According to a report from Channel News Asia, a total of nearly 200 DBS and POSB customers in Singapore have been hit by unauthorized withdrawals averaging S$1000 each. The withdrawals were done in Malaysia “while the ATM cards were with them safely in Singapore”. Which begs the question what does ‘safely in Singapore’ mean?

Channel News Asia goes on to report that withdrawals were made in Kuala Lumpur (not neighboring Johor Bahru) and done approximately the same time as ‘valid’ withdrawals. ZDNet has reported DBS is working together with its IT vendor, NCR to understand the issue and investigate further. It’s also suspended all suspected cards and are contacting customers to give them what it says would be a full refund. NCR also happen to make almost 90% of all ATMs in Malaysia, and according to Yahoo! news, this was “a security breach to its anti-skimming devices installed on ATM machines”, so I’m just wondering why this wasn’t done to Malaysian accounts of local banks? 

There’s been a recent surge of Anti-SOPA and Anti-PIPA sentiment over in the Unites States, Wikipedia blacked out it’s entire webpage and Google, Twitter and Facebook all joined in the fray. I’ve even received multiple emails from the Mozilla foundation on how to combat SOPA and recent a congratulatory cum Thank you note from Mozilla for joining the fight. Make no mistake, SOPA isn’t dead, it’s just been shelved for the time being, get ready people round2 starts soon.

In Malaysia though there has been little reporting on the issue, while some local blogs did mention SOPA, and a few newspapers briefly covered it, not much has been discussed on either of the laws. It’s typical of the Malaysian media to report less on matters that actually matter, and more on frivolous material like this article from the New Straits Times that read “Unity is Priceless: PM”. Really? Cause the rest of us thought Unity was worth around about Rm2.75 . I mean apart from pointing out the obvious, the article has absolutely no content, apart from the big picture with the “We Love the PM” nonsense.

That being said, there were a few articles on SOPA and PIPA, however those articles for censored to a certain degree, and here’s how.

Trey Ratcliff is a professional photographer who photographs ooze with talent, he also blogs at stuckincustoms.com. It’s an amazing blog, but what’s even more amazing is that Trey chooses to release his works of art under the creative commons non-commercial license, which has it’s restrictions but allows free usage of the photos as long as its used for non-commercial purposes. Now that’s like a programmer offering free programs, or a writer offering free-content. It’s not unheard off, but it’s rare. However, in todays economy more and more professionals are taking this step towards similar licensing of their works.

Treys photos aren’t customized for a specific purpose, he post them on his blog and if you like them you can use them. It’s not customized in the sense that he didn’t take the photograph of you or for you. Similarly a lot of programmers are offering free programs they wrote as a challenge or a dare and shared not just the program, but the source code that any other programmer can build further upon. They didn’t build it for a specific purpose, just something general that they thought would be best shared rather than sold. So in that sense, Trey can use photos of a holiday or a scenery and offer that for free.

I mention Trey not because I love his work (although it IS amazing), and not because Trey is a top level photographer that he shares his work online. I mention Trey because he has synthesized in short post on Google+ what he thinks of Online Piracy, and it really has struck a chord with people, especially since Trey is on a different end of the piracy war and he’s saying that pirates aren’t bad people. WHAT?

In what I hope is my last post about this ridiculous bill, I hope to ask and answer an important question I’m surprised no one has asked yet…

Why do we need such a bill?

Now I understand that we’d always need to raise standards, and provide assurances, but in the greater scheme of things is it really that necessary to do it now, or can we expend our energies and effort elsewhere for the IT community to get the value from our actions. This should be at the core of the discussions, this is the WHY of the bill, if I don’t believe in the WHY of the bill, then there’s no need talk about the who, what,where and how.

If the objective of the bill isn’t agreed upon, then it doesn’t matter how we achieve the objective. I feel a lot of IT professionals have bypassed this and zoomed down immediately to the details, pointing out flaws in the bill and a lack of clarity and specifics, however I’m not even sold at the high level of the bill let alone the specifics, and I struggle to understand why the bill is around in the first place, let alone how it will achieve it’s WHY.

So there’s a lot being said about the new Computing professional bill, even on this blog. For now though, if you’re really interested in finding out about the legal implications of the law, check out this amazing article here from the Bar Council Website written by ‘The Awesome’ LoyarBurok. Or if you’re in the mood for some petition, try signing this petition here, they’re aiming for 2000 signatures, so far they’re about half way through.

You might also want to digest a point by Tony Pua (opposition MP from PJ Utara):

Some laws you have to fight wars to keep….others you have to fight wars to be repealed. This is one of those laws you have to fight to prevent from ever being made a law…

On April 12th , 1861 Confederate forces attacked Union Military installation named Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The attacked marked the beginning of the American Civil War, and the United States of America would never be the same. The war was about more than just a secession from a Union, it was about preserving the right that every man was created equal and that no man or woman would ever be ‘owned’ again. In just over 140 years later, the United States of America elected their first Black president.If ever there was a war worth fighting for, it was the American Civil War. The Abolition of slavery was a law worth fighting for, it was worth preserving, even till death.

The Malaysian government is a crazy bunch, just today I saw two bits of news that left me squirming with disgust. First a short piece on Christmas Carollers requiring Police Permits to go Carolling (not just permits but full details of every activitiy) and then later today there is a new Computing Professionals Bill 2011.

Why would a government want to regulate the computing Industry? It’s not like we’re bankers or something? Why is there a need to regulate an industry that first off is too broad to define under an umbrella called computing, and secondly isn’t exactly a threat to national security.

Lowyat has done a great deal to summarize the bill and post it up for reading here..

But where we should be really intrigued is a part of the bill (according to Lowyat) that says:

A couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a website by mozilla claiming “The internet we know and love is at risk”. Now I’m not one to panic but this was some serious stuff here, Mozilla is a company I admire and respect, so if it tells me something serious is going down, I stand up and pay attention.

Further reading brought on a couple of key points, namely that Mozilla was talking about the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was designed to stop online piracy, but what it would effectively do was make give copyright holders essentially too much control over their copyrighted material. Now copyright holders undoubtedly have legal rights to their work, but giving them the right to shut down YouTube because someone sang their song and posted a video takes that a bit too far.

Mozilla also claim:

The fact is that this legislation as written won't stop piracy. But it would pose a serious threat to social media and user generated content sites (like YouTube) across the internet. It could also undermine some of the core technical systems underlying the internet, creating new cybersecurity risks.

As a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not jeopardize the foundational structure of the Internet.