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.

Alright, this is one area that I am extremely disgusted with. Over the last 2 years I have noticed some extremely disturbing trends about broadband that I just need to express.

In2Cable (India) Pvt Ltd has been my ISP in Bangalore for two years now, and at the present my family continues to use their services whenever we are in Bangalore. We originally signed up right after I had returned to India from the US in September 2001. When we signed up, we were given the option of either renting a cable modem for Rs 600/- a month ($12) or purchasing one from them for Rs 10,000/- (equivalent to about $210). We were not allowed to buy the cable modem from anywhere else. And there was the additional subscription fee of about Rs 1200/- per month (equivalent to about $25 per month). All this for a mere 64kbps cable modem connection, which I don't know how they have the nerve to call "broadband".

Okay, the charges were high, but it still beat dialup. Dialup in India really sucks because the telephone company STILL charges by the minute (Rs 1.20 per minute in Bangalore, which is about $0.03 a minute) for local calls. And the cable modem they gave us was the Motorola SB 4100, which sold for under $100 on Amazon at the time. So they made a whopping 100% profit on that. But, we endured the expenses for at the end of the tunnel was light. Or so we thought.

The first several months went pretty nicely. The connection was pretty reliable, which made up for the 64kbps speed cap. So downloads took hours instead of minutes, but at least I could download. Of course, which company in the world can let a good thing be? In2Cable proved to be no different. They purchased a subscriber management system from eLitecore Technologies in Ahmedabad. The software was called 24Online, but it was rebranded for In2Cable so you would never know it was eLitecore who developed it. This software was pure EVIL, and you can read about it on my Slyberoam page. In a nutshell, it ate up 7.5 MB of your system RAM just to ping an authentication server once every three minutes, it installed two Trojan programs called Restart2.exe and RestartMessage.exe, it prevented home users from creating home LANs (although a workaround was eventually discovered), it prevented you from doing a traceroute or a ping, and it also meant that In2Cable was now actively spying on what its subscribers were doing.

Alright, but still at least the internet connection worked, and more and more subscribers flocked to In2Cable. But, we know how companies can't let a good thing be, right? So, In2Cable decided that in order to manage its growing subscriber base, it would be best to LIMIT each account to a maximum of 600 MB of data transfer in one entire month! Yes, you read that correctly. 600 MB a month, or just 20 MB of data transfer a day. I can just fart on my computer and use up more than 20 MB of data transfer.

Okay, here I challenge the reader. Can ANY of you, for just ONE week, try to use less than 20 MB of data transfer a day? Please give it a try, and contact me if you are successful. Yet this is what we in India are being forced to suffer through, even though we are paying exactly as much, if not more, than what people in the West pay, for their internet access. Okay, for the righteous, yes there are millions of children that go hungry worldwide every day, and my particular problem of only 20 MB data transfer might sound mighty trivial to you, but know that I am not oblivious of those issues. This is my rant page, and the least I am allowed to do here is rant.

And, what are the costs of this whopping 20 MB data transfer a day? Incredibly, the price for a one month subscription of 20 MB data transfers is EXACTLY the same as the price before the enforcement of the 20 MB limit. That means, that in India, completely in contrast to the rest of the world, the price of broadband is *increasing*. Isn't that wonderful? And for every additional MB beyond 600 MB that a subscriber uses in one month, we are charged Rs 2/- ($0.04). So, if I need to download a Linux distribution of about 500 MB, it would cost me Rs 1000/- ($22-ish)! Do you see why I am going nuts about this?

Yes, these ISPs are faced with a myriad problems of their own, not the least of which is the monopoly on internet bandwidth exercised by the state-owned hegemonies... VSNL and BSNL. But increasing the cost of internet access will only deter subscribers. It is not the way a service oriented company like an ISP needs to operate. These problems are very easily exposed if one considers that every other ISP that I know of in India has similarly *increased* the cost of internet access for its subscribers by imposing extremely harsh restrictions. In one case, the total data transfer limit is only a paltry 300 MB a month!

So, where am I with all of this? I think it is time to stop sitting idle. It is time for action. I am going to try and rally anybody and everybody I know to get together and try to make internet access a fairer and cheaper product for every Indian resident. My first step is to create a set of webpages that will inform the people about what is going on here. Then I will try and rally up people from various mailing lists that I am a part of. I also want to try and reach as many subscribers of In2Cable in my area as possible. My mission is to convey to these companies that in the internet age, the cost of information needs to steadily be dropping, not increasing, otherwise we are not evolving as a nation but simply going back to the early 1900s.

Are you interested in helping me out? Contact me! We need to get the message across to these ISP's and to the government that internet access needs to be drastically cheaper and more accessible to everyone. There can be no internet economy in India unless that happens. Do you have any useful contacts that can assist me with this crusade? Do you have any ideas on how to launch a successful protest for an issue such as this?

I will post more thoughts on this issue as it develops.