The New York Times reported this week that Facebook has ‘quitely developed’ a censorship tool, specifically for the Chinese government to suppress content on their platform. The piece writes: “the social network quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook...
You don’t have a right to freedom of speech. Obviously true if you’re Malaysian, but even Americans only enjoy a liberty in freedom of speech and not an absolute right. The difference is clear, liberties are protections you have from the government, while rights are something you have from everyone. So if someone threatened your right to live, the government is obligated to intervene...
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...
In case you’ve missed it. The official twitter handle of the ETP, @etp_roadmap, recently made a serious blunder. In a tweet sent out at 1.00pm on the 6th of January, they tweeted “Former Prime Minister Najib Razak: Energy and Food Subsidies are no longer sustainable”. Now the blunder of course was the word ‘Former’ and it was only a full one hour later (or an...
“There are many ways to reach out to the public, both political parties have a lot of space in Malaysia… It is unlikely we will have a debate, we need to engage with the people, the opposition will engage with people,” – Caretaker Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Razak Caretake Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Razak told Veronica Pedrosa that he was unlikely to...
If Pakatan win the next election, I would recommend that they award the title of Tan Sri or at least Dato’ to the following: Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Co-founders of Google, who own both the video sharing site Youtube, and the blogging service Blogger.com. Without these two free services the message from the opposition would not have reached so many Malaysians, so effectively in such a...
A Social Media Analytics firm recently reported that nearly 50% of Justin Bieber followers on Twitter–were fake. This meant that nearly 18 million followers on Justins twitter account either belonged to no ‘real’ person or belonged to a spam account–and that dear readers is a lot of spam! That’s like a newspaper saying its circulation was 100,000 a day, but it was...
For the past week or so, Malaysians have been completely engrossed by the “Listen Listen Listen” video, and barely a day went by without me hearing some lame joke about listening, speaking…and even sharks. Over the weekend however, I had some time to contemplate through the craziness and realize that underneath this viral video that took Malaysia by storm had some rather...
According to last weeks Star, MACC deputy chief commissioner Datuk Sutinah Sutan was reported to have said that Civil servants and staff of government-linked companies (GLCs) surfing social media or engaging in personal matters during working hours may be categorized as having committed corruption!! The underlying logic to the argument seems plausible enough, Datuk Sutinah goes on to elaborate...
A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a cool card game based on Computer processes, in hindsight the only thing that post proved was that I’m a geek. The card game was funded through a crowdfunded initiative, and that was really what made it cool. The instagram camera is cool on its own, and the fact that it’s currently being crowdsourced through Indiegogo (a website similar to...