[box icont=“chat’]The social media in Malaysia is being monitored and existing laws are sufficient to weed out troublemakers trying to test the limits of free speech, Communications and Multimedia Minister Ahmad Shabery Cheek said today…

“The laws that we make are not to defend the party alone - that’s wrong,” Ahmad Shabery, who is also an Umno supreme council member, said.

In an attempt to curb internet freedom in Malaysia, the government is beginning a series of concerted statements to signal that internet censorship in Malaysia is merely a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. Previously I’ve explored why internet censorship doesn’t alleviate or even mitigate the risk of communal violence, yet the government still presses on with trying to censor the internet, apparently jumping on the opportunity of Alvivi to make their case stronger.

So why is the government so enamoured by the thought of internet censorship, when clearly it doesn’t work?

When a new phone hits the market, we tend to get terribly excited about its new features. And rightly so: what are boundaries for, if not to push frantically? But with the release of the latest BlackBerry 10 handsets, perhaps the most important contribution to the future of the smartphone might come in the form of the continuing inclusion of an actual QWERTY keyboard.

While the iPhone has been holding steady at four buttons, and Android handsets are caught in a strange limbo between buttons and always-on touch-screen style soft keys, BlackBerry has held fast with its products’ trademark keyboards while also offering touchscreen options.

Why shouldn’t Malaysia censor the internet?

Of late, the recent cases involving a certain pair of ‘sex’ bloggers and their ilk have prompted certain parties to call for more stringent regulations of the internet, but I for one think that we need to ensure that the internet remain free and un-censored–now more than ever. So why shouldn’t we censor the internet?

Rephrasing the question

A lot of people have made up their minds about it, mostly based on a series of assumptions–assumptions that usually false, and I hope to address the core assumption in this post.

Last week I wrote about the ‘rigged’ EDGE poll, that the EDGE had to eventually take down because they suspected someone was trying to bias the results. It was later revealed that a handful of IP addresses were responsible fro the bulk of the votes–presumably the fake ones. An IP address defines a unique internet connection, but not necessarily a unique device. You can try this yourself at home, and connect your PC, Laptop, Tablet and phone to your Wi-Fi router and then go online to check your IP from each–all of your devices will have the same ’external’ IP address.

Crime has become a hot-button topic these days, and while a lot of fingerpointing and blame-shifting has been going on in political circles, I think it’s wise we took a step back and try to address the root problem rather than its symptoms.

A brilliant piece by Evgeny Morozov from the Slate, points out the following:

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Forget terrorism for a moment. Take more mundane crime. Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it’s because youths don’t have jobs. Or you might say that’s because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks. What should you do?

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The Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 and it’s new amendment. that wonderful piece of legislation meant to repeal the archaic and ‘draconian’ ISA may turn out to be even more archaic and draconian than the ISA it was meant to replace.

While much of the legal fanfare has been focusing on the detention without trial sections of the bill, as a tech blogger, I wanted to focus on the technical aspects of it. Specifically let’s focus on how the new law would allow the government to eavesdrop onto your internet communication without the authorization of any Judge or Judicial oversight. Now while, the public prosecutor, or Attorney General in this country isn’t specifically part of the government–he (or she) is appointed by the Yang Di Pertuan Agong on the ‘advice’ of the Prime Minister.

The sections of the bill that focus on the interception of communication is both all-encompassing and far-reaching, giving far too much power to the Public Prosecutor to intercept your private conversations and web surfing habits, which is a gross invasion of privacy.

Power to intercept Communications

On top of this, the Public Prosecutor has the legal authority to compel an ISP to intercept and retain any communication you performed for an unspecified amount of time. Which could be forever.

Basically he can begin to ask Maxis or Unifi for the list of websites you visit, and your detailed online communications,  access to your emails, your friend list on facebook, your tweets and even your online files. Not even your online porn stash will be free from the prying eyes of the Public Prosecutor (not that I have one though…just saying, I know a friend who does).

All this without ever having to go to a Judge for judicial oversight. More importantly, anything collected in this way is deemed admissible as evidence in court, and no one will have to explain how the evidence was obtained. For all you know they could have placed webcams in your home, but they would would never have to explain this in court.

What’s worse is that a Police Superintendent is granted similar powers when “immediate action is required leaving no moment of deliberation”.

We all understand the need for the Police and Public Prosecutors to do their job well, and they require tools to catch the bad guys. However, this grants them way too much power with regards to their ability to invade the privacy of personal citizens. I don’t want the Public Prosecutor or a curious Police Superintendent snooping on my internet conversations, and yet the new Special offences act allows them to do that–legally!

[box icon=“chat”]In the early days of public computing, researchers who discovered vulnerabilities would quietly tell the product vendors so as to not also alert hackers. But all too often, the vendors would ignore the researchers. Because the vulnerability was not public, there was no urgency to fix it. Fixes might go into the next product release. Researchers, tired of this, started publishing the existence of vulnerabilities but not the details. Vendors, in response, tried to muzzle the researchers. They threatened them with lawsuits and belittled them in the press, calling the vulnerabilities only theoretical and not practical. The response from the researchers was predictable: They started publishing full details, and sometimes even code, demonstrating the vulnerabilities they found. This was called “full disclosure” and is the primary reason vendors now patch vulnerabilities quickly (9). Faced with published vulnerabilities that they could not pretend did not exist and that the hackers could use, they started building internal procedures to quickly issue patches. If you use Microsoft Windows, you know about “patch Tuesday,” the once-a-month automatic download and installation of security patches.

MyNic is the organization responsible for managing the .my Top Level Domain, which means every website address that ends with a .my is under their administration. These centralized control centers act as giant targets for hackers, but for the most part, they’re protected better than Fort Knox–or they should be.

Yesterday, a hacker going by the name Tiger-M@te successfully manage to hijack the .my addresses of popular websites belonging to Google, Microsoft, Dell and even Kaspersky (an Anti-Virus company). Instead of being presented with the usual webpage, visitors who entered urls like www.google.my, or www.skype.my were redirected to a static page with the word HACKED emblazoned in big red letters.

[box icon=“chat”] I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.

-Richard Matthew Stallman founder of Free Software Foundation (Techbytes interview)

In what appears to be open-season on the NSA and Tech Companies, Bloomberg has joined in with a report of their own, implicating that Microsoft provides US  intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix. In other words, Microsoft grants special access to the likes of the NSA to poke around in the nearly 1 Billion users of Microsoft software via newly discovered bugs—long before Microsoft report it to the public and eventually patch the bug.