Two weeks ago, Lowyat.net published a ‘challenge’ to their readers, one that would supposedly pay a cool RM100,000 to the winner.All you had to do was decrypt an AES-256 encoded blob of code (more accurately referred to as ciphertext). As expected, no one won. Because breaking that ‘military-grade’ encryption is beyond the capability of most normal human beings, and...
Are you afraid of Hackers? Do you lie restless at night thinking of what might happen if they got into your bank account, facebook profile, or e-mail. Perhaps you’re also worried about that they might hack into a forum you visit, or that they might get into your personal messages on whatsapp. It’s true that hackers are able to do all of these things, but the public perception of...
Our newly appointed Communication Minister has come out all guns blazing in directing the The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to ask social media giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter soon to block “false information and rumours” on their platforms. That in itself is quite frustrating, but what really got me scratching my head was his claim that “that social...
Recently a court in Malaysia ruled that the newly amended evidence act could presume an IP address would uniquely identify a user of a network, and in the case of an Internet IP address, enough to tie an IP to the individual subscriber. In other words if the authorities ever found out that ‘your’ IP address was behind a post, then you’d have to prove it wasn’t you rather...
As the 1MDB fiasco begins to simmer over the political stove, I wanted to inject some technical information into this discussion, specifically around emails and how they’re almost useless pieces of evidence. Just to make sure everyone’s on the same page, here’s some context. In early March 2015, sarawakreport.org, a website run by investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle-Brown...
I’ve updated this post on 31-Mar-2015, to incorporate the latest changes, and to provide more up to data info on the procurement database. Left everything else in tact. Happy birthday Malaysia!! Just how awesome is our country, that we celebrate an Independence Day AND a Malaysia Day, not to mention 2 New years day, (or 3 if you count Awal Muharram). So on that note, I decided to use my IT...
Recently KiniBiz did a piece on Malaysian broadband speeds, and once again the hoopla about how Malaysian broadband speeds are slow arose. Kinibiz quoted an article from Asean DNA which stated that the average broadband speed in Malaysia was just 5.5 Mbps, while Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore had speeds that were double that (or more!) The report however was inaccurate, and I think there’s...
Are some laws worth following–in other words, are some Laws so idiotic that they should be ignored completely? That sounds anathema, because we have a romanticized definition of the law, we define the Law as a broad general agreement a society undertakes, and the law keeps society from tearing itself apart. In other words, the law is so sacred because without it–we descend into...
Tun Dr. Mahathir now says he’s change his mind about internet censorship. To quote him “Not knowing the power of the Internet, I promised that we (speaking as the Prime Minister of Malaysia) would not censor it. But today I have changed my mind.” Of course, everyone has a right to change their mind–but in this case Tun went from being absolutely spot-on (the internet...
With the on-going debacle about the Kangkung saga dying down, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write specifically about internet censorship and its implications to ordinary Malaysian citizens. As you may well know, many Malaysia Netizens reported of difficulty accessing one particular post of the BBC website that dealt with the Kangkung issues, causing many to cite that Telekom...