« Google Maps is a social network » says Pritvi. With features like posting reviews, following other local guides, earning points, liking & sharing other people's reviews, indeed Maps is a social network.

After DevFest 2022, I started contributing to Google Maps more often, starting with a few missing places in my village, Providence.

Living in Providence, it is very common to hear that « lin alle acheter gato kot Aziz » or « mo p alle zuer lotto kot Samy » and yet these two places were not on Google Maps.

Then, I added village temples that were missing, like the Kalimaye (a Hindu shrine dedicated to Mother Kali). There are four such shrines in Providence, that I know of and I added three of them to Maps. While doing do I noticed a road was not named and it is the Kalimaye Road itself.

I followed the Google Local Guides Help to add the « missing » road but to my surprise, I could not. After I submitted the details about the road, Maps said, "We cannot fix issues in this region yet."

I tweeted about it and tagged @googlemaps.

Within an hour, @googlemaps replied the tweet, asking me to follow them so that they can DM me to help.

Thus, I followed @googlemaps and they sent me a DM asking the coordinates for the the missing road. I replied with those details including pictures of the road sign and surroundings.

A few days later, Kalimaye Rd appeared on Google Maps. 😊

There was a lot of discontentment following that announcement. Many users enjoyed the stability of CentOS and its binary compatibility with RHEL and its long term support. The news of turning CentOS into an upstream project for RHEL changed all of that.

CloudLinux is one of many CentOS supporters that was not happy with the news.

In response to the shift in project direction of CentOS, CloudLinux backed the development of AlmaLinux, a clone of RHEL. CloudLinux has been in the "Linux business" since 2009, providing a customised Linux distribution for hosting companies. Its products were mainly based on RHEL/CentOS. Thus, their commitment to the AlmaLinux project meant they would be heavily invested. In fact, CloudLinux financially backs the AlmaLinux OS Foundation.

The AlmaLinux mirror 😊

After that short history lesson, let's come to the present.

David Venter, the Founder & Director of cloud.mu, and I were having a usual "Linux mirrors" conversation and David said "we should also really do AlmaLinux". I was like, "I just read their doc, it's the easiest mirror documentation I have seen so far".

Well, the next day, David provisioned the mirror server and I did the rest of the configuration. Once the server had sync'ed completely, I submitted it to AlmaLinux for review. Soon after, almalinux-mirror.cloud.mu appeared on mirrors.almalinux.org.

If you head to almalinux.org and click on the download button, it takes you to the mirrors page and there you can see the list of the closest mirrors to you. Being in Mauritius you should see almalinux-mirror.cloud.mu at the top of that list, followed by other mirrors in Africa.

Sponsorship

Improving the Linux updates experience in Mauritius would not be possible without mirrors. I am extremely thankful to cloud.mu for the server/bandwidth sponsorship and their commitment to make Linux thrive in Mauritius.

The Baie Jacotet SCLS is where the South Africa Far East (SAFE) submarine cable lands in Mauritius.

The days that followed, several more revelations were made.

P. K. Jugnauth himself revealed that he asked the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, to send a technical team from India to carry out a survey at the landing station. At no point does Jugnauth give details on the nature of the survey or the precise reason that required a survey at the landing station. He only cites "national security" to hide away from questions.

Jugnauth also confirmed that Singh had refused to give access to the landing station, hence he phoned him. Later Singh allowed access.

Singh made further revelations in subsequent interviews, thereby stating that a three-member technical team was accompanied to the Baie Jacotet SCLS by the Chief Technical Officer of Mauritius Telecom, Girish Guddoy on 15 April 2022. The Indian technicians attempted to capture data from the SAFE consortium equipment which is provided by Alcatel Submarine Networks. They failed to do so twice. Thus, they captured data on eleven links of Mauritius Telecom instead. As per Singh, the Indian technicians in a meeting in his office on 14 April 2022 had informed that they intend to capture a 2 mins internet traffic data from the SAFE cable.

The allegation of allowing a foreign state to sniff internet traffic in Mauritius has been refuted by the Prime Minister.

Today, Subramanian Moonesamy, who is well reputed in the internet community, sent an email to the Data Protection Office citing the 36th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners.

S. Moonesamy mentioned that one of the results of the conference was a resolution of Big Data that states —

To be transparent about which data is collected, how the data is processed, for which
purposes it will be used and whether or not the data will be distributed to third 
parties.

The conference was hosted by Mauritius in 2014.

S. Moonesamy stated in the email that several newspapers in Mauritius have featured a data capture at the Baie Jacotet cable landing station. He asked the Data Protection Office whether the 2014 Resolution is relevant to the data capture at Baie Jacotet.

Who is Subramanian Moonesamy?

S. Moonesamy is a Cryptographic Officer of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. He is a Trusted Community Representative of the DNS technical community. He is involved in the DNSSEC key signing process of the root zone.

He has drafted internet standards for the Internet Engineering Task Force. He is currently Board Director for AFRINIC for Seat 3 – Indian Ocean.

Last Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Mauritius, P. K. Jugnauth, was replying to a question asked by a Member of Parliament, E. Juman, during the first session of the parliamentary debate.

P. K. Jugnauth confirmed that the Security Division of his office had requested the former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, S. Singh, to extend all necessary assistance to a three-member technical team from India who would field a survey mission at the South Africa Far East (SAFE) Submarine Landing Station at Baie Jacotet, Bel Ombre.

P. K. Jugnauth stated that in the morning of 15 April 2022, he was informed that Mauritius Telecom had not made the necessary arrangements for the team to have access at the Landing Station. Therefore, he telephoned the former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, S. Singh, and asked him to make arrangements for the survey to be carried out.

The SAFE Submarine Cable Landing Station at Baie Jacotet was declared a restricted area through Government Notice 183 of 2004. The decision was taken by the cabinet on 8 October 2004 and the SAFE SCLS at Baie Jacotet has been a restricted area since 11 November 2004 in accordance with Section 13B of the Police Act.

What is a restricted area?

Section 13B of the Police Act defines the meaning of a restricted area in Mauritius. It states that —

(1) The Commissioner may, where he considers it necessary or expedient 
    in the interest of public safety or public order, order that 
    special measures be taken to control the movement and conduct of 
    persons in any area, and, by Order, declare that area to be a 
    restricted area.

(2) (a) The Commissioner may issue to a person a permit authorising
        him to enter and leave a restricted area.
    (b) The permit may be issued subject to such conditions as the
        Commissioner thinks fit to impose and may be cancelled.

What do we know about conditions to access the landing station?

Until now, neither S. Singh nor P. K. Jugnauth, has provided any information regarding the conditions set by the Commissioner of Police in order to access the SAFE Submarine Cable Landing Station.

Thus, we do not know whether the staff personnel of Mauritius Telecom can access the landing station at any day and any time, whether they need to inform the Commissioner of Police of such access, whether they can bring people who are not personnel of Mauritius Telecom along with them, whether the identity of the people should be disclosed to the Commissioner of Police, etc.

Context

30 June 2022 — Sherry Singh resigns as CEO of Mauritius Telecom.

1 July 2022 — Nawaz Noorbux of Téléplus, Défi Media, interviews Sherry Singh. The latter discloses the reason behind his resignation. He says that the Prime Minister, P. K. Jugnauth had phoned him to ask him to do something which is illegal, against the interests of Mauritius Telecom, against the interests of the citizens of Mauritius, against the country and against certain friendly states. Nawaz asks him what is it exactly. Singh says that P. K. Jugnauth phoned him to give him instructions to allow a third-party to install equipments in Mauritius Telecom which will sniff all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in Mauritius.

6 July 2022 — P. K. Jugnauth confirms that he had a phone conversation with the S. Singh and that he had asked him to give a technical team access to the Baie Jacotet Landing Station. He says that at no moment during the conversation he mentioned a sniffing equipment. While answering a journalist regarding the third-party, he says that there was a matter of security and that there was a need for the survey. He says that in Mauritius we do not have the technicians that can do such a survey, or even if there are, he decided to hire foreign technicians. He says that he spoke to the Prime Minister of India, N. Modi, to get a team of technicians that can do the survey.

12 July 2022 — Prime Minister, P. K. Jugnauth, while replying to a question in the National Assembly, confirms that he has lodged a police complaint against S. Singh.

12 July 2022 — Axcel Chenney of l'express interviews Sherry Singh who promised further revelations. Singh described chronologically what led to his resignation. Axcel says that the Prime Minister has denied any attempt for surveillance and questions Singh that he is saying the opposite. Singh confirms that it was about surveillance. Singh also confirms that the technical team did several « interventions » in the network and that he has proof. He does not show any proof during the interview. He says he will provide all proofs to the authorities when the time comes.

Update

S. Moonesamy replied to my tweet about this article and indicated that companies who have to maintain their equipment at the Baie Jacotet SCLS have to designate the persons who should be granted access to the site and the identity of the persons would be in a log book.

The document that S. Moonesamy referred to in his tweet is Mauritius Telecom's Master Agreement for Inter-Connection at the Submarine Cable Landing Station.

An explanatory memorandum to Cross-Connection at the Submarine Cable Landing Station (SCLS), published by the Information & Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA) provides details about the Baie Jacotet SCLS and includes a copy of Mauritius Telecom's Master Agreement.

Page 13 of the document includes a site plan of the Baie Jacotet SCLS.

The site plan provides a layout of the building and which section the building contains Consortium's infrastructure and which section contains Mauritius Telecom's infrastructure.

In an interview given to Sunday Times, R. Valayden, the Chief Editor of Capital Media provided some details about the persons who had access to the Baie Jacotet SCLS on 15 April. Details that no other media outlet has published so far. I quote what he said in the interview —

Selon mes recoupements, vers 12h58, trois véhicules sont arrivés. La première voiture, une Mercedes, était conduite par Girish Guddoy, ‘Chief Technical Officer’ (CTO) de MT. Le ‘Manager’ de MT était au volant de la deuxième voiture, une Hyundai. Et la dernière voiture, une Honda Vezel, avait, à son bord, trois ressortissants étrangers. Les agents de la SMF ont été informés par le CTO que tous les occupants du véhicule sont des employés de MT et que leur visite ne devait pas figurer sur le registre. Les deux cadres de MT ont ensuite introduit les étrangers dans la salle des opérations. Le CTO de MT a demandé au personnel sur place de se retirer et a prononcé les mots « Top Secret ». Les techniciens étrangers n’ont pas accédé au câble SAFE mais se sont concentrés sur le panel en utilisant un logiciel médiateur (‘middleware’). L’intervention sur chaque connexion nécessite d’abord un court-circuitage occasionnant une panne de 30 secondes lors de la connexion du logiciel et idem lors de la déconnexion. Le ballotage de 60 secondes est inévitablement répercuté dans les rapports techniques. L’équipe est partie vers 19h15. C’est le ‘Manager’, un des cadres les plus aguerris de MT, qui a assisté les techniciens étrangers alors que son chef hiérarchique se rongeait les ongles à l’extérieur.

R. Valayden, for obvious reasons, did not reveal his source of information, but one could imagine that it must be coming from one of the MT employees present during the visit.

R. Valayden said that S. Singh had both moral and legal responsibilities to refuse such a request coming from the Prime Minister, since Singh had all executive powers to do so.

He also casts doubts on the claims of S. Singh, saying that in spite of Singh not receiving a formal request for the survey by the Prime Minister, Singh could still follow up by an email the same day to keep it on record.

• Melkbosstrand, South Africa
• Mtunzini, South Africa
• Saint Paul, Réunion
• Baie Jacotet, Mauritius
• Cochin, India
• Penang, Malaysia

The SAFE cable is owned by a consortium of network operators. The operators are AT&T, Angola Telecom, BICS, Camtel, China Telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, Ghana Telecommunications Company, KPN, KT, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Maroc Telecom, Mauritius Telecom, NATCOM (Nigeria), OPT, Orange, Orange Cote d’Ivoire, PCCW, Singtel, Sonatel, T-Mobile, Tata Communications, Telecom Italia Sparkle, Telecom Namibia, Telefonica, Telekom Malaysia, Telkom South Africa, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone.

It became operational in April 2002.

The SAFE cable is considered to part of a longer submarine cable that connects Europe, Africa and South-East Asia. The complete submarine cable is referred as the SAT3 / WASC / SAFE cable.

The information about the SAFE submarine cable provided in this post has been taken from TeleGeography.

I replied to her that it is not «swindler» but network sniffer.

In this blog post I try to explain what is a network sniffer device or software? But before we understand that there a few things we should become familiar with.

I think most of the Internet users today know that every device connected to the Internet is identified by a string of numbers called the IP address. A phone number is the identifier of a physical telephone. Phone numbers allow calls to be made among fixed telephones and mobile phones. Similarly, devices connected to the Internet are able to find each other and initiate communication protocols using the IP address of each device.

Lesson no. 1 — Internet Protocol (IP) addresses

Your computer, mobile phone and Smart TV in your house, each one is assigned a private IP address by your router (which is usually given to you by your Internet Service Provider, e.g Mauritius Telecom or Emtel).

An example of a private IP address is 192.168.100.10. All devices connected to the WiFi of your home router will have IP addresses in that range (192.168.100.11, 192.168.100.12, etc). These addresses are assigned to your home devices by the ISP router and they allow your devices to communicate with each other. The IP addresses are not reachable from the Internet. Therefore, if I need to communicate with your smartphone at your place, which has an IP address of let's say, 192.168.100.10, then I won't be able to do so from the comfort of my home, because that address is not reachable from the Internet.

For communication to happen on the Internet, public IP addresses are required. Your ISP provides you a router which is also a modem. The modem connects to your ISP network and a public IP address is assigned to it which is unique on the Internet. This IP address allows you to communicate on the Internet.

When you open Netflix on your Smart TV, the request is sent to your router first and from there it is the router that sends the request on the Internet, to the Netflix server. Your router knows which of your devices made the request and therefore when a response is received from Netflix, it forwards that information to your Smart TV.

The range of IP addresses 197.224.0.0 – 197.225.255.255 is allocated to Mauritius Telecom by AFRINIC (the Regional Internet Registry for Africa & the Indian Ocean region). Many such IP address ranges are allocated to Mauritius Telecom and other Internet Service Providers in Mauritius. There are five Regional Internet Registries in the world that allocate the use of the IP addresses to organisations such as ISPs, universities, cloud companies, etc.

Lesson no. 2 — Network Packets

Okay, now we know how the Smart TV sends a request to Netflix on the Internet and it receives a response. Let's see what are the requests and responses made of.

When someone needs to send a picture to somebody over the Internet, let's say using WhatsApp, that picture isn't sent as single item over the network. It is broken down into many pieces before it is sent over. The pieces travel from one router to another, across the world, until they reach the intended destination (which is another device, e.g a smartphone). At the destination device, all the pieces are reassembled to make up the picture like it was on the sender's device.

These small pieces are called packets. One may rightly ask, how many packets is a single JPEG file broken into before sending over the network?

The number of packets may vary depending on how network devices are configured. Network devices such as routers are configured to allow a maximum size for a single packet. This is referred to as the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) and it's usually 1500 bytes. Therefore, we could say that a 1 MB JPEG file would be broken into about 665 pieces of ~1500 bytes each before it is sent to someone on the Internet.

It is that single piece of 1500 bytes data that is called a packet.

A packet itself is composed of two parts.

• a header
• a payload (also referred as data)

Header

The header part contains information about the source, destination, protocol and packet number. This information is important for the routers to know where to send the packet and upon reaching its destination how the packets needs to be reassembled. The header part is not encrypted because this information should be readable by all networking devices that will carry the packet until its final destination.

Payload

The payload is the actual data that needs to be sent. In the example of the 1 MB JPEG file, the payload of the packet will contain part of the image data. If an encrypted communication is established on the Internet, then this payload will contain part of that encrypted data.

If the payload is not encrypted, then the packets can be captured by a network analysis tool (a sniffer) and the complete file reconstructed, e.g a 1 MB JPEG file can be reconstructed and viewed in any image application.

If the payload is encrypted, then the packets can be still be captured by the tool and the reconstructed file will be an encrypted JPEG file.

Network Sniffer

The former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, S. Singh, stated in a radio programme on Friday 1st July 2022 at 17h00, that the Prime Minister of Mauritius, asked him to allow a third-party to install a network sniffer in the premises of the ISP.

The statement by S. Singh shook many people and it sends chills down the spine thinking that the biggest Internet Service Provider could be breaching the privacy of hundreds of thousands of Internet users in Mauritius.

But, wait a minute? In his statement, S. Singh did not reveal the name of the third-party and the actual device or software that intended to sniff the Internet traffic. Unless those information are revealed, one can only speculate on sinister possibilities.

That being said, now let's look at what does a Network Sniffer do.

A network sniffer is a tool that can capture network packets and analyse them. Some network sniffers can even reconstruct whole files if the payload is not encrypted or do signature-based Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) on the payload to identify its nature if the payload is encrypted.

There are network sniffers that are also capable of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Therefore, they can decrypt the network traffic and give a complete view of everything that a person does on the Internet.

How are network packets captured?

A network sniffer can be installed on any device to capture the traffic of that particular device. For example, if someone wants to analyse his/her own incoming & outgoing traffic on a laptop, a sniffer can be instructed to capture the traffic from a network interface, which can be an ethernet (cable) port or a WiFi.

Some routers also allow packet capturing from the router's ports and the file produced during the capture can be analysed using other tools.

Enterprise-grade firewalls are often equipped with advanced network packet capturing and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capabilities.

Clearing confusions

In 2021, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA) proposed amendments to the ICT Act, which would have allowed the authority to apply an MITM approach and control the Internet traffic in Mauritius.

It had also become public knowledge, that ICTA intended to use Netsweeper which had the MITM capabilities to decrypt HTTPS traffic.

Many organisations, including international privacy-focussed organisations, browser makers, and the citizens of Mauritius strongly opposed the proposal and condemned the authority to even think of such an approach.

At that time, I made a proof-of-concept using a web proxy called Fiddler Everywhere, to demonstrate how HTTPS traffic can be decrypted on the fly.

It's been a week since S. Singh's statement on radio and we still do not have any information regarding which software maker and what type of «sniffer» was the subject of discussion between Singh and the Prime Minister.

Therefore, what we can retain here is that if Mauritius Telecom would have installed a sniffer without doing any MITM attack, then it would have to rely on signature-based Deep Packet Inspection. That approach would not have given MT employees access to your email messages, listen to your WhatsApp calls or read your Facebook messages, etc. It would have allowed the tool to reconstruct your browsing history partly.

Can an ISP monitor the Internet traffic of all its subscribers?

An ISP could decide whether to monitor and capture the traffic of all its subscribers, some of them or a just a few.

Is it not costly to monitor such amount of Internet traffic?

Deep Packet Inspection on a high traffic network is costly, indeed. However, using a network tap, the ISP can copy the traffic of a specific network segment or specific IP addresses, for analysis, without impeding the actual traffic. There are several approaches that can reduce the cost of operation.

Can a third-party have access to the network traffic?

If a third-party operates the network device or the «sniffer» then yes, it can have access.

Erratum

I initially described the packet as being composed of three parts – header, payload (data) and footer. After S. Moonesamy pointed out on the Mauritius Internet Users mailing list to check whether the footer part is incorrect, I read Section 3.1 of the RFC 791 – Internet Protocol to cross-verify. Section 1.3 of the same RFC describes an example where a TCP module would call on the internet module to take a TCP segment (including the TCP header and user data) as the data portion of an internet datagram. These information provide clarity on the packet composition as having a header and the data.

There are articles online that refer to the packet as a frame and then mention the frame as having a "trailer" part. The trailer is mentioned in RFC 1661 – Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP).

RFCs are documents that contain technical specifications for the Internet. They are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Software developers, hardware manufacturers, and network operators around the world voluntarily implement and adopt the technical specifications described by RFCs.

The final candidate slate for the ManCom 2022 — 2023 was published on Friday 10th June on the MIXP Announce mailing list by Keessun Fokeerah (MIXP Secretariat). Electronic voting through the Helios platform started on Monday 13th June and ended on Monday 27th June.

Twelve candidates from different organisations ran in this election.

The election result was announced today, via a Zoom conference call, where several peering members and interested folks from the Internet community joined in. Keessun computed the tally on Helios and the result was available within seconds.

Election Result

Therefore, the ManCom 2022 — 2023 will be composed of Nishal Goburdhan, Dr. Amreesh Phokeer, Ranveer K. Seetaloo, Jason Leong Son, Eric Loos, Ganesh Ramalingum and Sharma Baljinder.

I congratulate the newly elected members of the MIXP ManCom and thank all those who stepped up.

The candidates are:

• Dr. Amreesh Phokeer
• Mr. Bhaveshdeo Sreekeessoon
• Mr. Eddy Lareine
• Mr. Eric Loos
• Mr. Ganesh Ramalingum
• Mr. Jason Leong Son
• Mr. Nishal Goburdhan
• Mr. Ranveer Kumar Seetaloo
• Mr. Ravi Pudaruth
• Mr. Sharma Baljinder
• Mr. Tejas Pagooah
• Mr. Zaheer Ramjaun

The biodata of each candidate is available at www.mixp.org/#elections2022.

Voting in this election will be done electronically using Helios. Only MIXP peers can vote in this election. Instructions on how to vote will be sent by email to peering members. Electronic voting will start on Monday 13th June 2022 at 14h00 MUT and shall close on Monday 27th June 2022 at 14h00 MUT.

Each MIXP peer can vote for up to 7 persons.

Some of the above mentioned candidates introduced themselves during the MIXP session at the Africa Internet Summit 2022 at Le Méridien Hotel, last week.

The MIXP enables its peers to have settlement-free peering and keep intra-island traffic purely local. Therefore, peers do not have to pay any setup fee or other bandwidth related fees. By design, the MIXP treats all its peers equally and there is no traffic prioritisation or any filtering rules for specific participants.

I would highly recommend that network operators in Mauritius peer at the MIXP, not just to improve their network efficiency but help in making the overall Internet experience better on the island.

Representatives of Resource Members could vote on polls either on-site or online, through the my.afrinic.net members portal.

The AGMM was scheduled to start at 10h00 UTC. A few members protested that the meeting cannot start as several members had not yet receive their online meeting token. Some members reported that the token they received was not good.

The first meeting token I received was not good either and I instantly reported that to legal@afrinic.net. A few minutes later I received another token which allowed me the join the meeting.

Observers could attend the meeting on-site in a separate meeting room and the meeting was also live streamed on YouTube. Observers cannot vote in polls, comment on the proceedings or ask questions.

The meeting atmosphere remained heated during the whole time.

The meeting was adjourned for 1 hour, allowing tokens to be re-generated and sent to all registered members. However, the next few hours the meeting scene remained the same.

Motions were raised, polls were called, but the overall aim of the AGMM, in my opinion, remained unfulfilled. Firstly, the Board Elections could not be carried out due to a court injunction preventing the same. Secondly, the motion to adopt the audited financial accounts failed.

Appointments on the AFRINIC Board

Among all these upheaval, a Board of Directors meeting was held on Sunday, 5 June 2022 and Mr. Benjamin Eshun was appointed as the new Board Chairmain. Dr. Abdalla Omari was appointed as Vice-Chairman.

Disagreements followed on the AFRINIC Members mailing list. Some members claimed that the requirement of 5 directors to make a quorum could not have been fulfilled since three seats are now vacant in the Board and therefore, these appointments are not valid.

I wish the new Chairman and Vice-Chairman all the best ahead. I thank S. Moonesamy, former Board Chair and Prod. H. Youssef, former Vice-Chair for their time, guidance and leadership on the AFRINIC Board.

Many AFRINIC Resource Members look forward to this meeting and they travel every year to attend the meeting in person. Others who cannot make it can still participate and ask questions via the online conference system.

I have been attending AFRINIC Meetings since 2017. I have attended a few meetings online and two of the meetings in-person. I have attended the meetings as a Resource Member since 2019. I have never seen AFRINIC restricting Resource Members from attending the AGMM in the past.

Today, in a email the AFRINIC Legal Team informed members that due to the prevailing sanitary protocol in Mauritius, only one representative of a Resource Member will be allowed to attend the meeting in-person. However, to the astonishment and incomprehension of several members, the legal team also stated that only one representative per Resource Member will be allowed to join the meeting via the online conference system.

Several members have raised questions over this statement. I questioned the legal team about it and in response the AFRINIC Communications team stated that —

Article 12.14(9) provides, inter-alia as follows - "Corporations may act by representative. A corporate body, which is a Member, may appoint a representative to attend an Annual General Members’ Meeting on its behalf in the same manner as that in which it could appoint a proxy.”.

The AFRINIC Bylaws, from which the above article is quoted, does not state that a corporate body, which is a Member, can be represented by one person only.

Earlier in January, we had perhaps the first meetup, non-virtual, in a very long time, which was organised by the Linux User Group of Mauritius.

The Front-end Coders meetup was scheduled between 10h00 — 14h00 in the office premises of Prodigious. I had never been to their office before but finding the place was not a trouble. Also, there was no issue finding a parking space.

Shelly dropped me at Prodigious. We picked up Renghen along the way, from the University of Mauritius campus. We were at Prodigious at around 10h00. Kushul's and Sandeep's cars were in the parking lot of Maeva Tower.

I called Kushul to ask whether the presentations had begun. He said that people were still coming. Within a few minutes he came down the parking lot to show us the way to the office, which is on the 2nd floor of the building — a spacious and cozy place.

By 10:30 most people who had RSVP'ed had arrived. Some 20+ people attended the meetup.  Sandeep made an introductory speech.

He talked about the Front-end Coders and the agenda of the day. He thanked the meetup sponsors, Prodigious for the venue and Ringier for sponsoring lunch. He mentioned that they are trying to bring back the monthly meetups. The next one will be in May and the topic will be React, although no date has been fixed yet. In fact, they are still looking for a venue sponsor — so, if someone can arrange that, it would be a great help!

Sandeep mentioned that he closed the Front-end Coders page on Meetup.com. He explained the reason. The Meetup.com subscription costs about $120 yearly and while there were no meetups during Covid-19 restrictions in Mauritius, he still had to pay those fees. He said the meetup announcements are now made on their Facebook page instead and they also have setup a website to publish the events details.

The first presentation of the day was done by Mahima. She did an introduction to Tailwind CSS. She explained the concept of utility classes and did live coding to explain Grid and Flexbox concepts using Tailwind CSS.

Mahima gave an overview of some new features in Tailwind CSS v3.0 such as the Just-in-Time (JIT) engine and fancy underline styles. You can read more about these new features from the Tailwind CSS v3.0 blog post by Adam Wathan.

The next presentation was done was Jules. He spoke about Reactivity. He used the Vue.js Reactivity API. I am not familiar with Vue.js, less even with concepts of reactivity in JavaScript. Nevertheless, Jules did an extremely fun demo to engage the audience.

Jules talked about reactivity in browsers and the different methods to achieve it, starting from legacy methods, such as JQuery, to modern frameworks like Vue.js, React, Angular, Svelte, etc. He pointed out a useful resource to Learn Advanced JavaScript, by John Resig, the creator of JQuery.

Jules then explained how he could leverage the Vue.js Reactivity API in non-Vue.js applications — i.e using it outside Vue.js. He showed the code a of Node.js CLI application that he wrote to demonstrate the same.

The Vue.js website has a clear & concise documentation that explains Reactivity fundamentals. If you want to delve further into the topic, give it a hit.

At lunch time, we gathered in the mess room and we shared pizza from Aqua Farina, which was sponsored by folks from Ringier.

After lunch, we had a final presentation. It was done by Sandeep and the topic was Open Data in Mauritius. He went though a few of his pet projects for which he used data available locally from various sources — such as the CEB website, the Meteorological Services website and the Open Data portal of the Government of Mauritius.

He explained the hassle and difficulty in obtaining weather related data from the Meteorological Services of Mauritius. He shared his experience on meeting the Meteo personnel and trying to convince them to provide the data in an open format. The latter didn't seem to show any interest in such and instead told Sandeep that whatever data is available on the Meteo website, he can use for free. That entails scraping and parsing data from an HTML page.

Sandeep had to do adopt a similar approach when he built the page on Power Outages in Mauritius.

On the other hand, the Open Data portal provides statistical data in a more programmable way, but the hiccup is it's not always up-to-date.

Meetup ended some time past 14h00. It was a great catch-up after a very long time and I hope to see as many people or more in the next meetup.

My wife Shelly and I, we had planned to watch the movie on Thursday and I was supposed to buy the tickets today. However, before I phone mCine to confirm whether tickets are still available for Thursday, to my surprise I read on mCine's Facebook page that the film has been rejected by the Film Classification Board.

In another update, mCine informed that they had appealed against the rejection and the decision could be taken today (Wednesday 16 March).

At the time of writing this blog post, no further update was published by mCine and The Kashmir Files remains banned in Mauritius.

I wanted to know more about the Film Classification Board and its members. More precisely, I wanted to know the reasons behind the banning of this movie. However, on the website of the Ministry of Arts and Culture Heritage, the names of the Board members are not available. I could only find the email and phone number of the Assistant Secretary, Mr. Ajay Hooloomann. Therefore, I sent Mr. Hooloomann a request for information to obtain the list of members on the Film Classification Board and members of the Film Classification Consultative Panels.

I haven't received any reply yet.

Nevertheless, in a Government Gazette of 2019, I found the list of members on the Film Classification Board. This list contains 41 Deputy Chairpersons and 99 Board members.

Grateful to someone on Facebook who pointed me to the publication of this list in the Government Gazette.

Update – 16 March 2021 21:24

About half an hour ago, MCine has posted on its Facebook page that « The Kashmir Files » has been awarded VISA 18. The film will play in MCine cinema halls as from tomorrow. Strict sanitary protocols to be observed.

The COVID-19 counters on lexpress.mu and lemauricien.mu indicated this new record after their evening update on 15 July 2021.

ICTA issued several communiques² in an attempt to dispel fear and doubt surrounding their proposal. However, those communiques repeatedly stressed only public posts on Facebook will be filtered and decrypted.

For example, in a recent video³ published on ICTA’s website, at 2m3s, they say that ICTA won’t get user password, log in, email, private messages, bank details etc.

In this report, I explain how a proof-of-concept proxy was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the technical framework proposed in Section 11.2 of the consultation paper.

Disclaimer:
The purpose of this report is purely educational and written to demonstrate a specific context. Any misuse of the knowledge of the software or technique described in this report cannot be held against the author, i.e Ish Sookun. If you continue to read, you acknowledge having read this disclaimer.

ICTA's Proposed  Technical Framework

These three steps are the most important ones that are mentioned in Section 11.2 of the consultation paper and my proof-of-concept will focus on these steps only.

1. install a Certification Authority (CA) root certificate in web browser,
2. route requests for facebook.com to a proxy server,
3. decrypt the HTTPS requests.

Software & Technique

I used Fiddler Everywhere⁴ v1.6.0, Mozilla Firefox⁵, Ubuntu 21.04⁶ and a My.T Internet connection.

Fiddler generated a CA Root certificate which was added to the certificate store of Firefox. Then, Firefox was configured to use the Fiddler proxy.

All web requests, i.e HTTP and HTTPS requests, were intercepted by the proxy. HTTPS requests to and from different websites were decrypted in real-time.

I used my own Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail and Hotmail accounts in this experiment.

Results

I sent the photo of a lazy panda to my wife on Facebook to see whether this private message will be decrypted by the proxy.

Yes, the private message was decrypted by the Fiddler proxy and the photo appeared exactly as I sent.

Next, I tested messenger.com and the first thing I noted was that the proxy decrypted my login and password.

The email field contained the login. Both login and password were exactly what I typed in the login page of messenger.com. I blurred the fields in the screenshot for obvious reasons.

I tested Instagram to see whether a picture that my wife sent me would be decrypted the same way the proxy did for the Facebook private message.

Yes, the picture of the adorable Quokka was decrypted by the proxy, as you may see in the above screenshot.

I tested Twitter and I could see my login, password and direct messages in clear text.

Lastly I tested Gmail, Hotmail and LinkedIn. The login and password of all three platforms appear in clear text.

You will notice that Firefox never prompted me about any untrusted connection while the proxy decrypted the HTTPS traffic.

See above, the padlock will give you the impression that the website is genuine and it can be trusted. However, the certificate is issued by Fiddler and signed with "DO_NOT_TRUST_BC".

Facebook.com is signed by DigiCert and not DO_NOT_TRUST_BC.

Lastly, without decryption there is no way to identify what content the user is accessing on Facebook because all traffic will appear as facebook.com:443.

As seen above, all Facebook traffic end with :443 because the complete URL is encrypted. There is no means to know where does facebook.com:443 lead to, whether it leads to facebook.com/public-post or facebook.com/private-content. To obtain the URL information, the entire Facebook traffic will have to be decrypted. This means decrypting login, passwords, public posts and private messages in the process.

Login details, passwords and content sent via private messages can be decrypted by a proxy that is trusted by the web browser. At no point the browser will notify that the website being visited is being proxied and decrypted.

Therefore, if someone starts with decrypting facebook.com today and tomorrow decides to start decrypting gmail.com, the Internet user will not know that this is happening.

Credits to S. Moonesamy for mentioning a proof-of-concept proxy in his slide decks⁷ on Unsafe Web Browsing in Mauritius.

Cover photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash.

1. https://www.icta.mu/docs/2021/Social_Media_Public_Consultation.pdf
2. https://www.icta.mu/mediaoffice/news2021.htm
3. https://www.icta.mu/ICTA_Socialmedia.mp4
4. https://docs.telerik.com/fiddler-everywhere/introduction
5. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/88.0/releasenotes/
6. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/hirsute-hippo-release-notes/19221
7. http://www.elandsys.com/~sm/slides/unsafe-web-browsing-mauritius.html