Keith is an architect by day, blogger by night. He’s responsible for all the content on this blog, and irresponsible for everything else.

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The safest place for your money is under the mattress

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When I was in school, we joked about people who kept their money under the mattress, that somehow those who didn’t use banks were less intelligent than people who did.The general thinking was that smart people kept their money in the bank, where it was safe from theft, fire and flood, while still collecting interest. In the 80’s this was a compelling argument, when interest rates were...

Michael Hayden on interesting points

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Some interesting points: Non-nation state actors now pose a significant threat to nation states Historical threats usually associated with bad nation states, can now be executed by non nation-states Industrial Era, was about a consolidation of power, in the past only the Government could run something as complex as a phone network In a Post-Industrial Era, it’s about the decentralization or...

Anonymity and IP addresses

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This week, I’ll put the final touches on my move from Malaysia to Singapore. So, I felt it would a good idea to read through some Singaporean tech articles to see how tech events played out on the little red dot, and offer some unsolicited  and completely useless advice on them. It wasn’t easy shifting through a boat-load of gadget reviews masquerading as tech journalism (I guess some...

Random thoughts

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You’ve probably heard of the hackers who almost got away with $1 billion, only to be thwarted by a typo. (if it weren’t for those meddling keyboards!) What you probably didn’t hear was that they had already wired $100 million to themselves, are assumed to have pocketed anywhere from $21 million to $81 million in cold hard cash. Sure, Billions is more than millions, but one a...

2600 article

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*A republication of my article on 2600, a hacker magazine* Greetings from Malaysia. This is my first time writing to 2600, although I’ve been a kindle subscriber for more than 2 years now. For my first article, I hoped to write about a little hacking expedition I embarked on a couple of months back to help me improve my coding skills as well as help me learn more about local internet users...

Two years on, teaching coding in schools declared a success

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KLANG: Two years on, the the pilot initiative to teach coding and digital security as an SPM subject has been touted as a resounding success, and the government is mulling a move to make it compulsory by 2020. The announcement shocked parents, as out of 10,000 students who took part in the pilot program, only 10 had scored an A while the rest had failed with a grade of F. Education Minister...

More security theatre

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So now, only actual travellers will be allowed into airports, and everybody else from your mother to your 3rd aunty twice removed has to say their teary goodbye at home rather than at the Airport KFC. But why? So that terrorist will now have to buy a ticket in order to blow up the airport? I can picture out now, “Al-Qaeda attempt to bomb KLIA foiled due to lack of funds for ticket...

Just buy McDonalds

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If you haven’t listened to it already, here’s a fantastic cut-down (no bullshit) version of Jim Comey’s testimony to congress, on why he recommended Hillary Clinton not be prosecuted for hosting her own e-mail servers. For the uninitiated, while Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State, she hosted her own official e-mail servers, and the contention was whether she was right in...

Technology saves lives, but it isn’t perfect

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What do you do when the technology turns on you? Or when the feature that’s built to save you, is the one that might just kill you? There’s a stark similarity between the Takata airbag fiasco, that’s already taken 2 Malaysian lives, and the lady who died in self-driving Tesla. Both involve the auto-industry and both are technology related, but together they represent a much...

Show notes for today

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Your browser does not support native audio, but you can download this MP3 to listen on your device.   Some interesting links you might want to check out during my interview on BFM today, will tidy up this list later in the week. Office of Personnel Management Data Breach (Chinese hackers breaking into US Federal Employee Databases) China arrested the hackers responsible for OPM breach Turkey...