Internet in Israel sucks. The hotel I am in charges $20 for a day (!) AND they block Skype, SIP and other internet telephony applications, they prevent TLS from being used when send e-mail via SMTP and the systems nag-page (that doesn’t really show up on my Safari because it was „designed for Internet Explorer“) pops in every ten clicks permanently redirecting my HTTP request and potentially endangering my RSS infrastructure. The only place that came close to such kind of service was Dubai but I think it is even worse here.
Main problem in Israel seems to be that Microsoft doesn’t care about localizing Microsoft Office in Hebrew on the Mac taking away incentive for people to buy Macs. Macs are really rare round here and those who chose that platform anyway have a hard time. Even worse, I haven’t seen a single Linux system running on any computer where I have been.
they prevent TLS from being used when send e-mail via SMTP Most likely, they just hijack tcp/25 completely, be careful when using authenticated smtp then, possibly even with plaintext passwords.
The only thing to make such a connection useable is probably to tunnel everything to a sane network.