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 indeed block torrents by default. However, just like how you have to call Maxis to enable VPN access via your phone, you have to call them to allow torrent traffic as well…supposedly.

Keith is an architect by day, blogger by night. He's responsible for all the content on this blog, and irresponsible for everything else.

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 several IP addresses within the same building. Another 2,000 responses came from seven different IP addresses.

The DAP IT manager (didn’t know the DAP had an IT team now did ya?), in his press statement said that :

In investigating the DPI filtering equipment location, I have found 1032 suspicious network equipment using same IP address family as the the Arbor Network Peakflow SP with TM branding. Since the login page of this network equipment bears TM logo, undoubtedly MCMC should haul up TM and conduct IT forensic investigation on all 1032 equipments without delay. I am fully prepared to assist MCMC in its investigations.

In light of this new evidence, MCMC must re-examine its 2nd May statement. MCMC should be politically impartial and hold the standard of government regulatory body that it should be. It must put the interest of all Malaysians first.

Unless TM operates like the government, in which they announce the purchase of something in 2004, but only start to using it in 2013–I’m guessing they were using Arbor for other purposes before they decided to unleash its DPI functionality.

But there could be a twist.

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 researchers owned. For all practical reasons these urls were made specifically for the purpose of the test and should not be receiving any traffic from anywhere–unless of course Microsoft was listening.

Then they sat at wait at their servers to see if they received any traffic, and lo’ and behold barely a few hours later they received some rather funky traffic from an IP address registered to Microsoft in Redmond. busted!

The urls didn’t just end with the .com, but had sensitive material appended to it (or at least that’s what the researchers made it look like), and Microsoft used the url which meant they had to be eavesdropping on Skype messages and conversations. More importantly these urls were made to look like they held sensitive material, such as bank logins..etc etc, but Microsoft still used it, and worse even visited the sites to see what was on it.

Even more shocking is that Microsoft isn’t even denying the charge–yet, but they point out that they do scan urls once in a while to flag spam, but H-online isn’t buying it.

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 from having a whooping 71 followers on twitter, and a mind-blowing 5 (yes that’s a single digit) connections on LinkedIn. Although,  he does have more than 2,000 likes on his Facebook page–which he started on April 15th 2013. Coming back to twitter though, did you know he follows a spine-chilling 12 accounts–must be some pretty heavy Communicating going on in the Ministry eh!

The encryption key that is responsible for keeping your sensitive bank details secret, is nothing more than a very very long number, and that number protects your money more than any steel door or armed guard ever could.

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 Valley (and even beyond). People are willing to sacrifice the extra money and give up some freedoms to live in a Gated and Guarded area, in some cases the premiums reach 100% just to live in a area that is guarded. Residents of these communities also experience the hassle of having to ’tap-in’ and ’tap-out’ of their areas in addition to the tremendous difficulty hosting visitors in these neighbourhoods.

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 that have spawned since Pru-13, and it probably won’t be the last.

Here's some quick tips on how to access blocked sites in Malaysia that is blocked by the ISP (Telekom, Maxis, Time..etc etc). Currently the ISPs in Malaysia are throttling and filtering specific traffic to websites like Malaysiakini, Facebook and even Youtube. Just in case, things get nasty post-election day, I thought I'd quickly put together a couple of ways you can access Malaysiakini and other online portals despite a Unifi censor.