(I’ve gone ahead and used copy from my last post because a lot is still relevant from last week).

Everyone is talking about now discussing the stronger Qatar Quake that happened. Now it’s more of a sway than a Quake. Over at QSTP the feeling was quite smooth; this time it was like the table was gyrating in a circular motion (I’m thinking hoolahoops). Since it was the second time, I immediate knew it was… STOP!  tremor time (just a quick MC Hammer hat tip there). Everyone started to evacuate quickly. Good response time. This time there were additional rules, like not standing underneath any structures that could collapse. (nice!)

After evacuating the building, I got onto the Tweet machine to see who else felt it. Some thought they were dreaming, some felt nothing and thought it was a joke, and most people were surprised. (Yes, the same responses as last time).  Not many jokes about it this time. Either people were having a ‘oh no, this is actually a thing now’ moment OR they spent all their good jokes on the last tremor. People felt it in Bin Mahmoud, Westbay, Education City area, Old Salata, Airport Road, The Pearl, and other areas.

So what’s the deal? We didn’t really have an earthquake, it was just the aftershock from an Earthquake in Iran Pakistan border. Reports say that their earthquake was  7.8 in magnititude (last one was 6.4 in magnitude). It was felt in UAE and Bahrain too.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/16/earthquake-hits-iran-pakistan-border

So what happened in Qatar? I was actually happy to see so many people tweeting pics of buildings that were evacuated.
A few that did a great job taking this seriously were QSTP, Ministry of Defence, Qatar Airways, some buildings in the Pearl (yes only some took it seriously.), Al Mana Towers, ictQatar, and The Pearl itself restricted access into the location for a while.

I actually asked people to take note of whether or not their building did anything. You’ll know if you can trust them now or not. You’ll also know that you should put in a complaint to get the management to take things seriously.

It was a different feeling for different people. Some felt nothing, some said that it was quite extreme. Personally, I think that for most people that live here in Qatar and haven’t experienced an earthquake, their reactions might be slightly exaggerated. Having said that, if you were in higher floors in buildings, then you would have felt it much more than others (wider range of motion, albeit slower). That’s physics!

Let’s look at this from a positive perspective. Luckily, since this was a tiny little motion, perhaps it was a good thing. Perhaps this will show off the low quality buildings and highlight the ones that were constructed very well?
According to a friend working on Westbay projects, the towers all comply with Quake Code regulations. That’s a comfort.

Someone kindly tweeted a link to Earthquake Safety Measures. Thanks @neethatx.

Now, people said that it was a shock (no pun intended), since it was the first time ever that this happened. That’s not true.

In 1998 there was quite a shake up which caused a few pot holes to form.

On the 20th of July 2010 the Metreology department confirmed there was a slight tremor, but it was in the north east of the country and not many people felt it. Source

On the 18th of January 2011, there was a post on iCNN stating that a slight quake (most probably another aftershock) occured for 20 seconds. Source It was later confirmed that it was due to a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan that caused the aftershock. Source

On the 9th of April 2012 there was an earthquake that hit Southern Iran and tremors were felt across Doha. Source.

So there you have it everyone. Stay calm when it happens, check out the quick guide of what to do above, make sure to tweet AFTER you’ve exited the building, and stay safe

I went on down to the African Festival at Katara. It was a pretty fun event. I thought it would be nice to see what happened, what they were up to, and check out the entertainment. Don’t forget to Thumbs Up, Comment, and Subscribe Then I know if you’ve liked it! If you REALLY REALLY like it then please share it too! Take care all, Mr. Q (Your friendly neighbourhood Qatari)

Update: Another tremor felt in Doha on 16 April 2013. See here.

Everyone is talking about the Qatar Quake. Now it’s more of a sway than a Quake. Over at QSTP the feeling was quite smooth. Like a boat gently rocking. First thought was that someone was shaking their leg and causing the table to shake. Got annoyed for a moment. Looked around and saw everyone looking outside and we were immediately evacuated.

Funny, even the earthquakes are chilled out in Qatar.

After evacuating the building, I got onto the Tweet machine to see who else felt it. Some thought they were dreaming, some felt nothing and thought it was a joke, and most people were surprised. ‘No No, it’s not an earthquake, Qatar’s just trying to show the world how to do a proper Harlem Shake”. People felt it in Bin Mahmoud, Westbay, Education City area, Old Salata, Airport Road, The Pearl, and other areas.

So what’s the deal? We didn’t really have an earthquake, it was just the aftershock from an Earthquake in Southern Iran. Reports say that their earthquake was anything from 5.4 – 6.4 in magnitude. It was felt in UAE and Bahrain too.
Source: http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=311834

So what happened in Qatar? I was actually happy to see so many people tweeting pics of buildings that were evacuated.
A few that did a great job taking this seriously were QSTP, Ministry of Defence, Qatar Airways, some buildings in the Pearl (yes only some took it seriously. Sabban Tower management for example did nothing according to a tweet shared with us), Al Mana Towers, ictQatar, and The Pearl itself restricted access into the location for a while.

I actually asked people to take note of whether or not their building did anything. You’ll know if you can trust them now or not. You’ll also know that you should put in a complaint to get the management to take things seriously.

It was a different feeling for different people. Some felt nothing, some said that it was quite extreme. Personally, I think that for most people that live here in Qatar and haven’t experienced an earthquake, their reactions might be slightly exaggerated. Having said that, if you were in higher floors in buildings, then you would have felt it much more than others (wider range of motion, albeit slower). That’s physics!

Let’s look at this from a positive perspective. Luckily, since this was a tiny little motion, perhaps it was a good thing. Perhaps this will show off the low quality buildings and highlight the ones that were constructed very well?
According to a friend working on Westbay projects, the towers all comply with Quake Code regulations. That’s a comfort.

Someone kindly tweeted a link to Earthquake Safety Measures. Thanks @neethatx.

Now, people said that it was a shock (no pun intended), since it was the first time ever that this happened. That’s not true.

In 1998 there was quite a shake up which caused a few pot holes to form.

On the 20th of July 2010 the Metreology department confirmed there was a slight tremor, but it was in the north east of the country and not many people felt it. Source

On the 18th of January 2011, there was a post on iCNN stating that a slight quake (most probably another aftershock) occured for 20 seconds. Source It was later confirmed that it was due to a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan that caused the aftershock. Source

So there you have it everyone. Stay calm when it happens, check out the quick guide of what to do above, make sure to tweet AFTER you’ve exited the building, and stay safe

Check this out! Red Bull’s Fortress Challenge is going to be held at Film City (google it!). It’s a great chance to participate in a great challenge.

Interested in more? Visit: http://www.redbullmea.com/cs/Satellite/en_MEA/Event/Red-Bull-Fortress-Challenge-Qatar-2013-021243333562416

I went on down to check out Ikea qatar at Doha Festival City and decided to vlog it (and sleep in their bed too.)

I thought it would be nice for you to see what IKEA is like since so many people are talking about the place.

Don’t forget to Thumbs Up, Comment, and Subscribe
Then I know if you’ve liked it!

If you REALLY REALLY like it then please share it too!

Take care all,
Mr. Q (Your friendly neighbourhood Qatari)

(Please do share this! Let’s get people to be smarter about protecting their accounts online).

Here’s some breaking news thanks to the online community that covered this quite well and quite fast.

Qatar Foundation’s social media accounts have been ‘hacked’. People have been saying that it’s Assad Supporters Syrian Electronic Army. No they’re not a professional organization, it’s just some people trying to make themselves sound bigger than they really are.
You want to know what I think? No this isn’t the result of a ‘hacking’ attempt (because then the headline would be ‘twitter’ hacked, not QF), but more probably (and realistically) the result of poor password protection. (I’ll come onto that in a second, but let’s see what the community said).

First off, shout outs to @nasnas_here , @DJLedz, @dohadelivery, @mufyd_me , @teampistonbroke , @YasserM86, and Khalil, for bringing this to our attention and sending us images too.

At around 10:30AM on the 1st of March tweets started coming in that the Qatar Foundation twitter account was tweeting ‘anti-Qatar’ posts. Of course the online community, being mostly comprised of intelligent people, quickly realized that this was indeed the result of a hijacker.

Some people criticized QF for not being quick enough to react, but let’s face it; it’s a Friday morning. People are either praying, sleeping, with family, or doing the weekend chores. I personally think that they reacted as fast as they could. Who’s to say that they weren’t already taking action anyway? If the account was compromised, how could they have deleted the tweets in the first place? They wouldn’t have had access to the account. I don’t think many organizations have 24hour social media monitoring services in general. (Although I’ve been telling people that they should just pay for the ‘Alto’ social service, ah well.)

It’ll be interesting to see how the Cybercrime unit in Qatar responds. This is the chance for them to help set precedent for online justice.

The big point is though, that in most similar cases, this could have been avoided!

ictQatar had put together a great event called the ‘Safer Internet Day‘ yesterday (28 of February) at Qatar University. I was also one of the panelists there too. A number of topics were discussed and I particularly emphasized the irony that websites having stricter requirements to have more complex passwords is forcing people to pick the most simplistic password (or easily guessable) password string. Other discussions were identity theft and how people are not being secure enough. It’s not really that difficult (and I’m tempted to even prove it).

All you need is a bit of information and some good old fashioned social engineering.
1- Figure out the email address that the account is linked to. (It’s either the social media manager’s email or a generic email that’s being used by the company/ institution itself rather than a private and undisclosed one).

2- Try to infiltrate that person’s email address. Go with the ‘Forgot Password’ route. It’ll probably ask some basic questions that are guessable. Even if you didn’t know the answer, getting them could be easy. Some of the questions are “When was your mother born”, “What’s your maiden name”, “What’s your favourite color”. If I wanted that info and I knew who the social media manager was, all I’d need to do is ‘interview’ that person to get the answers I wanted.

3- If you manage to gain access, now go onto the social account you want to access. For twitter, click forgot password, type in the username you want access to, it’ll send a reset link to the email (you should have access to). For some social channels they make the mistake of sending you the password! (Once you have that, in many cases it’s the same for all the other social accounts).

4- You could also go the guessing route. Too many people go with passwords like. “Monkey123″ (Yes that’s common!), Password123, P@ssw0rd, 123456, a1b3c3d4, “generic word + 69″ (Do you see a password you’ve used here before? Post it in the comments below )
A brute password cracker can easily guess your password in a few days.

This is all theory but either way, How do you avoid having your account hijacked?
1- Use an undisclosed email address
2- Don’t use easy to guess answers
3- Don’t use the same password for ALL accounts
4- Don’t use an easily identifiable pattern
5- Where possible, go with two tier security (like google authenticator which is FREE).
6- Set up an alert if possible so that every time someone logs in (from another country) you get notified.

So what’s the latest? Twitter and Facebook have already been notified of the situation, we’re told. They’ve removed all access for ‘resetting’ the Qatar Foundation passwords or changing the profile, while everything is cleaned out. We saw a message on Twitter’s page that said that they’ve disabled password resetting. Good first move! Let’s hope that a proper security policy is put in place to avoid these things in the future.

Let’s ALSO hope that other companies (and government instutions) learn from this. This is a great wakeup call. (Speaking of calls, give me a call anytime whoever you are, happy to be of service )

Tell me people, what are your thoughts?

I’m very sorry everyone for not posting as usual but I’ll be posting a couple of updates in the next few days.

I’ll be sharing the future of ILQ, some stats, and some things that I’ve been thinking about recently. Although I’ve been away from blogging for a bit, those who have been following ILQ in general will have seen that we’ve kicked things into gear in the past while (which meant more work and less blogging!).

All good stuff I hope! Thanks for the continious support

Here’s an Qatari version of an Aesop Fable.

A Man and his son were once going with their Camel to the market at Souq Wagif. As they were walking along by its side a guy in a cruiser passed them and said: “You fools, you have a camel! What use is it if you don’t ride it?”
So the Man put the Boy on the Camel and they went on their way. But soon they passed a group of men sitting at a coffee shop, one of whom said: “See that lazy kid, he lets his father walk while he rides.”

So the Man ordered his Boy to get off, and got on himself. But they hadn’t gone far when they passed two women at a machboos stand, one of whom said to the other: “Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along.”

Well, the Man didn’t know what to do, but at last he took his Boy up before him on the Camel. By this time they had come to the town, and the passers-by began to jeer and point at them. The Man stopped and asked what they were scoffing at. The men said: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor camel of yours and your hulking son?”

The Man and Boy got off and tried to think what to do. They thought and they thought, till at last they cut down a pole, tied the Camel’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the camel to their shoulders. They went along amid the laughter of all who met them till they came to Market Bridge, when the Camel, getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the Boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle the Camel fell over the bridge, and his fore-feet being tied together he was drowned.

“That will teach you,” said an old man who had followed them:

“Try to please all, and you will please none.”

This isn’t NEW news but a few people asked me about this after reading ‘Fact 5′ in the Facts section on iLoveQatar.net

Yes Doha and Dubai are super close. The ties between the two are undoubtedly strong. In 1966 (officially 1967), Qatar and Dubai had a shared currency. It was known as the Qatar and Dubai Riyal. It’s one of the most rarest currency notes to get your hands on today. While doing a bit more research to share with you all, I stumbled upon this article from Trade Arabia from October 2012:

Rare-Find ‘Qatar & Dubai Currency Board’ Notes Auctioned in the UK!

At Bonhams ‘Banknotes and Coins’ auction in Knightsbridge in London, England yesterday, a number of mint-condition uncirculated Qatar and UAE banknotes – extremely rare in the world – has been purchased for £ 180,000 (QR 1.05 million) against pre-auction expectations range: £ 25,000 – 35,000 (QR 146,180 – 204,640), according to official press release from the auction house. 

At closer look by an expert, the corresponding early serial numbers – all marked ’000009′ – bolster more the intrinsic value of the collection.

The whole public sale, including non-currency items, hauled in a total of £ 580,194 (QR 3.39 million) for just 90% of the entire lots. Many rare coins of international origin and era as old as in Egypt 285 BC, the rule of the Ptolemaic kings.

Mr. John Millensted, Head of Coins at Bonhams, stated during a press interview: “It is a tremendously rare set and has been preserved well over the years, the price exceeded all expectations and we are very pleased with the result.”

The paper currencies, issued by the Qatar and Dubai Currency Board were a complete set of 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 Qatari Riyalsdating back in September 1966, were neatly stored in a blue-leather presentation album with the cover inscription: ‘Council For the Currency of Qatar & Dubai’.

The banknotes appear with a vignette with a dhow, derrick, and palm tree at left portion, reverses with denomination at middle and upper corners, and issuing authority across the top. They were modestly mounted on card pages and secured by a thin masking tape strip on back of right edge. 
What’s the history behind the bills?

Back in March 1966, the so-called ‘Qatar-Dubai Currency Agreement’ was sealed to pave way for the ‘Qatar and Dubai Currency Board’ which, in turn, was expected to give birth to a common currency.

Six months later, the Board issued its first banknote. For some major reason, however, the formal treaty was dissolved — within less than seven years hence.

The State of Qatar went ahead to commission its own paper money, as the United Arab Emirates Currency Board circulated its own bills in Dubai. 

At present, high-grade banknotes of the short-lived Qatar & Dubai Currency Board – except for the 1 riyal — are such rarities, with the 25 riyal having such a limited production that it is almost nowhere to be found in any condition. 

Having said that, there’s been talks about a shared common currency for the GCC. Apparantly the first time that the decision was going to be made, the UAE declined, the second time GCC leaders met up UAE was onboard but Oman declined. Right now it’s all just a dream, but perhaps we’ll get there. I’m not quite sure of what the reasons are behind a shared currency not happening (perhaps someone can comment below and let me know), but it sounds interesting. Do you think it’ll be worth it?

This is something that I’ve been talking about for quite a while and it’s something to be concerned about.
The water in many places in Qatar isn’t healthy. I don’t mean that it’s not drinkable, but it’s the cause for bad skin, dryness, hair loss, and even damaging to pipes.

I wonder if the government inspects any of the towers and does water sampling to ensure that we’re all living with healthy water. People often talk about the calcium level of the water being quite high. You know it’s high when you can’t even scrub the limescale off of glass! You can judge by yourself by looking at your faucets or around your sink for white scaling. High calcium content damages the skin and hair, that’s for sure, but I’m going to talk about something even more worrying. Rust/Dirty water.

I’ve recently been told (by a source that prefers to be anonymous) that there are construction companies that are using the wrong types of pipes. They should be using anti-corossion coated pipes. Basically, metal pipes (like any pipe) rust from the inside. They actually rust and get damaged even worse in our type of environment. This means you could be drinking rust…

Now I’m a sensitive person. So I decided to buy a 10,000 Riyal water filteration system from Japan (I know, it’s a lot). It’s state of the art and supposed to last 3 years. It’s attached to a secondary filter which is replaced every month and a half to two months.

Now take a look at this picture. I don’t need to say much.

See that transparent tube with that brown sponge in the middle? That’s what it looks like after just a 10 days! In the center, that super white roll is what the filter used to look like. Now this is quite scary to me. Something that’s supposed to last MUCH longer, turns a filthy brown in just a short period of time. I’m concerned for people who don’t have filters..

Think about this for a second… washing your face, your hair, brushing your teeth, or possibly event drinking this… This is the result of an apartment that’s only a few years old.

I wonder if anything is being done? How harmful is it?

So my question is, how many other people are concerned about the water in Qatar?