Tech columnist David Pogue shares 10 simple, clever tips for computer, web, smartphone and camera users. And yes, you may know a few of these already – but there’s probably at least one you don’t. Some however, didn’t work for me, like the double-space on my Samsung s3 just gave me a –double space.

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A lot of people ask why Malaysian has fallen behind countries like Korea, Taiwan or Singapore in terms of our economic development. The answer most politicians give is corruption–but there’s hardly any data to suggest that’s a big issue–at most corruption can account for the ’loss of income’. There’s no guarantee that the money we saved by eliminating corruption would be spent wisely on good projects, there’s no guarantee we’d be where Korea, Taiwan or Singapore is even if we had no corruption. Do you think there’s corruption in Kelantan, yet they seem to be trailing behind everyone in terms of development? Low corruption is not a guarantee of good education.

Malaysiakini now follows in the footsteps of other notable newspapers who’ve had they’re twitter account hacked, hopefully twitters recent announcement for two-factor authentication may help reduce the high number of hacks the social network faces on a regular basis.

F-Secure recently had a Hackathon in Malaysia, with the grand prize being a dinner with Miko Hyppönen. Miko is sort of like the Mick Jagger of Computer Security, Miko also  made international news in 2011, when he tracked down and visited the authors of the first PC virus in history, Brain.A. Hyppönen produced a documentary of the event. The documentary was published on YouTube.

The winner of the Hackathon was Tan Kok Boon (pic) who stole the spotlight with his groundbreaking application which allows users to monitor and prevent threats using F-Secure’s World Map Interface. Tan won the award for ‘ The Most Innovative Application’ and the award for ‘The Best Overall Performance’. Also notice from the picture, what device was the winner of the Hackathon using to code? It’s a MAC!

Which just goes to show, the OS of your laptop is almost irrelevant now–and pretty soon the OS of your phone will go the same way.

Just how private are your searches…turns out they aren’t private at all.

The wonderful people at Torrentfreak did an amazing piece of investigative journalism today. Upset over the passing of CISPA, they decided to do an internet check on how active the House of Representatives were–on bit torrent. It turns out with a couple of IP addresses, and some elbow grease you can pretty much find out how active a certain IP range is on bit-torrent or even on searching porn!!

So using the same techniques that Torrentfreak used, and applying them to the Malaysian e-Government official service provider “Government Integrated Telecommunication Network  (GITN)”,  your friendly neighbourhood Tech Evangelist manage to find some pretty interesting results!

The GITN is owned by Telekom Malaysia and is dubbed the “official network provider for the e-Government” in Malaysia–so let’s see what the official network for the e-government was being used for?

First off, someone was using the GITN network to download torrents–not exactly surprising, but judging by the variety of torrents (everything from Dark Skies to Naruto to Discovery Channel documentaries) it looks like more than one person was doing the downloading.

A couple of months back, I wrote a short post about a Malaysian project that was successfully funded on kickstarter. Today, I can proudly say that Malaysians continue to surprise me in untold ways.

Pitchin.my is the Malaysian kickstarter, and recently it saw a successful funding of a project on it’s website–that literally brought tears to my eyes. The project entitled “Sponsor a Child to Read” was done by an English teacher from a rural school in Negeri Sembilan with a small-ish goal to raise a relatively small-ish USD3000 to provide books to 30 students with low literacy level from SMK Teriang Hilir. Let me tell you, there’s nothing small-ish about teaching 30 students.

Liew Suet Li, the English teacher who started the project, goes on to elaborate that:

So it’s official. Datuk Maglin D’Cruz will compete in N.48 Kota Alam Shah in Klang. Sadly this is true.

I never liked Datuk Maglin, he’s the Deputy Information Communications and Culture Minister that was looking at ways to ‘control’ social media. I won’t go much further as to why this is a bad idea–but it just goes to show how in touch Datuk Maglin is on the social media.

Maxis announced that their network now supports LTE on the iPhone 5, which is a bit strange to me. Initially the MCMC announced that the telcos awarded the LTE frequencies were given band 7 of the spectrum–which wasn’t compatible with the iPhone 5.

However, something must have changed, SoyaCincau recently reported that:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin:

Mark Zuckerberg:

Facebook allowed the youtube videos and blog post from various opposition parties to be spread from friend to friend, without Facebook videos wouldn’t have gone ‘viral’. Together Facebook and Google were instrumental in allowing the opposition a platform to preach their good news in 2008–in 2013 they might just allow them to form a new government. 

Got a note from Malaysiakini today, for all you stingy-porkers out there who read all the malaysiakini news reposted by various parties, but never really paid for the subscription–here’s some good news.

Malaysiakini will go free from 17th April onwards, to pave the way for MORE adverts (like we didn’t have enough) but also to allow Malaysiakini to respond to attacks more effectively. Having to cater to two customer models makes responding to DDOS attacks a bit harder–though I can’t imagine why.

It’s however good news all-around. Malaysiakini will extend the subscription if you were already paying, and if you never were a customer, you now have access to all the news from Malaysia no.1 Online News Portal.