Last week one of my most popular videos detailing how I hacked Unifi accounts was ‘flagged’ as inappropriate in YouTube–apparently it was in violation of their community guidelines.

As such my video was made unavailable and essentially deleted from Youtube.

I was upset.

The email I received from YouTube, gave no indication as to what I did wrong, and even though it states that someone have viewed my video, the language used suggest this was just an automated message sent to my inbox. Nowhere does it suggest an actual human viewed my video and made a judgement, and even worse no justification was given for the removal of the video other than it was ‘flagged’.

Regarding your account: Keith Rozario

The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed by the YouTube Team against our Community Guidelines. Upon review, we have determined that the following video(s) contain content in violation of these guidelines, and have been disabled:

• "How I hacked 4 unifi accounts in 5 minutes" (http://youtu.be/MGWMFur2Pek)

Everyone hates spam. Misleading descriptions, tags, titles or thumbnails designed to increase views are not allowed. It's also not okay to post large amounts of untargeted, unwanted or repetitive content, including comments and private messages.

Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the permanent termination of your account.

For more information on YouTube's Community Guidelines and how they are enforced, please visit the help center.

Please note that deleting this video will not resolve the strike on your account. For more information about how to appeal a strike, please visit thispage in the help center.

Sincerely, 

The YouTube Team

Netflix is awesome. I watch it everyday, and while the selection is dated–it’s still pretty good.

If you needed proof for just how good it is–32% of all internet traffic in the US, belongs to Netflix. There’s two problems though. First, it isn’t free, and cost about Rm30 month. Not really and issue since Rm30 on Netflix gets you a lot more content than the RM100+ you spend on Astro.

The second problem is that it’s not available in Malaysia. So even if you were willing to pay the cash, you couldn’t get Netflix streamed to your home–until now that is. So here’s 3 ways to stream Netflix, BBC iPlayer and even DramaFever (for the k-drama fans out there) to your home in Malaysia.

The truth is we all have something to hide–secrets we wished the world would never know. A political stance we once had, a video of ourselves after too many drinks, or even just a sentence we once uttered at a party somewhere. If you think you’ve got nothing to hide–you should think harder.

So, when European Court of Justice recently ruled that Google had to comply with certain request from individuals to remove links to websites with their personal information–privacy advocates were delighted that we now had the ‘right to be forgotten’. Mario Gonzalez had requested Google to remove a link to a digitized article in La Vanguardia newspaper about an auction for his foreclosed home. Google refused, Mario sued, and the links were removed–only they weren’t.

"House of Cards is really big in India, I discovered," Spacey told reporters at the International Indian Film Academy Awards which took place in Tampa, Floria – the first time they’ve been held in America. "Except isn't it funny that Netflix doesn't exist there yet. Which means that you're stealing it.”

I’m gonna be honest here. Kevin Spacey is one of my all time favorite actors, from his brilliant work in Usual Suspects and American Beauty, to his legendary performance in the House of Cards series–this guy can do no wrong.

Let’s first take a step back, and understand how and Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Telekom Malaysia, Maxis or Digi operate.

Internet users in Malaysia were reporting issues trying to access a specific page on the BBC UK website that was a hilarious post making fun of our ‘beloved’ Prime Ministers Kangkung remarks. Apparently the issue became so bad, that users took to social media –only to find that they were not alone. In fact, so many Malaysians were complaining that they couldn’t access the post, that the official twitter handle of the BBC News tweeted to its followers asking them if they had issues.

Are you in #Malaysia? Can you access this BBC story about #kangkung? http://t.co/sDKN4fFWyV - let us know using #BBCtrending

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 16, 2014

However, there are a couple of things you need to know about internet censorship, and this debacle in particular.

Dear Tun,

First and foremost, let me start by telling you that I truly admire and respect your contribution to Malaysia. I remember shaking your hand when you attended my Convocation quite some many years ago. It was quite odd to see that while you were present, you didn’t give a speech, simply because you attended the function not as former Prime Minister of Malaysia, but rather as the spouse of the Chancellor–your wife Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah.

So  it saddens me deeply, that at another convocation–this time where you were giving a speech, you suggested that it is time to censor the internet to counter “distribution of pornography, questionable news and slanders”.

If I may be so bold Tun–censoring the internet is the single most destructive thing that can happen to modern day Malaysia, and something that must be opposed at every turn, even if it involves publicly correcting a senior leader such as yourself. As a citizen of Malaysia, I find it not just my right, but my duty to inform the Emperor when he has no clothes on.

I try to keep this blog focused on technology, but every once in a while the urge to veer off topic gets the better of me. The recent state of Malaysia has been one of paranoia and hyper-sensitivity. It seems that not a day goes by without a report of someone somewhere or ‘challenging’ the position of Islam, and that Muslims need to be united to stop this wave. Well if the solution was really Muslim unity, why doesn’t UMNO take it upon itself to dissolve and then the Muslims can be united behind PAS?

Here’s the deal…the internet is so big, that if you try hard enough, you’ll find something that offends you. Even if it is a 3 year-old video tucked away in some back alley of the internet, that shows a woman cleaning the feet of dogs.With a little elbow grease and some help from Google, you’ll have more than enough ‘offensive’ content to reveal day after day.

This recent spate of hyper-sensitivity I suspect will be used to justify some form of censorship of the internet, the government already has full control of both print and broadcast media, the only avenue it hasn’t fully controlled is online–and they’re just itching to start.

But even in the most hard-core censorship environments, things slip through. These are the false positives, and they exist everywhere from birth control pills to internet censorship. Imagine a much smaller internet of just 20 Billion pages, with 100 million ‘offending’ pages. If the government had a success rate of 99%, it’ll still wrongly block nearly 200 million websites. More importantly there would still be more than 1 million ‘offensive’ pages that would seap through the wall of censorship we construct. The futility of such an exercise should be apparent for anyone to see.

So futile in fact, that even in a fairy tale scenario of 99% accuracy would be no where near enough. If people had enough time to find a 3 year old video, they’d more than easily find those 1 million offensive web pages.

Quick, try this. Head over to your facebook page, and try to share a link from Mahathirs website, www.chedet.cc.

Can’t do it?

You most probably got a warning that looked something like this:

This has been going on for some time, but a couple of days ago, the Malaymail reported that not only is the website blocked, but articles pointing to Mahathirs ‘Chinese dilemma’  were also blocked. A note on Mahathirs Facebook page informed readers that:

[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 council member, said.

In an attempt to curb internet freedom in Malaysia, the government is beginning a series of concerted statements to signal that internet censorship in Malaysia is merely a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. Previously I’ve explored why internet censorship doesn’t alleviate or even mitigate the risk of communal violence, yet the government still presses on with trying to censor the internet, apparently jumping on the opportunity of Alvivi to make their case stronger.

So why is the government so enamoured by the thought of internet censorship, when clearly it doesn’t work?