Today I attended an Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS) event about the TPP. Among the panel members, included Michael Froman, the US trade representative and chief advisor to President Obama on issues of International Trade and Investment. (big shot!!) For those you don’t know, the Trans-Pacific Partnership(TPP) agreement is a trade deal between 12 countries including...
Why you have to pay GST on your Prepaid Top-Ups
I strongly believe the Goods and Service Tax is a good idea. Yes, it will impact the poor more than the rich. Yes, it will cause the cost of living to increase at a time when most Malaysians are struggling to pay the bills. But the people who will suffer the most aren’t the poor, it’s the tax-evaders. Tax evasion and illicit flows are a big problem for Malaysia, and the Goods and...
Should an IP address be used to Identify someone?
Recently a court in Malaysia ruled that the newly amended evidence act could presume an IP address would uniquely identify a user of a network, and in the case of an Internet IP address, enough to tie an IP to the individual subscriber. In other words if the authorities ever found out that ‘your’ IP address was behind a post, then you’d have to prove it wasn’t you rather...
Tech Journalism in Malaysia is disappointing
Last week visitors browsing to Google’s Malaysia website were greeted with a big bold image stating the website was hacked. The media had a field day proudly proclaiming that Google’s website was hacked, because that was exactly what the page they visited said….Google Hacked!! Only, Google wasn’t hacked. MyNic was hacked. They’re the agency in charge of managing all...
Keith’s PGP Key
In case anyone needs my PGP key to send me encrypted e-mails. Here it is.
e-mails should be sent to keith@keithrozario.com, which is hosted on Gmail, if you’re uncomfortable with that, drop me an encrypted e-mail there, and I’ll respond with a privately hosted e-mail you can connect with me on.
Regards,
Keith
FireEye: Group spied on Malaysia for 10 years
The team over at the FireEye threat intelligence published a special report(pdf) detailing an long running (and still on-going) cyber-espionage operation that has targeted multiple entities in ASEAN countries, including Malaysia. The program was reported to be running for more than a decade, and the sustained period coupled with the list of targets the program had, led FireEye to believe it to be...
Worked Example: iPhone PIN Hack
Last month, a company called MDSec released a video detailing how they manage to brute force hack an iPhone PIN lock. Pretty sweet piece of work, but I thought this would be a good example to understand how hacks work, and how hackers think. What is a hacker First off, we need to define what a hacker is, it’s a convulated term, but my favorite definition is : A hacker is someone who makes...
MDeC Private Meeting with ODI
Earlier this week I attended a MDeC organized private meeting with Richard Stirling from the Open Data Institute (ODI).The ODI is an institution that hopes to promote the ‘open data’ culture, and founded by a giant of the Tech world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which you might remember for inventing a small little thing we call the world wide web. The meeting was attended by just a handful...
The Snowden Revelations
It’s now almost two years on, since that fateful day at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong when Edward Snowden divulged secret NSA documents detailing unlawful and on-going spying programs carried out in the name of security. Sure we knew the government had ‘a’ spying program, and we’ve all seen Hollywood movies with fictional technology that allowed governments to carry out un...
Secure Apache configuration for WordPress & SSL
Recently I moved the hosting for keithRozario.com from a regular hosted platform called WPWebhost to my own Virtual machine on digitalOcean. The results have been great, but the migration process was a bit tedious and took some effort. I thought I’d share my Apache configurations, so that if you’re thinking of hosting your own WordPress site on an SSL server, you’ll at least...