Zimbabwe

[Evan Leibovitch]

Teddy David Mills wrote:
> The move has resulted in slower browsing speeds for internet users.
> "This is catastrophic as all legal Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
> utilise TelOne for their outgoing bandwidth to the  World Wide Web as
> well as for e-mail traffic," MWeb, the country's largest ISP, said in
> a statement. "Thus all such ISPs have and are being affected by this
> down time.
> In short, this is causing an almost collapse of the Internet in Zimbabwe."
Did anyone catch the reference to _LEGAL_ Internet service providers?
I wonder what the illegal/underground ones are doing?

> Makamure said the country is currently "re-routing every internet
> communication using other various options",
> but did not explain further. The southern African country is in the
> midst of an economic crisis characterised by four-digit inflation,
> soaring poverty levels, an unemployment rate hovering  at over 70
> percent and chronic shortages of fuel and basic goods such as
> cornmeal. — AFP
Two years ago, I was invited to a UN meeting in Geneva to help explain
the benefits of FOSS to international diplomats. It was the
representative from Zimbabwe who stood up and gave a speech that may as
well have been ghost-written by Microsoft, even more extreme than the
American position. It was a FUD-filled diatribe that questioned the
trustworthiness of open source as a tool of helping developing nations
-- at a time when many of Zimbabwe's neighbours were already embracing it.

Go figure.

- Evan

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