(keitai-l) Re: sha mail in Saudi Arabia

From: Benjamin <bkml_at_mac.com>
Date: 07/03/02
Message-Id: <A5D673E2-8E4A-11D6-A07B-003065FB21DC@mac.com>
On Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 02:31 , Paul Hardy wrote:

>> Well, there is a low tech and a hi tech solution to this problem ...
>
> There's also the unasked question: if these camera phones are in places
> where men are not allowed, who's pushing the shutter button?


Again, I can offer two solutions ...

- a wolf in a sheep's clothes
- a sheep in a wolf's clothes

;-)

It could be very dangerous though for a man to enter any place which is 
off limits for males.


Anyway, AFAIK Saudi Telecom is owned by the Saudi Royal family and they 
do have a tight regime on "un-islamic" stuff. So, it doesn't require any 
legislation or regulation to outlaw those phones. If there is any sign 
of ultra-orthodox clerics taking advantage of this phenomenon, Saudi 
Telekom will -without any rule of law assisting- just shut off all the 
camera phones in a blip (other than those known to be owned by the Royal 
family of course).

A friend of mine worked on a project in Saudi and boy he had some weird 
stories to tell.

On the other hand, I was working on a project for one of the Egyptian 
mobile operators and they had some interesting services there, like 
special prayer reminder SMS five times a day. At one time we were 
working on an idea to build a service which would upon request send back 
an SMS with instructions how to figure out in wich direction Mecca is.

Apparently, they do sell GPS based devices which show you the way to 
Mecca and they even come in a luxury 12 carat gold plated case. Also 
interesting, on every PC in the building you could see the screen savers 
having popped up with a message: "Prayer Time" and you would wonder 
where everybody had gone ...

rgds
benjamin
Received on Wed Jul 3 09:04:35 2002