Ever wonder how come the ads you see on Facebook or Malaysiakini reflect the searches you just recently made. Ever felt freaked out about it, there really is nothing to freak out about, unless of course you’re worried that a Multi-Billion dollar company may be keeping information about your searches and sharing them with ad sites that build profiles to uniquely identify you. Or that your personal search isn’t really private data, yet it can reveal very private details about yourself including your religious beliefs, sexual inclinations, medical conditions and even credit rating.

This is a blog about technology, but as of late it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus only on technology without looking into copyright, censorship and privacy. I can’t blog about technology while ignoring these aspects, anymore than financial analyst you look at Apple ignore the technology around their products.

So Maxis launched their new ebook portal aptly title www.ebuuk.com.my, far be it from me to point out that an ebook portal should at least have the word book spelled correctly (don’t you think so Maxis), also judging by the SSL certificate it appears wanted to go for a more generic myebooks.com.my domain name before switching to ebuuk.com.my.

I’m an avid reader and was excited when I heard the news, so I headed over to the Maxis ebuuk page, and noticed that it wasn’t up to my expectations. I was completely annoyed by the fact that in some cases the prices for ebooks via the ebuuk page was about twice the price of books you could download from Amazon. And the proof is below, it includes a book I’m about to purchase called The Progress Principle, retailing for USD9.99 on the Kindle for Amazon, while Maxis ebuuk retails it for Rm68.99. Now USD9.99 is about Rm30 or RM32, and Maxis is retailing it for about twice the price, that’s ridiculous. This is an ebook we’re talking about.

The Lowyat.net forum is abuzz with news and photos of a broken down Proton Preve. Not good news for a car Dr. Mahathir called the best proton ever. The rumour mill is abuzz with the reasons for the breakdown, but as of now it looks clear that the Proton in question didn't crash, but rather than some part 'lower arm assembly' gave way, or something like that.

*update: there’s been an announcement that the organizers are setting up a second show due to the huge demand. I’d recommend waiting for that before you start buying 2nd hand tickets.

Dissapointed you didn’t get your hands on Russell Peters tickets for the KL show?

Upset because you spent the whole night waiting for it, only to find out that the 7000+ tickets were sold almost instantly?

If you don’t know what RSS is, prepare to have your mind blown. If you’ve never used RSS, chances are you’re still bookmarking your favorite websites and blogs and visiting them on a regular basis painfully one at a time. RSS feeds allow you to magically consolidate all the content you read online, into one platform where you can get your daily dose of information all at one go.

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it was designed as a simple way for web authors to syndicate their content across the internet. Conversely (and more importantly), it also provides a way for web users to consolidate all their favorites blogs, searches and forum threads onto one single platform.

So what is it really? Well I’m not too sure of the technical specifications to be honest, but here’s how I think it operates.

This blog is about Technology, but in these past few years it’s become impossible to talk about technology without touching on the subjects of copyright and censorship. Very few people have a clear cut definition of what is acceptable copyright infringement and what isn’t. Not too long ago I wrote about how a wordpress theme designer was being sued because he created a facebook theme, did you also know that facebook has already trademarked the term ‘face’ and is looking to trademark ‘book’ as well. Most readers of this blog know where I stand on copyrights, patents and intellectual property, where I draw the line however is trademark violations. A trademark is part of a brand, and usually trademark violations are a clear-cut attempt to fraud consumers by passing off a product or service as something it’s not.

So what about business ideas and business models. Is it OK to make a clone of Facebook, and call it mukabuku– maybe. Is it OK to use the blue and white hues that we’ve come to associate only to Facebook– that’s a bit uncomfortable as you may be tricking users to sign up for mukabuku by misleading them into believing mukabuku is a Facebook product. Well how about if you deploying mukabuku to a country that doesn’t have Facebook?

So what about the Samwer brothers and their new online retail site Lazada, that was just launched in Malaysia? It’s got all the hall marks of Amazon, is that OK?

YTL Communications has been doing a pretty good job recently. The Star even went as far as claim that “YTL Comms to Break Even” until of course you read the article in which case it mentions that YTL require an additional 500,000 subscribers on top of it’s current 300,000 to achieve that.  However, it did offer a post-paid plan which was pretty decent, and who can forget the tie-up with Proton to offer a a 4G car. Why in the world would anyone buy a car because it has 4G, on the other hand why would anyone buy a Proton? (disclaimer: I still drive a 2004 Proton Waja which has served me well)

However, with Yes latest postpaid offerings I imagine it’s moving away from it’s niche position into more competitive environments, people may use Yes as a fallback, but post-paid is where the real money is and Yes is moving in. Yes Data plans come in various price points, from RM48 for 1.5GB up to RM168 for 10GB, the left-over credits don’t roll over to next month but there’s no extra charge for using over your quota just a speed throttle to 128kbps. (note to YES: 128Kbps is not broadband)

A couple of days back, I wrote about how copyright law was preventing a lot of us from listening the entire Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech because it was protected by copyright, and in order to listen to it you had to pay Martin Luther Kings family royalty. Today I did some searching on pinterest, and found some rather remarkable works of art around Martin Luther King that were pinned in pinterest, these works of art would not be possible if the family had further copyrighted other aspects of MLKs life, and with newer stricter copyright laws that could very well be the case.

Remember for a pinterest invite, just leave a comment on the post and I’ll send one to you as soon as I have the time. For now, enjoy!

From pinterest User Effeluna 

Now for an artist to copyright a song or a piece of work, for that artist to then legally make a living of is fine.

It’s not fine if you need to pay royalties to use Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream speech”, because his family own the copyright to a speech that is a part of US history. They later sold those rights to EMI, and now a recording company owns the rights to the speech that encapsulates the civil rights movement, and that same recording company is patrolling the online alleys to catch the copyright infringers.

Yesterday, I was over at a friends house fixing up a PC that was ridiculously infected with malware. The only complaint they had however was that they couldn’t access malaysiakini, a local news site that they subscribe too. True enough the page wasn’t loading completely, and it was frighteningly slow even when it did. Now, this sort of symptom usually doesn’t lead to much, maybe bad browser plugin or something like, but browsing from all 3 browsers on the machine (Chrome, Firefox and IE) yielded the same results.

So I decided to do what I always do and perform a Google search, and Google wasn’t loading…gasp!!

Then I thought, I’d try bing instead…and it wasn’t working either.

Finally I did a simple netstat -a on the command prompt and I was horrified.