My position regarding events in Egypt

1. Mubarak's reaction to the protests should have happened BEFORE the protests took place. A true patriotic president would have pushed for the protesters' demands on his own, without any protests since those are basic human rights and steps towards real democracy. Mubarak had thirty years to work towards those goals and he seemed to totally ignore them and work for an unpublished agenda. For this reason, this guy CANNOT be the Egyptian president for one day longer. The only thing keeping him in power was his power, this was clearly destroyed in the protests.

2. Mubarak's reaction during the protests were reactions of a man who is clinging with all he has to his chair. Starting from trying to control the protests through riot police, the meaningless speeches, the slow reactions to the people's demands, ignoring the people demanding him to step down, the military showdown over Tahrir Sq. among many other things.

3. Appointing a vice president and allowing opposition parties to be heard and represented in the presidential elections is a normal thing that should have been done around thirty years ago. Plot Mubarak's actions on a graph and you will immediately see the patterns emerge. He never does something for the good of the people unless he absolutely has to.

4. The opposition groups were utterly stupid during the protests. I, a total political ignorant, predicted that Mubarak announcing that he will not run for the upcoming elections in a few months will result in a lot of unrest for the protesters although this is one of the best scenarios to support a transition of the power without chaos taking over the country. The opposition leaders should have made a formal proposal as follows:

- Mubarak does not run for any further elections, neither will his son.

- Amendments of the constitution that guarantee of presence of a number of diverse candidates.

- Further amendments that guarantee the supervision from the international community of the elections and that guarantee free and fair elections.

- Even further amendments to limit the number of successive presidential terms to only two.

- Mubarak does not pursue his presidential roles until the elections and all roles be transfered to the vice president Omar Sulaiman.

- Change of the governoment.

- Undoing all actions of media and internet censorship immediately

Then push Mubarak to give in for this proposal. Had this happened, everybody would be on his way home happy by now.

5. The Egyptian media and the Egyptian state TV were completely unprofessional during the protests. Coverage of the events were almost always either making false claims or massively under-reporting what is happening. The Egyptian media seemed to be totally driven by politics. This further supports other evidence, like internet censorship, that Mubarak is still, as always, ready to do whatever he can to stay in power. So far, there has been no indicators that he will discontinue this behaviour.

6. The will of the people is the utter most important thing in the whole matter. If the people say that the president goes, then he immediately goes. It is the people's country and if the majority chooses to destroy it, then it is their complete right. Most of Egyptians, and especially Mubarak, seem not to understand this at all. By the way, this is called "Democracy".

Conclusion, I am still not happy about the current state. Mubarak must stop all presidential roles immediately as he cannot be trusted to be in power any further. It might be acceptable for him to just fill the chair for this transitional period until the upcoming elections in 8 months.

This is one VERY GOOD Egyptian song

Renault Website.. What a shame

New Type of Stealing - Mobile Credit

Recently in Egypt, some new ways to steal people have emerged. Thieves steal mobile phones credit !!!!
Well I have seen 2 ways of doing that. If you are familiar with GSM providers in Egypt, most if not all of them provide a service called Credit Transfer, allowing a user to transfer a part of his credit to another user.

1. The thief sends a message to a random number, the message is an identical copy of the message received from the service provider upon the reception of a credit transfer.
2. The thief then sends a second message to the same number saying, "sorry, i did a credit transfer to you by mistake, could you please transfer the credit back to me?" or something similar. The naiive user will transfer the credit, that he never received in the first place, back to the thief.

Another way used in stealing mobile phones credit that I have seen many times.
1. The thief manages to get the username and password of an MSN user.
2. The thief talks to random people, preferably an opposing sex to the stolen account's owner, telling them that he/she needs mobile credit really bad, and his/her father is preventing him from leaving the house to buy credit, so can you buy credit for me and just give me the number of the card... or a similar message.
3. The naiive user again buys the credit and sends the credit recharge code to the theif, which recharges his phone immediately to cut any way of going back for the user.

Those thieves probably sell the credit they accumulate either to mobile phone shops (which sell this credit through Credit Transfer to other users that needs small amounts of credit) or to the people on the street that sell the calls to people who don't own a mobile phone on the street.