My Ongoing War with Clueless and Worthless

Newsletter #103
May 5, 2008

The Web's Only Peer-Reviewed Panama Newsletter
#103 Clueless and Worthless

My Ongoing War with Clueless and Worthless

Sometimes known as Cable and Wireless (they put it on their bills) Panama's premier telecommunications company has few admirers and deservedly so. Observing some of their actions prompts the question "Is there any Intelligent Life at Cable and Wireless?" A recent example; I and several friends began having email problems a few months ago. We could receive email just fine, but could not send messages out. The only thing we all had in common was that our email servers are located outside Panama. There were several @panamaretire.net accounts and a @panamamasons.net account. The temporary fix was to use the online mail programs instead of Thunderbird, Evolution, or Outlook. After a lot of head-scratching and trouble-shooting, my friend John called the C&W "help" desk and they eventually told him that they are blocking all SMTP server traffic (this is the server that forwards your outgoing email) if the server is not located in Panama, and the solution is to use the C&W SMTP server. The explanation was that they are trying to control SPAM. This is, needless to say, totally BOGUS. I have a lot of email accounts and the ONLY one that regularly receives more than one or two SPAM messages is my @cwpanama.net account. I think it a lot more likely that the only way they can monitor all outgoing email is to make sure it goes through their servers. Not too sure about who might be forcing this, but I have my suspicions.

Back to the point, one of my clients has been using a foreign email server for years, and when I tried to set up their @cwpanama.net address in the SMTP account, it wouldn't work. A call to C&W found that they had discontinued the account, and to get it turned back on, my client had to submit a written request signed by the legal representative. Well, that took several days, but finally the new password was issued. It was a six-digit sequential number, which to a black hat hacker is no password at all. OK, let's log in and change the password. No cigar, there is no option in the C&W online email program to change the password. My client called the "help" desk and asked how to change the password and was told they would have to submit another written request, signed by the legal representative. At this point, client went postal, questioning their IQ and ancestry, and screamed at them. When the client calmed down, they finally admitted that there was a URL where the password could be changed. Now, in all my trying to find a password changing operation, I looked at every cwpanama.net address I could find, but it turns out that the password program is hidden away at cwpanama.com! I'm curious to know how many of their customers have never bothered or been able to change the default password because they didn't know that you have to go to cwpanama.com to change it. BTW, just as a matter of interest, they also use a default password on most of their ADSL modems. A black hat could have a field day on the Clueless and Worthless network.
Manny

Editor's note: Bureaucracy, ya gotta love it.

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