A collection of post I’ve written about intellectual property and censorship
Why shouldn’t Malaysia censor the internet? Of late, the recent cases involving a certain pair of ‘sex’ bloggers and their ilk have prompted certain parties to call for more stringent regulations of the internet, but I for one think that we need to ensure that the internet remain free and un-censored–now more than ever. So why shouldn’t we censor the internet...
Last week I wrote about the ‘rigged’ EDGE poll, that the EDGE had to eventually take down because they suspected someone was trying to bias the results. It was later revealed that a handful of IP addresses were responsible fro the bulk of the votes–presumably the fake ones. An IP address defines a unique internet connection, but not necessarily a unique device. You can try this...
Every six months, the great people over at Sandvine release their Global Internet Phenomenon report, which seeks to make sense of global internet traffic across the different regions of the world, and every six months I learn a lot from just gleaning through it. For instance most of the traffic in the US continues to point to just one website–Netflix, which also explains the drop in...
There’s a controversy brewing in the land of the free, one that will have implications for Americans, but also Malaysians and nearly every citizen of the world. We may look back at the moment Mr. Snowden leaked controversial (and ugly) slides about a program called ‘PRISM’ as the start of a pivotal moment in internet history, a moment where we either begun a massive campaign to...
Great animation from the EFF on the draconian nature of the Transpacific Partnership Agreement with respect to Copyright laws:
For more info on the TPP and why we focus primarily on the copyright sections, check out this summary from tppinfo.com
Over the past years we’ve seen a recurrent theme where Government agencies were attempting to curtail internet freedom in the name of ‘keeping the peace’. From Saudi telcos threatening security experts to help them hijack tweets to governments procuring tools like Finspy to spy on their citizens–usually without any warrant or legal oversight. We’ve seen US federal...
I’m truly anxious at the recent rhetoric about ‘regulating’ of the internet, and fear the worst. I grew up with the internet and like to think we made a journey together, from my high school days where dial-up internet was the norm, to the blazing fast broadband I have now–things have change a lot for the both of us. I am a digital native, I know no other land other than a...
There’s a really cool tool called glasnost, that can easily detect if your ISP is throttling certain traffic through its servers. It works amazingly well at detecting if your ISP is blocking that most sacred of all internet traffic–BitTorrent. So running two test, one over my Unifi connection, and one more tethered over my Galaxy S3 on Maxis, and came to the conclusion that Maxis does...
The Edge recently held a political poll on whether Anwar Ibrahim should quit as the Opposition leader–But when the editor begun to see that the one-week survey attracted 12,736 responses and the responses were overwhelmingly one-sided, she smelt something fishy. Upon further checking with the IT team, they found that 6,354 of the responses came from one IP address, and about 1,700 came from...
Two days ago, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) lodge a report to the MCMC on an ‘internet blockade’ targeting DAP related political websites that was allegedly being carried out by Telekom Malaysia (TM). As you may know TM is the largest ISP in Malaysia, and if TM suddenly blocks a website–a large chunk of the Malaysian public are automatically denied access to it. The DAP IT...