It would be funny in a macabre way if it wasn't so damned annoying and holding back commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa. Naturally, I'm talking about electronic banking transactions and how you run in to so many roadblocks along the way. For me, it's more of an annoyance as I have European and American citizenship which my banking credentials are based upon. I can always refer back to these documents when needing to prove whatever it is that the banks need me to prove.
For someone in Africa, it's tremendously more difficult to complete online transactions, as banks and anyone other site with heavy security protocols assumes that Africa is full of scammers and frauds. Naturally, this chases away all the normal people and leaves just the scammers and frauds deceiving away, thus self-fulfilling these assumptions. And yes, it really is targeted at Africans. For instance, I had a couple of hour layover on my trip to Abidjan and I spent it catching up on things on airport wifi in Charles de Gaulle. No problems there, but the minute I fired up my machine to access the same sites in Côte d'Ivoire (in this case Facebook and my bank) all of the sudden the extra security verification greets me. This is obviously much better than an outright block, but still, it's incredibly frustrating. And again, this is because I have an established history with these sites in the US. If I were a new user, all kinds of other problems would arise, especially with Google, which I'll get in to in a later article.
But what makes me really crazy is when companies aren't honest about it. While I'm not sure if it's still the case, as they just launched a large redesign, Air France US would simply not allow you to buy tickets from from Côte d'Ivoire. And they fly to the main city of Abidjan as well as own a large stake in Air Ivoire! They don't admit it though. You encounter a generic "there was a site error" message every time you try to access things on the site, when someone accessing from Europe or North America at the exact same time has no problem. It's quite crappy and I would assume that this is not a problem when using Air France CI.
I'm not saying anything terribly new in all of this. These problems get twitted about often. They're just backwards thinking and the reason why the importance of European an American financial interests are on the wane in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Chinese and other Asian countries realize the huge market that is here and are approaching this continent as equal business partners as opposed to former colonies. Needless to say, they're finding a lot more opportunities.
A couple of days ago, McAfee released the information that .cm was the most dangerous domain on the internet currently. It's not so much that Cameroon has more internet scammers, but more that the internet scammers of the world have turned to .cm domains to create malware sites when people mistype a .com address. Unfortunately I think that a lot of people are now going to associate the country of Cameroon with being full of nefarious net thugs, which is quite unfortunate, as I say it's simply not true. You can read a full breakdown of all of this in a PDF on McAfee's site. (Yeah, a PDF is kinda like a fax machine, if you were wondering...)
The funny thing in this is that as I state on my about page, rarely is it the case that I am able to combine my Croatian lineage with my interests in African tech. Well, it appears that this is one instance (again) where there is actually an overlap.
As a complete opposite to .cm, it turns out that the .hr domain for Croatia is one of the safest in the world--Croatia in Croatian is Hrvatska thus the HR. Again, this doesn't mean that there are less scammers in Croatia, it just means that of those sites using the .hr domain name, there are less that are harmful on the web. Why is this?
To start out, a Croatian domain is considerably more expensive to register than a .cm, so that does play in to things to some extent. Then there is the fact that unless you have a Croatian website, in Croatia, .hr sucks as a domain extension. No one in their right mind would bother to register that for typo mistakes because really, there are none to be had. This all makes it a safer domain purely due to being less desirable.
But beyond these two points, there is something else that plays in to this in that you have to be a Croatian citizen or have a Croatian company (incorporated in Croatia) to purchase one of these very expensive domains. This in effect limits the possible buyers to a maximum of about 5 million. While that sounds like a lot, think about the fact that from what I found, it seems that anyone can register a .cm domain. This creates a potential pool of billions of buyers. Obviously your chances to have a couple of bad apples in the bunch rises a great deal in this.
I think that when saying .cm is the most dangerous domain on the internet (or .cn or .hk or whatever) there needs to be a total given along with this to state how many of these sites are actually registered by the people of that country. I'd bet good money that if you did that, you'd see that nearly none of the malware idiots are Cameroonians because the overall penetration of the internet in Cameroon is around 3% currently. So, people just don't have the access to go about creating some nefarious site when there are much better things like email, Facebook, or other communication tools to use when one has limited and very expensive net time.
In all honesty, I think we screwed up (or rather the US with ICANN screwed up) in creating non-country specific domains in the first place such as .com, .net, .org, .info, .travel, .biz, etc. I think that if we only had domain extensions per country to date and you had to be a citizen of that country to get one, things would look a great deal different in internet land and I have absolutely no idea who on the net would have the "most dangerous domain" honors.
