Keith is an architect by day, blogger by night. He’s responsible for all the content on this blog, and irresponsible for everything else.
Over the past years we’ve seen a recurrent theme where Government agencies were attempting to curtail internet freedom in the name of ‘keeping the peace’. From Saudi telcos threatening security experts to help them hijack tweets to governments procuring tools like Finspy to spy on their citizens–usually without any warrant or legal oversight. We’ve seen US federal...
I’m truly anxious at the recent rhetoric about ‘regulating’ of the internet, and fear the worst. I grew up with the internet and like to think we made a journey together, from my high school days where dial-up internet was the norm, to the blazing fast broadband I have now–things have change a lot for the both of us. I am a digital native, I know no other land other than a...
There’s a really cool tool called glasnost, that can easily detect if your ISP is throttling certain traffic through its servers. It works amazingly well at detecting if your ISP is blocking that most sacred of all internet traffic–BitTorrent. So running two test, one over my Unifi connection, and one more tethered over my Galaxy S3 on Maxis, and came to the conclusion that Maxis does...
The Edge recently held a political poll on whether Anwar Ibrahim should quit as the Opposition leader–But when the editor begun to see that the one-week survey attracted 12,736 responses and the responses were overwhelmingly one-sided, she smelt something fishy. Upon further checking with the IT team, they found that 6,354 of the responses came from one IP address, and about 1,700 came from...
Two days ago, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) lodge a report to the MCMC on an ‘internet blockade’ targeting DAP related political websites that was allegedly being carried out by Telekom Malaysia (TM). As you may know TM is the largest ISP in Malaysia, and if TM suddenly blocks a website–a large chunk of the Malaysian public are automatically denied access to it. The DAP IT...
The guys over at H-online reported recently that they have some pretty good evidence that good ol’ Microsoft is eavesdropping onto your Skype conversations, and the results are pretty damning. The method for detecting those sneaky little eavesdroppers was pretty ingenious though. The researchers sent two urls in their skype messages to each other. The urls pointed to servers that the...
Couple of weeks before the election, we saw how the Deputy Minister of Information Communications and Culture was so into Information communications. Now, with the new cabinet being sworn in, I’m sad to say we’ll probably see more of the same ol’ same ol’. Meet your new Deputy Minister of the Communication and Multimedia ministry–Dato’ Jailani Johari!!! Apart...
Great video from the guys at Numberphile talking about illegal numbers. It always amazes to think that your money in the bank isn’t protected by steel doors or guards with guns anymore–it’s protected by numbers. (more specifically it’s protected by one VERY VERY large number). The encryption key that is responsible for keeping your sensitive bank details secret, is nothing...
Bruce Schneier, whom I respect tremendously, points out that freedom and security are opposing ends of the same spectrum, people balance out freedom and security based on what they perceive. In other words, people would sacrifice their freedoms if they thought they needed more security. A way to think about this, is the amount of Gated and Guarded communities we have sprawling through the Klang...
Quick post for today. I need to start writing even though, I’m still depressed from LAST sundays election results. However, I’m keeping myself abreast with all the hate going around, including the latest ‘Buy Chinese Last Movement’ or BCLM. If you don’t know what it is, just Google it and you’ll find out, it’s the latest in a string of racist movements...