ArchiveJuly 2013

Why Dato’ Sri Shabery Really wants to censor the internet

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[box icont=”chat’]The social media in Malaysia is being monitored and existing laws are sufficient to weed out troublemakers trying to test the limits of free speech, Communications and Multimedia Minister Ahmad Shabery Cheek said today… “The laws that we make are not to defend the party alone – that’s wrong,” Ahmad Shabery, who is also an Umno supreme...

Guest Post: Keyboards on Smartphones and the Future of Buttons

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When a new phone hits the market, we tend to get terribly excited about its new features. And rightly so: what are boundaries for, if not to push frantically? But with the release of the latest BlackBerry 10 handsets, perhaps the most important contribution to the future of the smartphone might come in the form of the continuing inclusion of an actual QWERTY keyboard. While the iPhone has been...

Internet Censorship won’t work in Malaysia

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Why shouldn’t Malaysia censor the internet? Of late, the recent cases involving a certain pair of ‘sex’ bloggers and their ilk have prompted certain parties to call for more stringent regulations of the internet, but I for one think that we need to ensure that the internet remain free and un-censored–now more than ever. So why shouldn’t we censor the internet...

Using Captchas on cybertroopers and botnets

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Last week I wrote about the ‘rigged’ EDGE poll, that the EDGE had to eventually take down because they suspected someone was trying to bias the results. It was later revealed that a handful of IP addresses were responsible fro the bulk of the votes–presumably the fake ones. An IP address defines a unique internet connection, but not necessarily a unique device. You can try this...

The root cause of crime

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Crime has become a hot-button topic these days, and while a lot of fingerpointing and blame-shifting has been going on in political circles, I think it’s wise we took a step back and try to address the root problem rather than its symptoms. A brilliant piece by Evgeny Morozov from the Slate, points out the following: [box icon=”chat”] Forget terrorism for a moment. Take more...

The Security Offences Bill 2012 -Technology Perspective

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The Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 and it’s new amendment. that wonderful piece of legislation meant to repeal the archaic and ‘draconian’ ISA may turn out to be even more archaic and draconian than the ISA it was meant to replace. While much of the legal fanfare has been focusing on the detention without trial sections of the bill, as a tech blogger, I wanted to...

How Computer Security Research works: Facebook 20,000 prize

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[box icon=”chat”]In the early days of public computing, researchers who discovered vulnerabilities would quietly tell the product vendors so as to not also alert hackers. But all too often, the vendors would ignore the researchers. Because the vulnerability was not public, there was no urgency to fix it. Fixes might go into the next product release. Researchers, tired of this, started...

.my domains hacked: Why SSL is more important than ever

MyNic is the organization responsible for managing the .my Top Level Domain, which means every website address that ends with a .my is under their administration. These centralized control centers act as giant targets for hackers, but for the most part, they’re protected better than Fort Knox–or they should be. Yesterday, a hacker going by the name Tiger-M@te successfully manage to...

Should the government use Microsoft products?

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[box icon=”chat”] I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them. -Richard Matthew Stallman founder of Free Software Foundation (Techbytes...