In October 2002 I wrote about non-existent security for Indiatimes email users (about which ’til date exactly zilch has been done). While browsing around, I discovered that things are even worse than they appear if you use any Indiatimes password-protected feature with the “Remember Me” feature checked: this includes their Cricket site, PhotoGallery and Filmfare. The same password is used for (ouch) their shopping and classifieds-submission sites. If you are
one of these users, anyone with access to your desktop (common in shared environments) can grab your Indiatimes login and password, no network sniffer required! All they have to do is fire up a browser (IE will do nicely), browse over to this very helpful URL and grab the username and password off the source of the XML page that results.

Okay, so at least it’s not remotely exploitable. I think. (Probably not until someone writes a worm/virus that exploits this particular flaw.) Still, somebody ought to tell these guys that passwords for portals with pan-India ambitions should be managed slightly better. Yahoo would have their heads bitten off if they did something like this.

(Note: in the interest of responsible disclosure, Indiatimes was notified before posting this.)

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I wonder if the hike in local-call-tariffs will affect dial-up internet users — anybody who dials a 172xxx SancharNet number to access the Net through a dial-up ISP like Sify and VSNL at discounted rates of upto Rs12/hr at night. If so, then dial-up users unfortunately become collateral damage. In the long run, it would do these ISPs a world of good if they could convert as many of these dial-up users to broadband. But given that dial-up is with us for some more time, they could pick a leaf or two out of ISP’s like Blueyonder, who offer plans like SurfUnlimited, which has a special unmetered telephone line just for data. Touchtel already advertises a scheme along these lines, and there’s no reason why Sify/VSNL could not enter into a revenue-sharing agreement with BSNL and offer a toll-free number for dial-up users to use.

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ToI: Telecom operators shun comment on TRAI tariff. I missed this point in the TRAI recommendation: WLL operators are now free to determine their own tariffs, and are not linked to fixed-line rates anymore. Bing! Looks like Reliance’s 20p/minute (or 5p per 15s pulse) plan will be making a comeback after all.

The linked article makes amusing reading incidentally: According to the basic telecom industry, TRAI had ushered in a Calling Party Pays (CPP) regime through the back door and thus lost out in the battle as they would now be paying to cellular operators on equal basis. So CPP is now a bad thing?

Cellular operators cried foul over TRAI giving free hand to WLL operators to determine their tariffs. And why shouldn’t they?

They also decried TRAI announcing free incoming calls on cell phones without levying any additional fixed charges. If this quote is accurate, I’d be surprised — cellcos have been asking for this for some time now, it’s unthinkable that they won’t pass on the benefit to their subscribers.

Overall, the TRAI seems to have redeemed itself this time — the proposal seems to be quite fair to all parties (curmudgeons protesting the local-call-tariff hike notwithstanding).

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For those who ask how does the customer gain from hiked local call prices: for a nation as large and heterogenous as India, the business efficiencies brought about by cheaper long-distance communication (update: note that long-distance calls have subsidized local calls for a long time now, and rational pricing for both is a welcome move and long overdue) is a huge win: for inter-state commerce, for improved business response times, for increased competition. These business efficiencies will trickle down to the individual too.

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The TRAI recommendations are out
(coverage from Rediff,

Sify), and they aren’t as bad as the
Financial Express thought it would be. Key points: local call charges have been hiked, and one of the biggest bugbears of the cellcos,
termination charges, has been addressed: fixed line and WLL operators will pay a fee to cellcos for calls to their network. This means that we are finally getting away from the notion that cellphone use is somehow an elite activity, something only the well-heeled (who can afford to pay for the privilege of receiving calls) do, and can finally see Calling-Party-Pays in India. Of course, cellcos will continue to pay
termination charges to fixed and WLL operators.

I’m happy about this for one reason: cellcos can now quit weaseling about the “unfair playing field” (the same unfair playing field that they were happy to play on for years before they saw real competition in Reliance) and compete on merits. What’ll be even cooler is if the TRAI removes the fiction of “limited mobility” (a.k.a castration of technology by government fiat) and allowed WLL operators to allow full-mobility services after paying the necessary fees. Given that the Ambanis and Pramod Mahajan is open to this, I expect this to happen within the next three months. This is a win-win for everyone as far as I see: companies compete on their strengths, customers get real choice in choosing services based on what is important to them, the telecom market itself grows:

It’s pretty apparent that GSM cellcos have a real opportunity to rule the
mobile voice market, given dirt-cheap handsets (This is CDMA’s Achilles’ Heel).
Mobile CDMA networks (even limited mobile ones) will rule the mobile data market
in the near term if they can deploy
CDMA 2000 1XEV-DO
quickly. Despite what they say, I think GSM cellcos in India will have trouble deploying 3G/WCDMA –
even now, except for BPL in Bombay, cellcos’ 2.5G/MMS plans are vaporware (Airtel is particularly galling,
with a its-here-real-soon-now announcement every six months). Considering the
serious issues
3G/WCDMA has with carrier/handset compatibility and backward compatiblity, I don’t see
3G offerings from Indian GSM cellcos at affordable prices anytime soon.

And of course, you cannot afford to forget that between Reliance and Bharti,
there’s about 90,000km of fiber laid out in India. Reliance plans to take this
to corporations in mid-2003, and to homes by end-2003 — the "last mile" being
Ethernet in this case:

Given their ability to mess up with clockwork precision, I can’t even begin
to imagine what the TRAI will make of all this. But if Reliance and Bharti are
to really leverage their investment in fiber, then not offering this to paying
customers is unthinkable for them… it’s only a matter of time before they do.

India’s telecom biz is in for some very
interesting
times.

*VoIP is currently not permitted for intra-India calls. But with
proliferation of broadband, either VoIP has to be allowed or telcos will lose
revenue to peer-to-peer voice chat software, which despite causing a
lot of frustration to telcos will be impossible to ban.

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The TRAI is supposed to release its revised tariff recommendations today. This FE article doesn’t paint too optimistic a picture for those who were looking for Caller-Party-Pays: CPP will be the norm everywhere, they suggest, unless you are calling from a fixed-line phone, essentially a BSNL phone (Bharti does offer fixed-line services through Touchtel, so could Reliance). Today will be a good litmus test for the TRAI: do they genuinely have the interests of the common man, and the development of India’s anemic telecom sector, in mind; or are they merely a “regulatory” facade for the maintenance of the old telecom raj that BSNL inherited? Stay tuned for their recommendations today.

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Joshua Allen:

Without disable-output-escaping, there is no way to extract HTML embedded inside XML, which means that Netscape is utterly useless for transforming RSS and plenty of other useful files. I am so glad that they get props for their standard supports. Once again, I had to walk away from Mozilla unsatisfied. I think from now on I will refer to Mozilla as "The Northwest Airlines of Browsers".

The funny thing is, Netscape wasn’t particularly religious about standards as long as it was the dominant browser. Standards-religion bit them only after Nav4, when IE4 had already had them sprawling. Standards are not bad per se (despite the fact that most users don’t care), but an inability to spot and implement a useful feature (especially when your main competitor does it) and bring it into the standards process is a sure sign of ossification.

That said, XML support has been a low priority for the Mozilla developers, as is sort of obvious by the pace at which Transformiix evolves. The three cool features Mozilla has added are of late mostly relate to improving the browsing experience: tabbed browsing, popup-blocking and a bayesian spam filter in mailnews; the last two are killer features IE would do well to imitate.

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From-the-affordances-dept: Fly UI.

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Reliance and Bharti have strike deal on interconnect rates. As Ravi Prasad points out, this is probably the first sane Calling-Party-Pays regime in India. Now if only BSNL would follow suit… thankfully, there will now be quite a bit of pressure on them to do so.

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Dmitry Jemerov is working on a Syndirella, a News Aggregator for .NET. Promising.

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