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 (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...
[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...
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...
[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...
Initially I wrote about PRISM and how a lot of people felt it was a tool to intercept communication in flight to companies like Google and Facebook, however slightly more details have emerged to debunk that claim. However, it’s of paramount importance that we understand what people are saying. No one is denying that communications aren’t being intercepted on their way to Google...
As Edward Snowden begins to look for more ‘accommodating’ countries who wouldn’t mind playing host to a man that currently is more wanted than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Kardashian combined, more details slowly begin to emerge about PRISM, painting an ever clearer picture of the extent of the program both Stateside and abroad. Each individual piece of information...
This article is really more a continuation from yesterdays piece about how unfair the Fair usage policies in Malaysia are. In my view telcos complaining about 15% of customers using 70% of their traffic is just ludicrous behaviour–it’s the cost of doing business. This is akin to a restaurant owner offering a buffet and then complaining that 15% of his customers are fat men who eat the...
Every six months, the great people over at Sandvine release their Global Internet Phenomenon report, which seeks to make sense of global internet traffic across the different regions of the world, and every six months I learn a lot from just gleaning through it. For instance most of the traffic in the US continues to point to just one website–Netflix, which also explains the drop in...
I’ve almost been fascinated by the fact, that our money in the bank these days are secured not by steel doors or armed guards, but rather by cryptography and the encryption keys that enable them. To put it in the simplest form your money in the bank is protected by a number–that’s what an encryption key essentially is. A long binary number of 1’s and 0’s that...