If you’re on Unifi you might have noticed that some sites are blocked and it’s due to government directives to block these sites.  Now that goes against what the Government of Malaysia promised it’s stakeholders during the advent of the MsC, in which it promised to not censor the internet. If you remember, somewhere in August 2008, the government issued a similar directive to censor Malaysia Today.

So what's a average user to do to bypass these internet blocks. The blocks themselves are issued by the government and issued to all ISPs, fortunately there are a couple of ways to bypass these internet blocks which amount to censorship, and it depends on what kind of mechanism your ISP uses to block it. I'm all for a free internet and here are some ways you can bypass those blocks.

Did you know Malaysia has a Multimedia and Communication Commission that oversees the quality of service for telecommunications companies including the broadband services they provide. I also understand that they are the enforcers of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, with a determination on the mandatory standards for the Quality of Service (Broadband Access Service) .

In not so many words, there are actually laws in place to ensure that your broadband provider meets a minimum standard in terms of uptime and service availability.

However, after reading the a short snippet of the Act from the SKMM website here, I was surprised to find that while it did have a specific outline for the quality of service, it did not have an outline for the penalty imposed if the quality of service was not met.

A recent article from the Star noted that Malaysia was about to sign a new Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that would make subject local copyright laws to those imposed by the US. Now according to the article from the star the purpose of us looking into a stricter Intellectual property law was to “encourage investments, innovation, research and development”. That is a false premise.

The laws by themselves are useless if enforcement isn’t there, and if you can’t even enforce the current IP law, then why bother changing the laws if there is no plan to up the enforcement? Also this premise that we will encourage research and development with a strict law is both flawed and without basis. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that innovation thrives when Intellectual property is strictly enforced, in fact innovation is effectively crippled when you’re afraid that anything you produce might infringe on someone else’s copyright. It would lead to a point where corporations would spend more checking on copyright infringement then they would actually innovating and producing.

Alright, so my Unifi is back up and running, apparently it was an area wide network issue that caused half my town to experience a Unifi Blackout, I have thus named this debacle, the Great CNY blackout of 2012. I was left 9 days without an internet connection and was forced to reload my Yes Broadband package to go online.

Anyway, with a little credit left on my Yes broadband account, I decided to test out the speeds of Yes against my Unifi connection and see who comes up tops.

Some disclaimers before I continue, I ran this test on a Saturday morning where web-traffic shouldn’t be too high in Malaysia, and I subscribe to the 5Mbps Unifi Package and a standard Yes pre-paid package. I also decided to run 4 test per ISP, and then compare the results. First I tested against 2 local servers (Singapore considered local here), and then 1 test each to the US and Europe. I used speedtest.net and while the results will probably be inconclusive, it’s a good benchmark to use in case you’re wondering whose faster.

[blackbirdpie url=“https://twitter.com/#!/keithrozario/status/167140677531074560”]

I posted the tweet above about 40 minutes ago, complaining about my omni-present (or omni-absent) Unifi connection issues about an hour ago.

Barely 30 minutes later, a friend of mine retweeted it and cc’ed a TM twitter account @TMConnects

Just this morning I wrote about how my Unifi services went down and how I wrote a letter to what ‘appears’ to be Telekom Malaysias CEO email address.

A lot of Malaysians are skeptical that CEOs would actually respond to emails. Steve Jobs has responded to many emails personally and so has his successor Tim Cook. There have even been reports of Palm's CEO responding to customer query and even non-tech companies like home depot doing the same.

These however are American companies, not Malaysian, would a Malaysian CEO actually respond to an email from a small-time RM150/month customer like myself? I figured why not give it a try, I was already internet-less -- what more is there left to lose?

Last year I moved into my new place, and had to apply for Yes! broadband because my place wasn’t Unifi ready yet. I blogged about how much I enjoyed the Yes! experience and even recommended it to most friends and family. That little love affair however took a turn for the worst when I discovered Yes! would experience a service interruption nearly once a month and the overall design of the Yes! service was lacking. So in the end I parted ways with Yes! and subscribed to Unifi instead.

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.

I basically live on Google servers, the first sites I visit when I wake up are Google Mail and Google Reader, without these two sites I’m basically lost. I seldom log on to facebook anymore and twitter may keep me occupied for about an hour, but after that I need my fix of Google. Google is such an integral part of our lives, in fact since 70% of my readers come here via a Google search, chances are you wouldn’t be here reading this very post right now–without Google.

The question then becomes how much do we trust Google? Have we really thought about trusting Google given how much we rely on it. Think about it if Google were to go down, where would you go for more information. Chances are you’d head on over to bing, take bing away and you start having problems.

How do you search for search engines, when you don’t know any??