I put all my phone numbers on the "Do Not Call Registry" in the US, and have experienced a great reduction in the number of telemarketing
calls, but, the Do Not Call registry does not apply to Charitable institutions, and a few others, and the volume of these calls has grown
exponentially over the months... it seems the charities sell each other their call lists, and if you give anything to one, soon you will have
them ALL calling at regular intervals.
I've been playing with Asterisk for a couple of years now. I've implemented every privacy option in my dialplan, and have finished the coding of the call filtering option, and had it incorporated into the 2.x releases.
First the 3-tone is played (the da-dee-doo that precedes "The number you have called is no longer in service!", if
no CallerID is present.
Next, if no CallerID is present, and the autodialer has not hung up, the calling party is forced to supply a phone number, or the call is terminated, and if they are stupid, and give my number instead of theirs, the call is "terminated with prejudice".
Then, they get a menu, where they must choose the person with which they would like to converse. They get music on hold, and if no answer,
they are thrown into voicemail.
One of the first menu options they are presented with is a number to press if they are telemarketers. This option runs them into what
I titled the "Telemarketer Torture Script". (See http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+Telemarkete r+Torture)
I have complete CDR logs of the incoming and outgoing calls, and have totalled up how many calls and from what sources, and at what stage
each call was terminated.
And I found that each measure I implemented removed a fairly small percentage of the callers, with the total result that I have not received any
telemarketing calls or requests for donations in almost two years now.
The single most effective measure is the menu prompts. It defeats autodialers, which aren't programmed to answer prompts. It somehow defeats all the rest of the live callers, who don't seem to have the courage to ignore the telemarketing option, and choose a person. Only once has a charity ever been brave enough to actually select my extension, and in that case, all they did was thank me for past contributions, and hung up.
My conclusion is, that if you truly want to eliminate unsolicited calls from your business/home, you need to implement a simple IVR menu system.
1. A comprehensive lexicon, that lists all english words, and ALL their possible roles as "parts of speech", that is, verb, noun, etc.
2. A hunk of statistics for each word, sampled from error-free text, showing the probabilities of the parts of speech when surrounded by certain words.
3. Some good well rounded algorithms to resolve ambiguities. "Time flies like an arrow", is time an adj. or a noun? Is "flies" a noun (plural) or verb?
4. good rule checks to see if the sentence fits proper patterns. Best to encode all the exceptions.
And all the painful details about extracting the root words from tense, etc. may come to play.
One possible reason the free software community hasn't played around with this yet, is because the cost of developing a useable lexicon is HUGE --it's several man years, if not tens of man years to develop, debug, review, etc. such a lexicon. The guys at Webster's, etc, have a definite head start, but... even such may not be useful enough; hardly any dictionary provides the level of detail you need, in painful accuracy, describing the parts of speech in a useful way right now. The GNU Dictionary project (history described here gives you a taste of the scope of the project. From what I've heard, it was mostly done by Russians (when they were cheap), because OCR is just not there.
From the standpoint of a grammar checking lexicon, the GCIDE in xml/html format is peppered with errors, omissions, irregularities, and problems, lacks all kinds of useful info, but is the best shot I've seen yet at a free lexicon.
Seems like most of the grammar checking s/w these days is rule/pattern based, and can spot a lot of common probs, but...
To sum it up, my guess as to why the open software movement seems to ignore the grammar checking software, is because a key piece of technology, a good lexicon, is missing. When one exists, you'll see all sorts of folks making pot-shots at really good grammar checkers.
This "bundling" thing-- isn't it just more anti-competitive behavior? Think about it. The core OS is just an OS. Each version is just bundling in other software, software that competitors could and do write. Thus, by providing it with the OS, they get an automatic "edge" on the market for those products. Isn't the whole trick to find the right "bundle", so that no other software purchases are necc. for the customer?
I've seen this before-- a bigger company offers "third party" software programs, which in the end, serves as a breeder for possible new software products which they could write themselves and "take over", if they do well enough.
"Bemba is a language spoken by 5 to 6 million people in Zambia, and in bordering areas of Tanzania and Congo (DRC). Bemba is one of the eight official languages of Zambia. It is the language of the Bemba people (population est. 1.7 million) and a major lingua franca across Zambia. Bemba is part of the Bantu language family (Guthrie's M.42), which consists of over 500 different languages throughout Central, Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa. Other Bantu languages include Swahili, Zulu, Luganda, Shona, Sesotho, and Kongo...."
I've submitted some upgrades to Asterisk that provide a databased Privacy, and a non-databased Call Screening. These can be done on a per-extension basis.
With call screening, you can set it up to ignore the CID and they are asked, every time,
for their name. This is recorded and your extension is dialed. You answer and it tells you that someone introducing themselves as: wants to talk to you, and you can either talk to them immediately, send them to voice mail, or give them one of two sendoffs before it hangs up on them. (One slow and tortuous, the other quick and polite).
While they wait, they are serenaded with whatever Music on Hold you want to subject them to.
If you want to use CID, you can database your decision, and it will be used in the future to decide how to handle the call. You can even store the recorded introductions they provide, and use them on a PA if you so desire.
CID can be fun to play with, but if its non-reliability goes over some threshold of pain, you can drop it and still avoid picking up the phone for callers whose voice you don't recognize.
These fixes have been submitted to the bugzilla database, and will most likely be included in Asterisk when the voice prompts are done in the same voice as all the others.
SO, I guess you could say that if Asterisk is being used to provide CID spoofing, it can also be used to thwart the anonymous caller!
Think about it-- to receive radio signals from another galaxy, you need a big dish, a huge amount of computer power for Signal Processing, etc. This doesn't even take into account that it is possible that galactic EM fields could so affect the signal that it's origin isn't even anywhere near where it appears to come from. The odds of someone catching a purposely beamed signal is astoundingly low. Too few receivers, too advanced a technology.
But a honking big laser sending a modulated signal at a strange color (like red, or green), would be fairly noticeable in the night sky to anything with eyes. Especially if it blinked. Millions, if not billions of low-tech receivers at the other end.
So, the light show at night for the low-tech worlds, and if you modulate the laser, you can not only flash it slow with bitmaps of NASA "Me Tarzan, You Jane" images, you can slowly crank up the speed and transmit whole MTV music videos for the more technologically advanced worlds.
So, aim it at your favorite star systems. Continuous transmission for a couple days every month or two on a regular schedule, ought to get the message across if and when there is anyone there to get it.
Oh, and by the way, I would NOT use a honking big laser sending nanosecond intense pulses in small groups, which would only be detectable by expensive and high-tech equipment at the other end, if I ever wanted to hope to be detected.
Uh, just look at the world of Electrical Engineers, designing big circuits. They started out with schematics, but as circuit sizes increased, the graphics got to be a big slow-down. The newer methodologies all use programming languages to make the big circuits easier to describe.
When things get big, language-based solutions end up more palatable than the graphical approaches.
About 20 years ago, I spent several months in a small town in southern Germany, southwest of Munich. One summer day, with the windows open, I noticed hearing a far-away 'boom', like an explosive set off far way. The curtains fluttered inward, and then got sucked right out the window! I realized that it must have been a sonic boom. After that, I noticed them every day. Must have been SOP for patrols to run over that area on their way to Iron Curtain borders.
Of course it's still free trade, in the sense you give it. You CAN still compete for these outsourced jobs! Just send in your resume to Microsoft (or anywhere else), and let them know you have 20 years of experience and will gladly work for them for 10,000 dollars per year.
Google for "strikeback"... it's been discussed on slashdot before.
There are some interesting variants to the basic strikeback idea, which is to detect an attempt to exploit some hole, then verify, then depend on the fact that the worm/virus did not patch the weakness it used, and use the same exploit on the aggressor to neutralize the worm/virus on the attacking machine.
One variant would be to "enlist" the attacking machine in the fight against the worm/virus. In other words, replicate the strikeback mechanism on the attacking machine, in addition to the normal virus/worm removal. This would exponentially spread the strikeback mechanism, and exponentially silence the attacking worm/virus, hopefully without exponentially increasing the network traffic.
Highly "immoral" "unethical" "questionable". But I'm sure it would also be highly effective in silencing a globally noisy infection.
Probably the only kind of organization that could get away with this kind of behavior would be a government.
You are correct, except for one small thing. I remember reading about hybrids where the engine
was used purely to recharge the batteries, and
the power train of the car is purely electrical.
If this is so, these generators usually run at
constant speed when they run at all, and this is
usually at their most efficient RPM setting, or
it could be at the least polluting RPM, whichever
is designed in. If so, the burning of the gas could
be done at the most environmentally friendly fashion
possible...
What difference this would make, or
whether it's being done at all in these models,
are questions for someone with more knowledge than I.
... of broadband firewall routers being sold that will not work with the default password. That such routers will not have ANY incoming ports open by default, and ALL unnecessary outgoing ports (not needed for http, https, ftp, telnet, pop/imap, sendmail, ssh, IM, irc, kazaa, etc),are all CLOSED by default. The user will always have the option to open any normally closed port. BUT, since most users leave their routers as-is, and don't care, as long as they can surf the web, send and get mail, etc, such routers will shut out the hackers and limit their exploits on an unimaginable scale. And, a lot of trojans could be cut off just by limiting the lesser-known port numbers outgoing. ISP's won't have to load down their routers with endless lists of changing exceptions to no-route rules... Boy, I dream big.
Sneakemail has a free option and a pay-for option. The cost is $2 a month. The free option requires you to "create" a throw-away address before you can give it out. The pay-for option allows you to define a key/keys unique across all sneakemail users, and you can use this key on the fly in your throwaway addresses.
Mailinator is a different approach. You can give out an address, any address@mailinator.com, and you can check this address at their website. There's no accounts there, no passwords, no privacy for the letters sent there. The letters are auto-deleted after a "couple" hours, so you have to check soon, but I have a feeling most folks aren't really interested in seeing any letter they get there anyway, unless it's perhaps an immediate response. But, hey, it's free.
Spamgourmet is free. You register for an account. You make up your own throw-aways on the fly, using a formula for the address--
[label].[num of msgs to frwd to you].[acctname]@spamgourmet.com
It keeps a big database, and forwards up to the number of messages you put in the middle element of the throwaway address, then just discards any further email to that address. It keeps track of the totals. You can view each throwaway address that has actually been used to send you email, and how many messages have been "eaten" over time. You can also define rules for the [label], to help prevent evil people from making up throwaway addresses for you, to spam you. Spamgourmet also has multiple domain names you can use for the addresses. And, you can pick up the source for the system, and implement it on your site.
There are some other pay-for sites that provide throw-away addresses. I just don't have the money to try them out and see what their advantages/disadvantages are.
I fully agree with the point, however, that whatever the method, people can save themselves a lot of spam if they use throw-away addresses a lot, keep their emails off webpages, (at least unencrypted), and use mild encodings if they are unlucky enough to have their names on any of the domain registries. And, if you do send messages to mailing lists, or anywhere else, use throw-aways! Many of these lists keep archives of the messages, which are rich in email addresses for email harvesting bots!
I don't think RSS is the end-all to mailing lists, and especially don't see them as a key player in the fight against spam. But, they serve their purpose.
I've spent some time in Rwanda. EVERYONE has a cellphone, at least in the cities. MTN RwandaCell seems to be a very profitable business there. Normal phone service is there, but I've heard that you can wait a while to get connected. I've also heard that a "normal" phone line is cheaper. VOIP is illegal; it'd cut into Rwanda Telecom too deep. But, that attitude is changing, as even some of the government Ministries seem to be using it.
Rwanda IT people are VERY chafed that some outsider owns the.rw domain and is charging them for its use! (Tuvala got $19 mil to GIVE UP its domain!)
1. It is NOT industry practice! If it were, you wouldn't have brought it up for discussion. You honestly did not expect this.
2. They didn't inform you before hiring you! Again, if they did, this would not have been such a shocker.
3. It's too late! They already told you, that you can have the job! If the IDIOTS were to wisen up, they would figure out that they should have had you sign, and have done the check, and have made their hiring decision based on the check, or the check is TOO LATE.
IMNASHO, if your employer were REALLY interested in this, they should have had you sign it BEFORE the hiring. Now, having accepted the position, requiring this check is tantamount to extortion. It'd be like Motorola waiting until AFTER you are hired to tell you about their drug check policy, and waiting till AFTER you are hired to pee in the collection jar. If I remember right, they tell you about this as you are interviewed, and you have to provide your specimen (and pass the lab test) before they'll hire you. If you have privacy qualms, that's the best time to step out of the situation. This is the way it was 10 years ago when I left Motorola, hopefully they have dropped the entire policy by now.
I'm one of the poor devils that got a job with Motorola before they instituted the drug policy. I don't/won't/never will do drugs, but when they instituted the policy, and presented all us employees with the ultimatum: be tested or get out, I started looking for a new job. My determination was, I've got a family to feed, so I'll provide the sample if requested, but I don't agree with the approach, and I was out of there in less than a year. My ultimate feedback of my opinion about their policy. A co-worker refused the test, on principle, and was immediately escorted out the building.
I guess those looking for a job had best ask what agreements they'll be expected to sign, if the employers aren't smart enough to tell people up front. Not informing is downright dishonest! It has the feel of "playing dirty tricks" on people. It's despicable because a job is no laughing matter to the guys getting hired.
One guy I worked with years ago specialized in microcoding floating point units. Originally he was an Ag major, aiming to be a dairyman. He took the cheese-tasting course, the butchering, etc, but almost a senior, a dairy owner came in and presented his financial picture.
The margins were too low. He'd never be able to make such an operation work and pay off any loan to obtain it. He had to do something different. So he shopped around campus and voila-- EE looked good. A new career was born.
Slashdot Mirror
I put all my phone numbers on the "Do Not Call Registry" in the US, and have experienced a great reduction in the number of telemarketing calls, but, the Do Not Call registry does not apply to Charitable institutions, and a few others, and the volume of these calls has grown exponentially over the months... it seems the charities sell each other their call lists, and if you give anything to one, soon you will have them ALL calling at regular intervals.
I've been playing with Asterisk for a couple of years now. I've implemented every privacy option in my dialplan, and have finished the coding of the call filtering option, and had it incorporated into the 2.x releases.
First the 3-tone is played (the da-dee-doo that precedes "The number you have called is no longer in service!", if no CallerID is present.
Next, if no CallerID is present, and the autodialer has not hung up, the calling party is forced to supply a phone number, or the call is terminated, and if they are stupid, and give my number instead of theirs, the call is "terminated with prejudice".
Then, they get a menu, where they must choose the person with which they would like to converse. They get music on hold, and if no answer, they are thrown into voicemail.
One of the first menu options they are presented with is a number to press if they are telemarketers. This option runs them into what I titled the "Telemarketer Torture Script". (See http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+Telemarkete r+Torture)
I have complete CDR logs of the incoming and outgoing calls, and have totalled up how many calls and from what sources, and at what stage each call was terminated.
And I found that each measure I implemented removed a fairly small percentage of the callers, with the total result that I have not received any telemarketing calls or requests for donations in almost two years now.
The single most effective measure is the menu prompts. It defeats autodialers, which aren't programmed to answer prompts. It somehow defeats all the rest of the live callers, who don't seem to have the courage to ignore the telemarketing option, and choose a person. Only once has a charity ever been brave enough to actually select my extension, and in that case, all they did was thank me for past contributions, and hung up.
My conclusion is, that if you truly want to eliminate unsolicited calls from your business/home, you need to implement a simple IVR menu system.
A more detailed explanation of the privacy measures are outlined in http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-cvs/200 5-July/006992.html
And, some details of my research results are in: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2 004-September/062571.html
Best of luck!
As I see it, a good grammar checker needs:
1. A comprehensive lexicon, that lists all english words, and ALL their possible roles as "parts of speech", that is, verb, noun, etc.
2. A hunk of statistics for each word, sampled from error-free text, showing the probabilities of the parts of speech when surrounded by certain words.
3. Some good well rounded algorithms to resolve ambiguities. "Time flies like an arrow", is time an adj. or a noun? Is "flies" a noun (plural) or verb?
4. good rule checks to see if the sentence fits proper patterns. Best to encode all the exceptions.
And all the painful details about extracting the root words from tense, etc. may come to play.
One possible reason the free software community hasn't played around with this yet, is because the cost of developing a useable lexicon is HUGE --it's several man years, if not tens of man years to develop, debug, review, etc. such a lexicon. The guys at Webster's, etc, have a definite head start, but... even such may not be useful enough; hardly any dictionary provides the level of detail you need, in painful accuracy, describing the parts of speech in a useful way right now. The GNU Dictionary project (history described here gives you a taste of the scope of the project. From what I've heard, it was mostly done by Russians (when they were cheap), because OCR is just not there.
From the standpoint of a grammar checking lexicon, the GCIDE in xml/html format is peppered with errors, omissions, irregularities, and problems, lacks all kinds of useful info, but is the best shot I've seen yet at a free lexicon.
Seems like most of the grammar checking s/w these days is rule/pattern based, and can spot a lot of common probs, but...
To sum it up, my guess as to why the open software movement seems to ignore the grammar checking software, is because a key piece of technology, a good lexicon, is missing. When one exists, you'll see all sorts of folks making pot-shots at really good grammar checkers.
This "bundling" thing-- isn't it just more anti-competitive behavior? Think about it. The core OS is just an OS. Each version is just bundling in other software, software that competitors could and do write. Thus, by providing it with the OS, they get an automatic "edge" on the market for those products. Isn't the whole trick to find the right "bundle", so that no other software purchases are necc. for the customer?
I've seen this before-- a bigger company offers "third party" software programs, which in the end, serves as a breeder for possible new software products which they could write themselves and "take over", if they do well enough.
"Bemba is a language spoken by 5 to 6 million people in Zambia, and in bordering areas of Tanzania and Congo (DRC). Bemba is one of the eight official languages of Zambia. It is the language of the Bemba people (population est. 1.7 million) and a major lingua franca across Zambia. Bemba is part of the Bantu language family (Guthrie's M.42), which consists of over 500 different languages throughout Central, Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa. Other Bantu languages include Swahili, Zulu, Luganda, Shona, Sesotho, and Kongo...."
So, you were pretty close.
"IfUcanReadThisUR2Close" ?
With call screening, you can set it up to ignore the CID and they are asked, every time, for their name. This is recorded and your extension is dialed. You answer and it tells you that someone introducing themselves as: wants to talk to you, and you can either talk to them immediately, send them to voice mail, or give them one of two sendoffs before it hangs up on them. (One slow and tortuous, the other quick and polite).
While they wait, they are serenaded with whatever Music on Hold you want to subject them to. If you want to use CID, you can database your decision, and it will be used in the future to decide how to handle the call. You can even store the recorded introductions they provide, and use them on a PA if you so desire.
CID can be fun to play with, but if its non-reliability goes over some threshold of pain, you can drop it and still avoid picking up the phone for callers whose voice you don't recognize.
These fixes have been submitted to the bugzilla database, and will most likely be included in Asterisk when the voice prompts are done in the same voice as all the others.
SO, I guess you could say that if Asterisk is being used to provide CID spoofing, it can also be used to thwart the anonymous caller!
Think about it-- to receive radio signals from another galaxy, you need a big dish, a huge amount of computer power for Signal Processing, etc. This doesn't even take into account that it is possible that galactic EM fields could so affect the signal that it's origin isn't even anywhere near where it appears to come from. The odds of someone catching a purposely beamed signal is astoundingly low. Too few receivers, too advanced a technology.
But a honking big laser sending a modulated signal at a strange color (like red, or green), would be fairly noticeable in the night sky to anything with eyes. Especially if it blinked. Millions, if not billions of low-tech receivers at the other end.
So, the light show at night for the low-tech worlds, and if you modulate the laser, you can not only flash it slow with bitmaps of NASA "Me Tarzan, You Jane" images, you can slowly crank up the speed and transmit whole MTV music videos for the more technologically advanced worlds.
So, aim it at your favorite star systems. Continuous transmission for a couple days every month or two on a regular schedule, ought to get the message across if and when there is anyone there to get it.
Oh, and by the way, I would NOT use a honking big laser sending nanosecond intense pulses in small groups, which would only be detectable by expensive and high-tech equipment at the other end, if I ever wanted to hope to be detected.
Uh, just look at the world of Electrical Engineers, designing big circuits. They started out with schematics, but as circuit sizes increased, the graphics got to be a big slow-down. The newer methodologies all use programming languages to make the big circuits easier to describe.
When things get big, language-based solutions end up more palatable than the graphical approaches.
About 20 years ago, I spent several months in a small town in southern Germany, southwest of Munich. One summer day, with the windows open, I noticed hearing a far-away 'boom', like an explosive set off far way. The curtains fluttered inward, and then got sucked right out the window! I realized that it must have been a sonic boom. After that, I noticed them every day. Must have been SOP for patrols to run over that area on their way to Iron Curtain borders.
You'll be in the competition!
There are some interesting variants to the basic strikeback idea, which is to detect an attempt to exploit some hole, then verify, then depend on the fact that the worm/virus did not patch the weakness it used, and use the same exploit on the aggressor to neutralize the worm/virus on the attacking machine.
One variant would be to "enlist" the attacking machine in the fight against the worm/virus. In other words, replicate the strikeback mechanism on the attacking machine, in addition to the normal virus/worm removal. This would exponentially spread the strikeback mechanism, and exponentially silence the attacking worm/virus, hopefully without exponentially increasing the network traffic. Highly "immoral" "unethical" "questionable". But I'm sure it would also be highly effective in silencing a globally noisy infection.
Probably the only kind of organization that could get away with this kind of behavior would be a government.
If this is so, these generators usually run at constant speed when they run at all, and this is usually at their most efficient RPM setting, or it could be at the least polluting RPM, whichever is designed in. If so, the burning of the gas could be done at the most environmentally friendly fashion possible...
What difference this would make, or whether it's being done at all in these models, are questions for someone with more knowledge than I.
... of broadband firewall routers being sold that will not work with the default password. That such routers will not have ANY incoming ports open by default, and ALL unnecessary outgoing ports (not needed for http, https, ftp, telnet, pop/imap, sendmail, ssh, IM, irc, kazaa, etc),are all CLOSED by default. The user will always have the option to open any normally closed port. BUT, since most users leave their routers as-is, and don't care, as long as they can surf the web, send and get mail, etc, such routers will shut out the hackers and limit their exploits on an unimaginable scale. And, a lot of trojans could be cut off just by limiting the lesser-known port numbers outgoing. ISP's won't have to load down their routers with endless lists of changing exceptions to no-route rules... Boy, I dream big.
I've read the previous replies to this message, and I thank them for the new inputs.
Here's another to add to the list:
SpamGourmet .
Sneakemail has a free option and a pay-for option. The cost is $2 a month. The free option requires you to "create" a throw-away address before you can give it out. The pay-for option allows you to define a key/keys unique across all sneakemail users, and you can use this key on the fly in your throwaway addresses.
Mailinator is a different approach. You can give out an address, any address@mailinator.com, and you can check this address at their website. There's no accounts there, no passwords, no privacy for the letters sent there. The letters are auto-deleted after a "couple" hours, so you have to check soon, but I have a feeling most folks aren't really interested in seeing any letter they get there anyway, unless it's perhaps an immediate response. But, hey, it's free.
Spamgourmet is free. You register for an account. You make up your own throw-aways on the fly, using a formula for the address--
[label].[num of msgs to frwd to you].[acctname]@spamgourmet.com
It keeps a big database, and forwards up to the number of messages you put in the middle element of the throwaway address, then just discards any further email to that address. It keeps track of the totals. You can view each throwaway address that has actually been used to send you email, and how many messages have been "eaten" over time. You can also define rules for the [label], to help prevent evil people from making up throwaway addresses for you, to spam you. Spamgourmet also has multiple domain names you can use for the addresses. And, you can pick up the source for the system, and implement it on your site.
There are some other pay-for sites that provide throw-away addresses. I just don't have the money to try them out and see what their advantages/disadvantages are.
I fully agree with the point, however, that whatever the method, people can save themselves a lot of spam if they use throw-away addresses a lot, keep their emails off webpages, (at least unencrypted), and use mild encodings if they are unlucky enough to have their names on any of the domain registries. And, if you do send messages to mailing lists, or anywhere else, use throw-aways! Many of these lists keep archives of the messages, which are rich in email addresses for email harvesting bots!
I don't think RSS is the end-all to mailing lists, and especially don't see them as a key player in the fight against spam. But, they serve their purpose.
I've spent some time in Rwanda. EVERYONE has a cellphone, at least in the cities. MTN RwandaCell seems to be a very profitable business there. Normal phone service is there, but I've heard that you can wait a while to get connected. I've also heard that a "normal" phone line is cheaper. VOIP is illegal; it'd cut into Rwanda Telecom too deep. But, that attitude is changing, as even some of the government Ministries seem to be using it. Rwanda IT people are VERY chafed that some outsider owns the .rw domain and is charging them for its use! (Tuvala got $19 mil to GIVE UP its domain!)
You have a case in turning down the credit check.
1. It is NOT industry practice! If it were, you wouldn't have brought it up for discussion. You honestly did not expect this.
2. They didn't inform you before hiring you! Again, if they did, this would not have been such a shocker.
3. It's too late! They already told you, that you can have the job! If the IDIOTS were to wisen up, they would figure out that they should have had you sign, and have done the check, and have made their hiring decision based on the check, or the check is TOO LATE.
IMNASHO, if your employer were REALLY interested in this, they should have had you sign it BEFORE the hiring. Now, having accepted the position, requiring this check is tantamount to extortion. It'd be like Motorola waiting until AFTER you are hired to tell you about their drug check policy, and waiting till AFTER you are hired to pee in the collection jar. If I remember right, they tell you about this as you are interviewed, and you have to provide your specimen (and pass the lab test) before they'll hire you. If you have privacy qualms, that's the best time to step out of the situation. This is the way it was 10 years ago when I left Motorola, hopefully they have dropped the entire policy by now.
I'm one of the poor devils that got a job with Motorola before they instituted the drug policy. I don't/won't/never will do drugs, but when they instituted the policy, and presented all us employees with the ultimatum: be tested or get out, I started looking for a new job. My determination was, I've got a family to feed, so I'll provide the sample if requested, but I don't agree with the approach, and I was out of there in less than a year. My ultimate feedback of my opinion about their policy. A co-worker refused the test, on principle, and was immediately escorted out the building.
I guess those looking for a job had best ask what agreements they'll be expected to sign, if the employers aren't smart enough to tell people up front. Not informing is downright dishonest! It has the feel of "playing dirty tricks" on people. It's despicable because a job is no laughing matter to the guys getting hired.
One guy I worked with years ago specialized in microcoding floating point units. Originally he was an Ag major, aiming to be a dairyman. He took the cheese-tasting course, the butchering, etc, but almost a senior, a dairy owner came in and presented his financial picture. The margins were too low. He'd never be able to make such an operation work and pay off any loan to obtain it. He had to do something different. So he shopped around campus and voila-- EE looked good. A new career was born.