There is several issues that are a hidrance for the economic development of Mexico, but one of the few that worries me the most are the monopolies.We have public and private monopolies, but we have monopolies in basically all our industries (telecommunications with telmex, oil with pemex, banks with banamex and bancomer, media with Televisa and TV Azteca). We all know the damage monopolies do, but there are some effects even more sutile. I found a story on slashdot about a new vector of attack called drive-by pharming. It basically configuring your router to change the IP address associated with a DNS name, you can read the detail in the article (btw I am quite sure I received that email). The first time this attack has been found on the wild was in Mexico. That doesn't surprise me the least; the big problem is that Telmex (and prodigy which is their ISP) being a monopoly have basically create a humongous homogeneous network of misconfigured routers. I am also guessing that the bank that is attacked is Banamex, which is another big monopoly.  

I have a love-hate relationship with Telmex. They are a monopoly which I hate, and their services is expensive. But their service  have some redeeming qualities: they give you a real ip adress, they don't filter the content, and they don't block any port; at least they didn't. That have recently changed when they decided to outgoing calls to port 25 just after christmas. They decided to do that because they had been transform in one of the biggest spamming source in the world (to reactive your port 25 access click on this link). I think they decided to do this silently so that only people who are technically saavy would discovered it. However, it did took me a couple of hours figuring why I couldn't send emails and finding the link to correct the issue. Anyway, after this was done, my college which prides itself  of their technology decided that the best thing to do to overcome this issue is giving everyone the link to open their port 25. They should have opened a new port, which is the standard way most smtp servers are working right now instead of giving you the pliers to break your own lock.