Imagine a small village of a 100 people. One day, a sorcerer shows up, and grants all the villagers magical 1000-sided dice, which are purely random and can only be thrown at a fixed rate of 1 throw per second (no faster & no slower). Over the next year, at noon of every day, the sorcerer will announce a random number between 1 and 1000, and the first villager to throw that number on their...
A judge in the US has ordered Apple to provide ‘technical assistance’ to FBI, in creating what some (but not all) cybersecurity experts call a backdoor. In the few years I’ve written about these issues, I’ve never seen anything as hotly debated as this one, across the folks from digital security to foreign policy all coming down on both sides of the debate. On one hand it...
Under the current hype of the FBI ordering Apple to ‘install backdoors’ on their iPhones, a bit of interesting news seems to have slid under the radar. A court in Singapore ruled that e-mails from the Hacking Team breach, published by the hacker Phineas Fisher via a torrent download, and available freely on Wikileaks–were still confidential in nature. The news hits close to...
Today, I was on BFM talking about Hacking Team, the audio for which is below, and more comments and thoughts below that. Your browser does not support native audio, but you can download this MP3 to listen on your device. This is my last ditch attempt to get a conversation started about the use of surveillance software by the Government—and these conversations should take place...
Our spanking new, hand-picked Attorney-General is proposing life imprisonment for journalist who refuse to reveal their sources. And surprisingly, my favorite Member of Parliament,Dato Azalina Othman, has supported the move, saying it was ‘high-time’ Malaysian did something. Fortunately, some calmer more rationale heads, like Dato Paul Low have criticized the A-G for his short-sighted...
Next week, I’ll be on BFM for an interview about spyware, which will be my last Hail Mary play to get a conversation started about the use of surveillance software by the Government. If a radio interview on a popular station won’t do it, nothing on my blog will possibly be able to anyway 🙂 In any case, this post is a pre-emptive response to a slightly controversial idea that I cover...