Just a collection of stuff (mostly from my old blog)
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I just finished Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, the definitive book on crowdsourcing, and although it was written nearly 4 years ago, I was really bowled over by key insights throughout the book. Crowdsourcing is more than just the design work or iStockphoto, there’s also an offshoot into the world of Crowd-predicting. Utilizing the wisdom of the crowds to predict anything from sports results...
I used to be a strong believer of organics, until I saw the prices of organic foods at my local Jusco. Needless to say, I stopped believing in organics pretty quickly. Of course, I understand the premise, which is that organic food is 100% natural, without added chemicals or fertilizers, no herbicides or pesticides leaving your food 100% wholesome. There is strong justification for this, although...
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...
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...
Back in 2007, I had a new year resolution to run 5km in 25 minutes, or more specifically to get my body in good enough shape to run 5km in 25 minutes. That was my aim, it was partly driven by some research I read that it’s better to have just 1 resolution and making that resolution specific rather than generic. So rather than, ‘I’ll exercise’, I needed a goal or a target...