CategoryMisc

Jais recently launched anew mobile app to allow the public to easily report any crimes that contravene syariah laws. Obviously there’s social and legal implications here, which I won’t go into, but we need to understand just how stupid this idea is. When you ask amateurs to give you security, what you eventually end up with is amateur security. It’s the reason why Maths...

Is it wise to use an online password manager? After all, putting your passwords on the cloud seems like a really dumb idea. But I use password manager because while storing stuff on the cloud may present risk, it’s far riskier and dumber to re-use passwords. Why you need a password manager? Despite the sexiness of zero-day exploits and hardcore state-sponsored hacking groups we see on the...

You’ve probably heard of the hackers who almost got away with $1 billion, only to be thwarted by a typo. (if it weren’t for those meddling keyboards!) What you probably didn’t hear was that they had already wired $100 million to themselves, are assumed to have pocketed anywhere from $21 million to $81 million in cold hard cash. Sure, Billions is more than millions, but one a...

*A republication of my article on 2600, a hacker magazine* Greetings from Malaysia. This is my first time writing to 2600, although I’ve been a kindle subscriber for more than 2 years now. For my first article, I hoped to write about a little hacking expedition I embarked on a couple of months back to help me improve my coding skills as well as help me learn more about local internet users...

If you haven’t listened to it already, here’s a fantastic cut-down (no bullshit) version of Jim Comey’s testimony to congress, on why he recommended Hillary Clinton not be prosecuted for hosting her own e-mail servers. For the uninitiated, while Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State, she hosted her own official e-mail servers, and the contention was whether she was right in...

The last time I took a public train in Malaysia was 10 years ago. That’s a long time to be spoilt by the luxury of having a car to drive around. So it was a pleasant surprise to see this viral story, about a man on a KTM kommuter train who saved a women from a group of youths who “misbehaved and demanded cash and their valuables”. But then I remembered that KTM had launched...

Two weeks ago, I took my first ever Uber ride, and here’s what I think is The Good, the bad and the ugly of Uber. The Good The app worked perfectly out of the box, it was intuitive, and the drivers that fetched me from (and to) the Toyota service center were courteous and friendly. What was even more shocking was the price–Uber is freaking cheap. Bukit Jalil to Bukit Bintang for RM20...

People think of the media as the powerful behemoth that’s capable of swaying public perception. On the contrary, I think public perception sways the media. Companies like Facebook, Google and even Amazon, have gone all-in on the confirmation bias, the idea that people like and prefer information that confirms their existing ideas and biases. No one likes being told their wrong about...

In the online world, surveillance and censorship are two sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other. When the government moots a ‘blogger registration’ act , we automatically infer it to be part of a wider censorship initiative, an attempt to control the narrative by subtlety telling bloggers “we know who you are, so watch what you say”. We...

Every now an again, I brush off the dust from an old laptop I have in the corner, and boot-up a couple of forgotten python scripts. One of those scripts would scrap the DOE Malaysia website for API readings in Malaysia, unfortunately, those damn fools at the DOE now only publish 7-day data, and completely wipe off anything older–for some unknown reason. I even contacted my...