Note: Because of public demand for a printable version of this column, here’s a PDF version of this week’s column.

This week, I’m going to give over much of my column space so that other voices can be heard.

Over the last two weeks or so, there’s been an animated and quite fascinating discussion on the VIGNET technical mailing list. VIGNET is a mailing list service provided by the Vanuatu IT Users Society (VITUS) in order to contribute to a public dialogue about all things to do with technology. With over 220 subscribers, it represents a significant number of people working in IT in Vanuatu.

Following the roll-out of Digicel’s GPRS mobile Internet service, concerns have been raised about children and youth in Vanuatu having access to unsuitable content, especially pornography, through their mobile phones.

With nearly 100 messages from dozens of different contributors, the discussion was illuminating, intelligent and remarkably respectful, especially given the delicacy of the topic. What follows is a small but representative sampling….

Some of the commentators suggested that responsibility for what our children are getting from the Internet begins at home. Russell Mujee wrote:

“If a parent is aware of the bad contents their Kids are accessing then they should call customer service to disable their Kids GPRS – And only to allow access later under their Authorization.

“The other option is to buy mobile phone(s) WITHOUT GPRS for their Kid(s).”

Jane Kanas replied to support the idea that, while we can never entirely block undesirable content, we should do everything we can to arm those in our care with the moral and ethical sense to cope with its unwelcome influence. She ended with a pithy and simple sentiment:

“Shape the mind to shape the action.”

Nambo Moses echoed this sentiment:

“The instructions we obey today… the future we create.”

Edward Williams added his voice, and warned against externalising the blame for this content:

“[Y]umi no save ronwe, ko isolatem yumi wetem ol pikinini afta traem blong saed long technology.

“Yumi stap lukluk iko longwe tumas, blame Digicel, olgeta we oli providem internet long fones. Responsibility istat long house fastaem. I gud ia Digicel i allowem blong kat GPRS long ol fones.

“Sam papa mo mama naoia i mas stap long house mo toktok plante wetem pikinini. Irresponsible parents [i letem] pikinini mekem rabis fasen.

“…[T]eachim gud pikinini blong yu…yumitu no save ronwe ia….Fulap istap kam iet.”

Writing from California, one interested observer suggested that we pay close attention to how other countries are dealing with the very same issue:

“Vanuatu is in a unique position as they can learn from other country’s mistakes, observe some of the issues that technology brings, and use knowledge gained as a basis for forming policies, or at the very least be aware of the risks that come with advancements in technology.”

Some people suggested that it’s all well and good to say responsibility begins at home, but that the majority of adults in Vanuatu are largely uninformed on the issue. Replying to Williams, Sum Abiut wrote:

“I don’t think parenting alone can put an end to this thread. Do parents really know who their son/daughters class mates or friends are? I don’t think so, they might be hanging out with some bunch of teens who took advantage of this service to influences other teens to watch porn. No one is blaming Digicel or [any] ISP here. It needs team work to deal with this threat.”

To which Williams replied:

“[T]eam work won’t be very effective if some bunch of lazy people are depending on yumitu mo other people sweating themselves out trying to put some rules in place preventing all these happening, and they don’t take the time to teach their kids.”

Joseph Toara raised the issue of law enforcement. Stating that Vanuatu already has laws prohibiting indecent material, he asks why aren’t they being enforced on the Internet?

“Long internet every thing is there, unless i kat filter. Hemi no mekem sense blong kat wan law we i blockem people blong karem [porn] magasine i kam long country while yu letem internet open nomo olsem.”

Numerous people offered their support for this proposition.

Makatere replied with “two cents worth”:

“Whereas monitoring all traffic at the gateway? Thats a small step towards becoming a Police state. Big Brother anyone?”

The debate swayed back and forth around the issue. One contributor, signing on with the name Big Aussie, reminded us that this problem is a little like trying to squeeze the air out of a balloon:

“Trying to hide or block these things only makes them hide, making it even harder to control access to them.”

I offered a few thoughts of my own. At the core of the issue of enforcement is the legality of the measures taken to protect people from these influences. I worried about constitutional issues, including the rights to freedom of conscience and speech, and the constitutional prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

Furthermore, the license agreements currently in place for our ISPs have no requirement to filter content for any reason. Imposing further conditions on them might create a great deal of concern for their lawyers, especially because of the implications raised about legal liability for the actions of their customers.

Ironically, it would be easier to for them to provide such services voluntarily to those people who wanted to subscribe to them.

More than anything else, though, I worry about the potential for abuse. The problem with installing a filtering system on our core networks is that everything we say and do on the Internet would become visible, and I fear that the temptation to look for material other than pornography might become overwhelming. If experience elsewhere is any guide, it’s not at all unreasonable to fear that political rivals, jealous lovers and people indulging in petty vindictiveness might use these tools to abuse someone’s privacy.

I’m a strong supporter of content filtering in schools, businesses and those private residences that want it. But history teaches us that when such overwhelming surveillance power is given to the state, the worst outcome is the most common.

Kenneth Fakamuria countered with an excellently reasoned response:

“The bottom line is that it is illegal to be bring pornographic material to Vanuatu. In the pre Internet era this law was enforced through customs and immigration. Now of course thanks to internet technologies, pornography is easily accessible in many major centres in Vanuatu. Does this make pornographic access any less legal? No, but it has made the law much more difficult to police.

“It was for this reason that I suggested that further action should come from government – to further enforce this law. And one suggestion was to filter pornographic material from the source. It is much easier to filter from one source than to let it pass 20,000 lines which will require 20,000 filtering actions from the many islands in the country where internet is accessible.”

Joseph Toara offered the following conclusion:

“[L]ong end blong day, yumi man Vanuatu yet bae i dicidem wanem we hemi good blong yumi.”

There is a great deal yet to be said on this topic. VITUS considers it critically important that the people of Vanuatu educate and inform themselves about the new influences – both good and bad – that our newfound levels of access to the Internet introduce to us.

Recently, I’ve come across references to a phenomenon some expats have wryly termed the ‘V’ factor. Apparently there is some magic variable Vanuatu inserts into every equation that reduces our ability to calculate a sensible output to zero.

As emblematic phrases go, the ‘V’ factor ranks somewhere between Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and those inane office posters warning you that ‘you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.’

Joseph Heller penned his famous novel in an attempt to characterise the crushing, often deadly banality of bureaucratic systems. His initially humourous tone peels away layer by layer until death, disappearance and the destruction of innocence leave the surviving characters with few illusions about humanity’s true nature.

Compared to this tour de force of gallows humour, a silly-looking poster tacked onto a corkboard seems innocuous, to say the least, little more than an ineffectual, protesting squeak from a mouse in a maze.

The ‘V’ factor isn’t so harmless. Rather than explain (Catch 22-style) Vanuatu’s unique environment, it substitutes dismissive hand-waving (often accompanied by another beer) for any serious desire to adapt to the reality of the situation. In essence, it’s a quick and easy way of exculpating oneself, of refusing to be implicated in the petty, small-world inefficiencies that define Vanuatu.

The ‘V’ factor is the final excuse of someone who wants into the show, but doesn’t want to pay for the ticket.

Okay, I’ve said what the ‘V’ factor is, but the real question is: What does it look like? It is the best laid plans of expats and investors going awfully awry. It’s the sum of the gecko eggs in the computer case, the centipede in the sandal and the rats in the wiring. It’s the axiom that, of a truck, some fuel and a driver, you can have any two at a time. It’s the two-day-late SMS that says, “I’m waiting. Where are you?”

It’s the always-empty service desk, police who don’t patrol, the teacher who’s later than his students, the meeting that’s always one short of quorum, but never the same one. It’s the marvelously, magically receding deadline, beckoning like the endless sunset on a westbound plane.

But most of all, it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s a will-o-the-wisp, a flight of fancy. It’s fairies in the buttercups. It is the recognition that the world isn’t working the way you want it to – and the irrational impatience you feel as you wait for the world to adjust itself for you.

Why, then, are even the best-laid plans doomed to failure? And if they are doomed, what should we do?

I’m glad you asked.

Systematic planning, order and organisation are all anathema in the islands. And not without good reason. You see, the village is a very small place, and in Vanuatu, it’s always been the source of all abundance, of everything that’s good. In order to ensure continued access to that abundance, we villagers need to understand a few basic rules:

• Give a little, get a little. Yes, it can be a pain to suffer constant interruptions, distractions and requests for help, but the day will certainly come when you’ll be the one at someone else’s door with your hand out.
• Get along with everybody, all the time, if you want to prosper. You’re going to need a hand some time soon, so you’d better be nice to people, even that greedy, jealous so-and-so who’d cut your throat as soon as look at you – if he didn’t have to be so nice, too.
• The nail that stands up gets hammered down. The village is a small place, and there’s no room for rivalry. Keep your head down, don’t get too noisy or ambitious or, just like the weak dog in the pack, all the others will turn on you.
• The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away. Trust in today, and let tomorrow take care of itself. Worst case scenario: your fellow villagers will all be in the same boat as you, so your misery will have company.
• Don’t plan on anything. There are no kings here to tell us how it’s going to be, and you really don’t want to act like one. That would make you the nail in a village full of hammers.

Vanuatu is changing; there’s no doubt about it. But over 90% of the country has a set of rules that have worked well since time immemorial, and let’s face it: this is their country. This may be paradise, but even paradise has its rules.

Many of us expats – myself included – are here as agents of change. We know the world outside, what it consists of, and devote our energy to helping ni-Vanuatu come to terms with the things they cannot change. But in order to do that, we need to know the ground we stand on.

It may be that throwing your hands in the air and laughing off the ‘V’ factor will work for you. But don’t plan on it.

Not My Problem.

There is a time-honoured tradition here in Vanuatu, requiring that nobody get too fussed over anything. It requires as well that one think twice about the inevitable repercussions before taking ownership of anything. Whether it’s for an item or an idea, a report or a plan, taking responsibility is nearly always a liability.

There are good reasons for all this, to be sure. The only way for a group to survive in a small village – on an island, to boot – is to get along. Learning to keep one’s head down, even when silence comes at a price, ensures harmony. Being quick to forgive weakness and slow to confront ineptitude has become one of the hallmarks of Vanuatu society.

But this is the single biggest impediment facing IT service delivery in Vanuatu today.

I’m a firm believer in community, especially as it’s practiced here in Vanuatu. I respect and admire people’s ability to work cooperatively. On the roughly sixty occasions I’ve stepped into the IT pulpit here in the Independent, I’ve always tried to avoid behaving in a way that would cause any individual or organisation to lose face.

Today I’m going to make an exception.

I do so for two reasons. Firstly, I’m simply tired. After five years of work at the grassroots level, I’m starting to become impatient with the institutional weaknesses I see. We can’t go further until we start to address them.

My second reason is somewhat more optimistic in nature: I feel that the IT community has become quite strong; it’s matured enough by now that we can constructively engage on this issue. So here goes….

The standard to which all ICT-based businesses operate is far too low. At the core of it is the feeling – often subconscious, always unspoken – that we somehow can’t or even shouldn’t expect things here to be as solid, as efficient or as robust as elsewhere in the world. While a degree of realism is always called for, it seems to me that this point of view is being used more to excuse our weaknesses than to explain our environment.

We can’t change our environment, but we sure as heck can work on our weaknesses, and it’s high time we did.

I find it nearly incomprehensible that a telephone company can’t organise itself to answer the phone. It would be ironic if it wasn’t so painful, but I can’t count the number of times in the last three months alone that I and others have rung through to TVL, only to be told, ‘Sorry, there’s nobody in the office right now.’

I’m the last one to put myself on a pedestal (as you’ll see shortly) but for heaven’s sake, when I helped to set up the first commercial ISP in the Eastern Arctic, our team of four part-time geeks always answered the phone, no matter the time or the day of the week. And we always called back. Every time.

With consumer-grade equipment and a piddling budget, in an environment that makes Vanuatu look like (heh) Paradise, we kept our little operation running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I’m not asking for (or expecting) perfection, but how hard can it really be to answer the darn phone, to forward it to a mobile if the person is not at their desk? This is the telephone company, for crying out loud.

And lest Digicel start giggling in delight at seeing their competition pilloried in print, let me add that they hardly blameless in this regard. In the past weeks there have been dozens of complaints on the VIGNET mailing list about their inability to answer the phone, to follow up with their customers.

Digicel’s customer service system is fully computerised, and there’s a huge LED display on the wall showing call queue sizes and wait times. And in spite of all that, they still manage to leave their customers fuming, their problems unresolved.

VITUS has tried on a number of occasions to engage with Digicel, to start a constructive dialogue. In spite of a few positive signs at the start, this has never really happened. Tanya Menzies, the new General Manager, is from Jamaica, and we earnestly hope that her life experience there, along with prior experience of life in the Pacific, will have shown her the importance of engaging with the community.

We remain hopeful but impatient in this regard.

And a mea culpa: The private sector is no better. I’ve been ashamed on more than one occasion to have to apologise to a customer for not resolving simple issues sooner. I’ve had to deal with innumerable cases where equipment doesn’t arrive on time, where instructions from the client are ignored or selectively remembered.

I watch customers perform a sort of dance of despair as they move from one service provider to the next, hoping each time that they’ll finally get predictable, quality service. It gives me little satisfaction to see them come back to me chastened but still hopeful that somehow things have changed for the better in their absence.

I have spent the last two years working side by side with one of the few truly successful ni-Vanuatu entrepreneurs in this country. Joseph Tamata built CNS Ltd. quite literally from nothing. He’s dealt with skeptical banks and suppliers, customers who couldn’t believe that a ni-Vanuatu business could provide the services they wanted. He’s proven them all wrong.

Every day, I see the effort he exerts to try to improve his business. He invests in his staff, he fosters the best and brightest young IT talent in the country, and asks for only professionalism in return. To their credit, the majority of his staff do their best every day to live up to his expectations. But the number of times I’ve seen him disappointed in this regard is shocking.

Just as I stated at the outset, the problem is clear: Taking responsibility for a client, for a task – and especially for a crisis – seems to be beyond the capacity of the majority of people here. Petty jealousy, gossip and a propensity to blame the messenger make it dangerous to accept responsibility for anything.

In fairness, in many cases the customer is equally to blame. It’s far easier to blame the person fixing the machine for the problem than it is to accept that the source of the problem may be sitting in front of the computer.

Your computer needs regular service, just like a car. If you only call a technician when there’s a crisis, then any inefficiencies the technician introduces into the situation only compound the issue. But that doesn’t mean the technician caused the crisis.

All of us, ni-Vanuatu and expat alike, fall into this trap. I want to despair sometimes of the ease with which people slide into a cycle of externalising their problems, sitting back and waiting for someone else to come and fix them.

There are no easy answers to this problem, but I refuse to believe it’s as intransigent as some would have it. The problem is simple, but not easy. And so is the answer.

A wise man once said that, when you’re faced with a problem, consider all the courses of action, weighing the difficulty of each one. Chances are, the right choice is the one that feels the hardest.

Answer the phone. Own your work. Stop passing the buck. The problem won’t go away on its own. But if you apply a little elbow grease, you’ll find that maybe, just maybe, the problem won’t come back.

Most importantly, you’ll find that you have an ally on the other end of the line.

Police and inspection officials don’t enforce the laws, and the drivers don’t make any real effort to clean up their act. Everybody knows they should. Everybody knows that this pollution causes health problems. Even the simplest metrics, like the dirt it leaves on our clothing, on our skin and under our nails, makes it impossible to deny that there’s a problem. And yet we do nothing.

Why? The answer is simple….

The driver doesn’t breathe his own black smoke. He doesn’t even see it. It’s behind him all the time. When he breathes black smoke from the truck in front of him, well, it’s not his black smoke. It’s someone else’s. Therefore it’s not his problem. Sure, a tune-up could make the bus run better, but the bus is running now, and tune-ups cost money.

Looking at it from a distance, the whole situation seems silly, but it’s common human behaviour to ignore bad things if they don’t have an immediate negative effect on the people doing them. It’s one of the reasons smoking and alcohol abuse persist – people don’t see the damage until it’s too late.

But what does any of this have to do with computers and IT? Just this: Our computers are belching a constant stream of ‘black smoke’. Odds are very good that your computer is guilty of it, too. It’s harming us and harming people elsewhere in the world. And we’re hardly doing a thing to stop it.

For most people, viruses are simply a fact of life. In the same way we assume that every sniffle or cough is an unavoidable part of everyday life in Vanuatu, we assume that our computers start out shiny, speedy and new, and then they gradually become sickly and slow. We accept it as inevitable when our email accounts eventually become so clogged with spam that they’re unusable.

These chronic infections have serious consequences. The fact that people’s computers run more slowly, or that the Internet connection gets clogged – these are just side-effects of something far more insidious. Trojans, spyware, viruses – call them what you like – they are all designed to steal your money.

Okay, maybe not your money in particular. At least, not yet. The vast majority of computer users in Vanuatu don’t use the Internet to buy and sell things. Few even use online banking services. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t give their money to the criminals who write this rubbish software. But that’s going to change. It won’t be long before we start performing transactions over the Internet, and when we do, the risk to us will, relatively speaking, be greater than the average person in the developed world.

The loss of a hundred dollars from a bogus transaction is fairly easily written off by the average Sydney dweller. Even losing the entire contents of their bank account is not necessarily disastrous. Currently, those ni-Vanuatu who are online on a regular basis represent the most privileged elements of Vanuatu society. But even they can suffer when their income or resources drop by the smallest amount. The prospect of financial loss for someone operating a micro-business in the outer islands is much, much worse.

Just like the Monday morning bus-driver driving by, oblivious to the gouts of smoke pouring into his neighbours’ faces, we allow our computers to pollute the common space, making things more difficult and dangerous for everyone. Even when we see the effect that this software has, we don’t recognise it as our problem.

Most of us don’t see the problem at all. We assume that computer viruses are inevitable. We assume that Internet service is unreliable and slow, and put all the blame on TVL, our favourite whipping boy. We just assume that computers need to be wiped down and re-initialised from time to time. We accept anti-virus and anti-spyware software slowing down our computers and complicating our lives as a fact of life. We don’t recognise the black smoke even though we’re surrounded by a cloud of it.

Here’s a well-kept secret: None of this is necessary. Viruses are not inevitable. Computers don’t slow down on their own. Relying on anti-virus software is like taking antibiotics every day instead of cleaning our food. Internet service here in Vanuatu would be vastly better if we made even a nominal effort to limit the garbage we spew over the wire.

In the past, rubbish software was more a nuisance than anything else: A few hours downtime, a computer with ugly, embarrassing porn pop-ups, email inboxes chock-a-block with viagra ads and the like. But the stakes are starting to get serious now.

The problem is that online crime is remarkably profitable. Global income from illegal online activities is estimated to be in the billions of US dollars now. Some have even speculated that it’s comparable to money earned through the international drug trade. While this is probably an exaggeration, it underlines an important point: More and more often these days, the people who stuff our emails full of ads for pills are the same ones who sell heroin, supply the sex trade and profit immensely from it all.

Online crime is very attractive to criminal enterprises like the Chinese triads and the Russian Mafia. It’s much safer, requires less effort, and they make more money for dollar invested than they do in just about any other activity. Why run the risk of being arrested at a border crossing with drugs when you could stay at home hacking credit cards or just fooling innocent people into sending you the money themselves? Even if you do get arrested, it’s only ‘white collar’ crime. The absolute worst that happens is you get a slap on the wrist. Cyber-crime has really got their attention, and they’re beginning to invest.

One particular group in Russia has gained control over a network of infected computers that numbers somewhere between about 2 and 10 million individual PCs, according to recent estimates. Known as the Storm bot-net, this vast army is coordinated through a remarkably sophisticated command-and-control system that allows the controller to send massive amounts of spam. Recently, researchers have spotted the Storm net being used for other purposes. It was used to take the entire Estonian Internet service down for days. It’s also being used to crack valuable passwords. This development really worries people because Storm’s masters control more raw processing power than any known super-computer in the world.

These are our PCs. We are helping others steal money and ruin what would otherwise be a much nicer Internet. This is our black smoke. Until we learn to recognise it and accept responsibility, we will be continue to be engulfed by it. Rest assured that unless we do something it will get worse before it gets better.