Malaysian Technology Issue from a Malaysian Tech Blog
There is no greater danger of tech illiteracy, than the way we treat hackers. A society that doesn’t understand technology will view those who can manipulate it as wizards and sorcerers. Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, and to most people that bar of being ‘sufficiently advanced’ isn’t set very high. The magic analogy is apt, even in...
In 2016, Chip and Pin will gradually be introduced in Malaysia, that means your Credit Cards now will prompt you for a PIN instead of signature during purchases. This will be a bit of a hassle, but it will be worth it, here’s what you need to know about it and credit card transactions in general. The 5 people you meet in card transaction First off, a short primer on credit card...
Not to beat a dead horse now, (you can read my previous articles here and here)but I’ll say it one last time, internet speeds aren’t exactly what we should be debating over these days. We should focus on internet penetration rates, and broadband penetration, and define these correctly. The MCMC defines broadband as anything over dial-up. Which is stupid, because a 128kbps ISDN would...
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...
Got Maxis Fiber to your home, but want to change your WiFi passwords, then here’s how you do it. First you need to logon to your router. You can do so by opening your Web-Browser and type (where you’d normally type google.com), or just click here. You should either see a picture like the above, then you’d need to enter the username and password, or if you haven’t setup a...
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...
The latest buzz in Malaysian cyberspace is the ‘threat’ from Anonymous Malaysia to launch ‘internet warfare’ on the Malaysian government, singling out our poor ol’ Prime Minister, demanding that he step down or face the consequences of Anonymous actions. The threat of internet warfare even came with a date, 29th to 30th August at 2.30pm, coinciding with Bersih 4.0...
Sarawakreport, a website covering sensitive political topics in Malaysia was blocked today by the countries most prominent ISP, Telekom Malaysia (TM). Internet users using TM’s Domain Name Server (DNS) reported that the website was inaccessible, and I’ve confirmed that is an intentional block by TM. Here’s a quick primer on DNS. The internet works on this marvelous set a rules...
There are two types of governments in the world, Those that build complex surveillance software to spy on their citizens, and those that buy them–and our government is more the buying type. Few nation-states have the budgets to build out complex surveillance software, but some are finding that ‘off the shelf’ software sold by dodgy companies are just as effective at a fraction...