KLANG: Two years on, the the pilot initiative to teach coding and digital security as an SPM subject has been touted as a resounding success, and the government is mulling a move to make it compulsory by 2020.

The announcement shocked parents, as out of 10,000 students who took part in the pilot program, only 10 had scored an A while the rest had failed with a grade of F.

Education Minister, Dato’ Seri Java, said that this reflects the current IT market, where out of 10,000 security consultants, only 10 will ever give you good advice.

“We benchmarked against the industry, and set the grading curve accordingly, so only a 10 students getting an A was the intention!! We can’t have cases where students just memorize a textbook and then score an A, this is not History or Geography, this is an important subject” he said, while further mocking drama and English literature under his breath.

Deputy Director of Education, Perl Ramachandran further added that instead of focusing on the 9,990 students who failed, the public should instead focus on the ‘A’ students who showed exemplary work and are were ‘bright spots’ in the dark abyss which is the Malaysian education system.

One such exemplary student was 17-year old lass Siti Pintu bt. Belakang, she had managed to install a backdoor into the MOE exam system and downloaded the question paper days before the exam. A backdoor is an application that allows an attacker unfettered access to the compromised system, and Siti managed to code one from scratch specifically for this purpose.

Already Russian cyber-criminal organizations are offering her scholarships to prestigious universities, Perl further added.

Then there Godam a/l Rajakumar, who instead of stealing exam papers, simply hacked into the MOE grading system and gave himself a ‘A’.

So now, only actual travellers will be allowed into airports, and everybody else from your mother to your 3rd aunty twice removed has to say their teary goodbye at home rather than at the Airport KFC.

But why?

So that terrorist will now have to buy a ticket in order to blow up the airport? I can picture out now, “Al-Qaeda attempt to bomb KLIA foiled due to lack of funds for ticket purchase”

….riiiiggght!

Do these people even consider just how easy it is to circumvent some of the ridiculous ‘security measures’ they put in place these days.  If all it takes for a terrorist to gain entry into an airport is a plane ticket, it’s not a very tall order for them to go out and buy one, or just print a fake copy good enough to fool the security officers.

We’d be spending countless of man hours, for security personnel on entry points scanning through useless documents with no real security in return.

What a waste–just like those women only KTM coaches that do absolutely nothing.

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 hosting a service that would handle classified e-mails in the basement of her house.

What do you do when the technology turns on you?

Or when the feature that’s built to save you, is the one that might just kill you?

There’s a stark similarity between the Takata airbag fiasco, that’s already taken 2 Malaysian lives, and the lady who died in self-driving Tesla.

Both involve the auto-industry and both are technology related, but together they represent a much deeper issue at hand–despite our noblest expectations, technology isn’t perfect–but it’s better than we had before.

We’ve all been trained by Hollywood to expect perfect technology, working all the time and in every scenario, but in reality technology sometimes fails, and newer technology fails more often.

Technology endures through failures, only by our good graces, but unless we grant that grace to it, we will not progress.

What should our response to a technical failure be?

Do we insist on removing ALL traces of the offending technology, or do we accept it as a price of progress, that the occasional failure is a tax we pay to get better technology.

But are some taxes just too high?

Society might accept failing antennas on an iPhone, or even bad Google searches, but an air-bag, that might blow a hole in your chest or a car that might crash you into a truck, might be too high of a price.

So is the tax for air-bags and self-driving cars just not worth the potential safety we get in return?

Some interesting links you might want to check out during my interview on BFM today, will tidy up this list later in the week.

Office of Personnel Management Data Breach (Chinese hackers breaking into US Federal Employee Databases)

China arrested the hackers responsible for OPM breach

Turkey losing Personal Information on 50 Million Citizens

Let’s start with the quote that set off the rage in my heart—

“You can see today that our Internet is slow. Not because it itself is slow but because a lot of people are using it,” he said

The government agency chief blamed this on illegal downloads hogging Internet bandwidth here, adding that this does not happen in countries like Germany due to stricter enforcement.

“In Germany, the Internet is fast because if you download illegally, you will be charged by the authorities.

“You can’t download illegal movies, songs and pictures there, you need to pay but we here, anything also we download illegally right up to the pictures of our grandfathers.

“That is why the Internet highway is slow but we blame the government. The government has created proper Internet highways but we don’t know how to use it. Millions have been spent on this by the government,” he explained.

Let’s start with his first sentence, an substitute the word ‘internet’ with the name of any Malaysian highway you choose, personally I like to use the LDP:

You can see today that our LDP is slow. Not because it itself is slow but because a lot of people are using it

Let’s go to the 2nd statement:

In Germany, the Internet is fast because if you download illegally, you will be charged by the authorities.

“You can’t download illegal movies, songs and pictures there, you need to pay but we here, anything also we download illegally right up to the pictures of our grandfathers.

“That is why the Internet highway is slow but we blame the government

Here’s 4 reasons why he’s wrong.

This will easily be the most controversial blog post I ever wrote, so consider yourself warned.

It’s controversial, because it touches on multiple taboos in our society, sex, child abuse and security theater. You see, there’s been a growing call for a national sex offender registry, especially in the wake of news that a British Pedophile had sexually abused up to 200 children in Malaysia.

The news is especially shocking for Malaysians, who are still coming to grips with the fact that a foreign ‘mat salleh’ abused our children, in our country, right under our fucking noses, and we’re only now learning about it….years after the abuse had taken place and even then, the details are sketchy.

As I said,many have renewed the call for a Sex Offender registry. The idea being, that if we start registering sex offenders, we could more easily monitor them, and be able cut-off  their ability to further abuse children. It’s a great idea, but it wouldn’t have saved these 200 children, simply because Richard Huckle wasn’t convicted of any sexual abuse, he wouldn’t have been on the registry even if had one.

Then we have calls for better screening procedures of people who work with children. Another great idea, but again wouldn’t have stopped Richard Huckle. Maybe a extremely thorough and in-depth screening  process that interviewed his parents, grandparents and fourth grade history teacher would have uncovered something about his psychology that may have triggered some alarms–but that level of screening is both unrealistic and a gross invasion of privacy.

Finally we have calls for better sex-education in schools, which I’m 100% in favor off. Proper sex education may have prompted one of Huckle’s victims to speak out and report the issue, which may prompted his arrest at a much earlier time–but ultimately these were impoverished children who were not given access to proper education anyway, so sex education in public schools probably wouldn’t have helped them.

But are we forgetting something obvious?

Gawker is the internet’s most slimy news organization, a online website that has no qualms disclosing people’s sexual infidelities regardless of the cost such disclosures have on their personal lives.

So for most people, seeing WWF superstar Hulk Hogan win a lawsuit against Gawker to the tune of $140 Million dollars was a real sight for sore eyes. But when it was revealed that Hogan was funded by Billionaire Peter Thiel, the internet suddenly lost its damn mind.

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 ‘women-only’ coaches on their train, and this event had me pondering the security and social implications of such coaches, and concluded that women-only coaches are a terrible idea!!

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

Bukit Jalil to Bukit Bintang for RM20.20. I remember a time when taxi drivers would charge me Rm10 just to drive from Menara Citibank to KLCC, or RM20 to drive from the Kelana Jaya LRT station to Subang Parade–and that was after I haggled, begged and bargained the prices down.