Keith is an architect by day, blogger by night. He’s responsible for all the content on this blog, and irresponsible for everything else.
What happens when a government agency tasked with providing cybersecurity “guidance” and “expertise” gives you advice like “avoid uploading pictures of yourself to avoid the threat of black magic”? And then goes into damage-control claiming that it “was just a casual remark and did not represent the federal agency’s official position on the matter”, only to...
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...
A public service announcement from our good friends at the FBI, warns that motor vehicles are increasingly vulnerable to remote exploits, which in the wake of the bad-ass research from Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller shouldn’t be shocking. What struck me, is that the security advice the FBI is offering drivers was identical to the advice cybersecurity experts have been giving to–well...
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...
The Apple vs. FBI story has evolved so much in the past weeks, I thought I needed to write a separate post just on the updates. Admittedly, the story is far more complex and nuanced that I initially presumed, and everyone wants to be part of the conversation. On one side, we have the silicon valley tech geeks, who seem to be unanimously in the corner of Tim Cook and Apple, while on the other we...
Imagine a small village of a 100 people. One day, a sorcerer shows up, and grants all the villagers magical 1000-sided dice, which are purely random and can only be thrown at a fixed rate of 1 throw per second (no faster & no slower). Over the next year, at noon of every day, the sorcerer will announce a random number between 1 and 1000, and the first villager to throw that number on their...
A judge in the US has ordered Apple to provide ‘technical assistance’ to FBI, in creating what some (but not all) cybersecurity experts call a backdoor. In the few years I’ve written about these issues, I’ve never seen anything as hotly debated as this one, across the folks from digital security to foreign policy all coming down on both sides of the debate. On one hand it...
Under the current hype of the FBI ordering Apple to ‘install backdoors’ on their iPhones, a bit of interesting news seems to have slid under the radar. A court in Singapore ruled that e-mails from the Hacking Team breach, published by the hacker Phineas Fisher via a torrent download, and available freely on Wikileaks–were still confidential in nature. The news hits close to...
Today, I was on BFM talking about Hacking Team, the audio for which is below, and more comments and thoughts below that. Your browser does not support native audio, but you can download this MP3 to listen on your device. This is my last ditch attempt to get a conversation started about the use of surveillance software by the Government—and these conversations should take place...