On September 2021, malaysiakini reported on a website called mysppl, that was selling personal data online. The site used previous breached data on Malaysians, and was selling it to anyone with a credit card (or Grabpay account).

Note to aspiring criminals.. the last thing you want when doing something illegal like selling personal data ,is to tie that back to Bank Account by accepting payments. But I guess, anything goes these days.

Anyway...

I decided to see whether I could use generic Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques to try to find out who is behind the site, and this post is about my journey through that process.

Let's go...

`I've been playing guitar for over 25 years -- but I still suck at it.

I spent my first ever bonus I got (~RM2,000) on a brand new Norman Guitar, and now I'm the proud owner of multiple expensive guitars and amps ... but all that expensive gear hasn't improved my playing one iota. Even though I used religiously change my guitar strings every month.

I found a few tutorials online to do this, but they're old and don't 100% work. So here's some quick steps on how you might sign your git commits with GPG keys stored on your Yubikey.

Since I'm a mac user, these steps are specifically for macOS, for Windows check out Scott Hanselman's great post here.

So you think Ivermectin works.

You studied the data, you've read all the medical studies you could find, you've seen hours of YouTube videos where doctors swear by the drug, and you've even spent days (or weeks) researching on your on. Finally you conclude, that the data suggest Ivermectin is an effective treatment against COVID-19.

Most of the time, adding a python package to a Lambda function is a simple task. You pip install to a directory, and then copy that directory to the function either directly or through a lambda layer.

But sometimes, there's extra work required.

Packages like opencv install additional files on your system that aren't available in the same directory you pip installed into. When you pip install opencv-python-headless, additional .so files are downloaded to special directories in your environment to provide the openCV functionality.

This weekend, I decided to learn me some Vim.

According to it's website, "Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient" -- to be honest, I only used vim when forced to from the command line, I wasn't sure why anyone would choose to do 'serious' editing in Vim.

As a father of 2 young children, I worry about how to prepare my children for the future of work. What will their careers look like? And am I preparing them the right way?

Amid the Pandemic, I look at hard-hit industries and imagine how different my career would be, had I been in one of those industries. Like being a pilot, at age 40, with years of experience -- living the high life in 2019, and looking desperately for a job in 2021.

Luck Out: (colloquial, idiomatic, US, Canada) To experience great luck; to be extremely fortunate or lucky.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/luck_out

My life has been series of lucky breaks, a collection of events where I've 'failed upwards', and while my career isn't wildly successful, I'm smart enough to know and humble enough to realize the comforts I have are a distant hope for billions(!) of others on the planet.

I've been experimenting with meditation over the last few months, and I think it's great. Next to having a disciplined 8 hours of sleep everyday, I think meditation is the best thing you can do for your personal mental health.

I first started by reading headspace, and trying out his 10-minute meditation technique, but now I'm on the WakingUp app, which again starts a pretty reasonable 10 minutes per day. I'm by no means a guru, but just like exercise, 10 minutes a day beat 0 minutes a day -- by a lot!

Last week, a friend sent me a video of viral video by 'Fat Bidin', highlighting privacy concerns of the MySejahtera app. The same author (a.k.a Zan Azlee) also wrote a comment piece in Malaysiakini explaining his concerns over the Government's contact tracing application.

Specifically, he was concerned that MySejahtera had a "slew of different capabilities that is very much of a concern, such as:"