (the license under which Slyberoam is released) and
determined in detail what sorts of guarantees I have made about
Slyberoam. The answer in short is, NONE.

So spare me the crap about ignoring 40% of users or giving you money
or about my Microsoft approach. I don't give a rat's ass about
whether you use Slyberoam or not. Unless you decide you want to pay
me. So until then, go get a life, or sit down and program. Bitching
is just too pathetic a way to waste your time.

- -R
---------------

Anyway, the moral of the story is that no matter what good you try and do, there are always nutcases out there who think you are devious, manipulative, greedy and willing to harm anyone for your own good. Hmm, does that sound like any famous companies you know about? Yes, I think at times I display all these qualities, but in general I display none of them.

I received an email yesterday from a visitor who asked: "Is it possible to increase the bandwidth, download speeds of [an In2Cable] connection?" I have pretty strong feelings on this matter, and listed below is my response to this person, which I thought I should make public:

In some cases, yes. But please don't do that. It is because of this malpractise that In2Cable has enforced 600MB data transfer limits on their connections. Please be responsible. You must realize that every time you misuse something, someone else suffers (another customer, not necessarily In2Cable).

An ISP equipped with nasty software like 24Online is capable of monitoring everything you do online. This has very obvious implications on our online freedom. Suppose that -- through some miracle -- we were to trust the ISP to respect our privacy, but if their connections are abused by customers, they have no choice but to monitor things closely.

Remember, *nothing* you do online is hidden from the ISP, even if you do it securely via SSL or other means. There is no way you can hide massive amounts of data transfer. It will show up on their screens.

I have a meager 64kbps connection but I have used it to download entire distributions of linux. Now with the 600 MB limit, and a flat Rs 2/- charge for every MB in excess of 600 MB, the same 600 MB download costs me Rs 1200/-. The punk who tweaked his cable modem into clogging the network doesn't really care, but I have to foot the bills.

An analogy I used a while ago on my website was that of buying petrol. Just like you buy petrol to "drive around the city", you buy bandwidth to "drive around the internet". Now imagine if the petrol stations sold you petrol and then started following you around everywhere you went? And if they didn't like the places you went to, or if they felt that you drove around too much, that they would just stop selling you petrol (or only sell you 5 litres a month). There is a reason nobody drives 6.0 litre 12-cylinder 540 HP BMW's in India. Petrol is a precious commodity, and is restricted by the availability of crude oil in nature. People are forced to instead make do with affordable options like 2-wheelers and sub 2000cc cars. But the price of petrol is so important to our economy that it affects our entire productivity as a nation.

This is exactly the same with the internet. We need and value our internet freedom, and can't have people follow us around. But we need to be responsible with our usage so that the costs of internet access don't end up having ISP's impose non-sensical restrictions on our usage yet charge us more and more for the same product. And snoop in on our daily internet activities.

I agree that bandwidth is simply too expensive and too scarce in India. I recently estimated it to be about 12x more expensive than in the US. But there is more to it than just backbone bandwidth. A 64kbps connection costs around Rs1100/- a month with In2Cable, or about $25. A 3.0 Mbps cable modem connection in the US costs about the same (or up to $40 in some places). This is a factor of (3000/64) = 46 times. So on one hand we have 12x more expensive bandwidth in India, but simultaneously our ISP's are charging 46x more than their American counterparts. And in India our average income is 10 times lower than the average American. Something is very seriously wrong here. There is NO surprise why the internet hasn't exploded in India like it has in so many other countries. We have *such* a long road ahead.

We need to stand up and fight the system that refuses to implement true broadband (64kbps is NOT broadband, it is what I prefer to call a joke). We need to make a push to encourage companies and the government to drastrically improve internet infrastructure by *several* orders of magnitude. Hopefully that will bring prices down to a more affordable level, but the way I see it, bandwidth in India will tremendously saturated and tremendously expensive for at least another decade if not more. I have already written to Jaffer Sharief (who is the representative from my area) and the Chief Minister's office to revisit policies that restrict the growth and availability of the internet. And I know merely writing is not enough. One person's voice will probably be ignored. But if you too are concerned about bandwidth and cost for internet connectivity, please take more proactive action rather than just tweaking your cable modem.

In the mean time, the 600 MB limit is the main reason I am looking to transfer from In2Cable to another ISP. Hopefully DSL where people can't "tweak" their modems to give them more bandwidth than is sanctioned.

Also, I deeply resent the attitude that because Linux is free, that Linux users in general don the internet "underworld". The "free" stands for "freedom", not for zero cost. With freedom comes responsibility. So please let's be responsible and respect our fellow users. Let's not commit acts whose consequences are to further limit our freedoms.

Responsible also means that we stay alert and react to overpricing of commodities. Bandwidth is no exception. If we are to be responsible, we must struggle towards a more accessible internet.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
Rahul Mittal

Well, it's 5:00 AM and I've been up all night logged into irc.quakenet.org. Yes, the Half-Life 2 sources were leaked. Somebody had hacked into Gabe Newell's computer at Valve software, and had access to the sources since 9/11 (there's that auspicious date again), maybe even earlier.

Anyway, it's a really sad day for Valve, and I expect that the community will rally to support Valve as best they can. Also this means that the official release date for Half-Life 2 is probably delayed.

I really hope they find this hacker, but more importantly, this event raises so many questions about security in todays software development houses. There is an unbelievable amount of detail already out on the web, but I will post only the link to Gabe's post on halflife2.net (which is inaccessible at the moment so to ntfs.org instead):

http://www.ntfs.org/comments.php?catid=3&id=8144&69003

As to the exact details of what is contained in the leaked source... well the zipped file was more than 30MB in size, so there's a lot of material in there. The next few days will reveal exactly how much damage was done. Note that these sources are already about a month old, so much might already have changed.

The question is, who, if anyone, do you point a finger at for this situation? At Gabe? At Valve for not implementing stricter security practises? At the hacker who had access to all of Gabe's email and basically single handedly has caused irreparable harm to Valve? Or Microsoft, for their buggy Outlook software? Or nobody?

All I can say at this point is exactly what Gabe said: "This sucks."

There are some things that I really resent about Indian business culture. One is that there is really very little respect for the customer. Everyone selling you anything in India always thinks that they are doing *you* a favour. They have a new cell phone service, and the salesman just assumes that this is exactly the product you need, without even providing you with all the details. A case in point:

Today, at 9:30 PM, two sales minions from Touchtel dropped by. Unannounced. They didn't bother to telephone me or email me to inform me that they will be arriving. Brilliant. They had already taken their shoes off by the time I opened the door for them, so I let them in just to be polite. Ok, so here's the history...

If you have been following my blog, you will recall that I have become incredibly annoyed with In2Cable's new policies limiting the total data transfer per connection. I found out about Touchtel's Zipnet DSL service from the linux-bangalore-non-tech mailing list. So I went to their website and figured out what plans they offered and at what rates. And I obediently read through their FAQ. At the end of it all, I had a list of 9 questions that were still unanswered, so I wrapped them up in a polite email and dispatched it to Touchtel two days ago.

Yesterday I get an email response saying they need my address and telephone number. The person replying to wrote that it would be easier for someone to answer my questions over the phone. Okay, so I email back giving them my details.

Today, these toons show up with all their sales papers and photocopied rate charts. I told them I know about their basic services and plans, so what I need is answers to my nine questions. They look back blankly, "What questions?" I realized that these salespeople were sent all the way over to sell me a Touchtel Zipnet connection but they weren't even informed about my nine specific questions.

And then one of the clowns musters up the courage to tell me that their special offerings are only valid until tonight, because tomorrow the new month (October) begins, and so they can't guarantee that any of the "special" features of the plan will still be available. What special features? There was nothing special about the whole thing. *I* have to pay a non-refundable connection fee. *I* have to provide a security deposit. *I* have to pay for the purchase of a DSL modem. *I* have to pay the account activation charge. *I* have to pay the monthly fee. Yes, so what is special in this product?

One of the things I had specifically asked for was the result of a traceroute from one of their client PC's to my website hosted in the US. Many DSL companies are notorious for providing a 150ms or larger delay in just the first three hops... I have no idea if it is the fault of crappy equipment or if all DSL companies have this ridiculous delay. If you use online voice conferencing or IP telephony, or even play multiplayer games online, you will realize that 150ms delay in just the first three hops can seriously jeopardize what you are trying to do.

The fee they were charging me for the DSL modem is Rs3000/- which is pretty reasonable for India. But it only connected to a USB port. I wanted to know what model and make the modem is, so that I can try to find another compatible DSL modem that works with ethernet. Our two superheroes didn't even know what make or model the modem was that they were selling.

To their credit, they did answer my seven other questions fairly satisfactorily. After dismissing them, I returned to my desk and was half way through an angry email to Touchtel complaining about sales representatives showing up at my door at 9:30 and not having a clue about my previously disclosed questions. By then the steam fuming out of my ears had stopped and instead I post the story here. The thing is, if I complain to the management, it is the salespersons' jobs that become at risk, whereas they really had no fault in this whole thing. The process set up by the management at Touchtel for answering queries is clearly inadequate, but why punish the salespeople who are just trying to earn a living.

Returning to why I started this post. What I wanted to emphasize is that India has a very very long way to go if it wants to match the customer-centric business model in the West. OK, I know many people will argue that many companies really don't give a rat's ass about customers as long as they can sell products to them (and the related income from service and support). But at least the sales process in the West cleverly disguises this. That doesn't happen at all in India.

Part of the problem is the culture. Indians in general are significantly poorer than Americans or Europeans. Over centuries we have developed a sense of "survival at any cost". Traditionally, Indian citizens have never had salespeople running around to their houses in shirts and ties trying to sell them a new water filtering system. And so when people suddenly start getting this sort of attention as a result of growing capitalism, they feel that they are being honored by these salespeople and are consequently more liable to fall victim to purchasing the wrong product. Further, this has elevated the salespeople to a much more highly respected level than in the West. These salespeople roam around the city, show up at people's doorsteps at any time, are often rude and inadequately trained about the products they are selling, and yet expect that the customer sign up for their product immediately. There is no selling "process". There is an expectation of instant decisions, and responses like "I need another week to evaluate competing products" are simply not expected.

I expect that this scenario will change, and in fact I see glimpses of that change already. There are odd articles now and then in the media about the "lowly salesperson", something which was entirely absent as little as ten years ago. Yes, India is becoming a better place, but we have a long long way to go.

Anyone wishing to sneak into Yahoo! Groups may now do so:

http://india.citizenlab.org/

Oh, and to quote Atul Chitnis from the linux-bangalore-non-tech mailing list:

"Did you know that the internet treats censorship as damage, and works around it?"

Muahahaha.

Crazy little Kynhun group 2, Government of India 0

The second was goal was representative of the sheer dominance of the internet over the fledgeling powers of the Indian Government.

First up, pricing. Here's a very recent article on Yahoo! News that gives you a very good idea about the bandwidth differences between India and the US.

American ISP's are *increasing* the cap on maximum bandwidth for their subscribers while maintaining the subscription rates, whereas in India, that cap is not changing at all, the price for the same cap is going higher, and the pricing is becoming based on data transfer instead of bandwidth. I would grit my teeth but then I'd be gritting them so hard that I'd have no teeth left.

As I have mentioned before, the Indian ISP's aren't entirely to blame in this fiasco. The problem is that our country is being run by a bunch of morons in the government that have no clue what the internet is or how it works. Recently they commanded several ISP's to try to enforce things like banning a Yahoo! Group from being viewed in India because it discusses politically incompatible issues. Apparently this order was issued by CERT. Which person at CERT is responsible for this? Why the hell is this ministry still hiring idiots who have never heard of SSL, proxying, mirrors, etc? How can they call India an emerging IT superpower and yet not know that this sort of blocking is really not possible?

Of course the ISP's themselves have a bunch of morons working for them. Instead of blocking the specific Yahoo! newsgroup that was causing the trouble, they decided to block all Yahoo! newsgroups. WTF!!??? OK, so with "broadband" in India, we are allowed a maximum connection rate of 64kbps, are charged 12x more for the same data transfer than in the US, consequently can't do any typical broadband activities like watch movies, listen to music, tune into online radio, AND we are blocked from all of Yahoo! Groups because the morons at the ISP have no clue how to block just a single group?

Interestingly, I don't think In2Cable was ordered to block Yahoo! Groups because I received no disruption of service when I tried to connect.

What is funny about all this is that this attempt to block the group backfired on the Indian government. The story was published in Indian and foreign media, and they basically made a mockery of themself. The story was even Slashdotted. Apparently the group's membership skyrocketed from a mere 12 members to about 188 within a few minutes of the Slashdot story.

Crazy little Kynhun group 1, Government of India 0.

Thanks to an own-goal.

There's a lesson in this for everyone: You win battles by spreading information, not by alienating it. More than just the Government of India needs to learn about this. Even the US Government, which tried to block Al Qaeda and Taliban activity on the internet, albeit unsuccessfully.

Did you hear that, Government of India and ISP companies of India? Make internet access cheaper and more reliable. Then watch your own public ratings soar.

Here is another link related to this overall topic of internet freedom that I have become obsessed with tonight:

Big Brother turns gaze on debates [timesofindia.indiatimes.com]

Basically it's talking about government enforced restrictions for the spread of information in India, with networks such as VSNL, Sify and Dishnet DSL being asked to block all access to Yahoo! Groups.