Port Forwarding is a really simple concept, but a very important step you need to take if you want to remotely access the devices you have at home. For instance, if you have a Unifi connection connected to an always on desktop and you wanted to Remotely access your windows machine, you’d need to perform port forwarding on your router.

Similarly if you’ve just installed a new IP camera in your home, and want to access the camera while you’re on the road you’ll need to perform port forwarding on your router.

Port forwarding is a neccessary step in order to access your home devices from outside your home. If you want to access anything in your home remotely you’ll need to configure some sort of Port Forwarding, and here’s the why are how.

I’ve just come back from a fantastic 2 week long vacation in Australia, and I absolutely loved it. The weather was a bit cold for my Malaysian body (especially in blue mountains), but overall the holiday was a well deserved break from nearly 8 months of non-stop work ;).

The one thing I did notice about Australia though, was that data charges were quite exorbitant. I stayed at various Youth Hostel throughout Queensland and NSW and was surprised that they charged nearly AUD7 per day for Wi-Fi connectivity. Needless to say, I wasn’t too impressed with shelling out nearly RM25 per day for something I get free from even my local mamak.

It was the same nearly everywhere else, even their coffee joints and cafes didn’t offer free Wi-Fi, one explanation I came across was that Australia was geographically very distant from the rest of the world AND it was sparsely populated, so the cost of supplying connectivity to the country was very high. Therefore, these cost were reflected in the amount users paid to go online. In Malaysia, Tune Talk offers 5 Sen/MB, which works out to roughly Rm25 for the same 500MB of data I got from Optus, Digi offers a 600MB for an RM75. Well below the nearly Rm100 I spent on my Optus Pre-paid. So instead of subscribing to the local Wi-Fi, I decided to spring for a mobile data package, in this case the Optus Pre-paid plan that cost AUD30, with that I got unlimited minutes, 250 minutes to landlines, unlimited sms and 500 MB of data. That’s a lot of money, considering I wasn’t bothered about the other stuff except the 500MB of data.

IBM have always been on the cutting edge of innovation, they’ve moved more becoming merely a computer company to  what is probably the first truly all encompassing technology company, they don’t just make fancy gadgets or shiny tinga-ma-jigs, they make actual solutions for real-world problems.

In 1996, IBM introduced the world to Deep Blue. Kasparov met Deep Blue and wasn’t impressed, he had no reason to be, he defeated Deep Blue 4-2, and walked away comfortably.

However, in 1997, IBM re-introduced the world to the 2nd version of Deep Blue (unofficially named Deeper Blue), and this time Kasparov was beaten –but not by much. Kasparov is the Tiger Woods, Pele and Michael Jordan of the Chess world, and he was beaten by a super computer with 11.38 GFLOPs of power.

In turns out though, we had nothing to be afraid off, Chess is after all a pretty simple game when you break it down, the number of possible moves are finite, together with the number of possible scenarios to play out. It’s not an easy game to master, but as it turns out playing chess is infinitely easier than just plain talking.

In fact, of all the talking games, Jeopardy seems the most difficult. At the end of this post, I will make an argument to show that Jeopardy – a simple talking game – is about 6,500 times more difficult than Chess (a game we often associate with genius). Turns out Kasparov has to bow to Ken Jennings.

I  remember my computer security professor telling me that encryption doesn’t make it impossible to decrypt, but rather infeasible to decrypt. Nobody is going to buy a supercomputer to crack your final year thesis, simply because the data isn’t worth nearly as much as the cost to crack it–thereby making it infeasible.

With cloud computing, however, end-users and regular joes like us, have access to very very powerful machines for a fraction of their actual cost (since we’re only renting the machines). Couple that with the high scalability of the cloud , it means that what was previously infeasible, is now a very viable option. In fact what used to be only available to big corporations and governments, now has become available to anyone with a credit card and Amazon account.

I’m not talking about complex mathematical approaches to breaking encryption either, I’m talking about the standard brute force method. Brute Force basically involves trying every single possible password until you eventually find the password that works. In the past brute force wasn’t considered a valid option since trying all those passwords which number in the hundreds of billions, would require a very powerful computer, and most people–not even criminals, had access to that sort of computing power. However, with the advent of cloud computing, powerful hardware is suddenly becoming more available to the general public for low-down prices. What use to cost tens of thousands of dollars per server now cost just 2.60 an hour to ‘rent’.

What if we could use the power of the cloud to crack the average level encryption we have on our zip or excel files? Well it turns out, we can, and it’s results are ridiculous!

Imagine buying a house from a housing developer who insist that even after you’ve bought the house the developer will be allowed access to your downstairs bathroom. So that even after you’ve bought the house and moved in and got that nice kitchen cabinet design you’ve been eye-ing, the developer can still access your downstairs bathroom, no matter what. Worse still, the developer then decides to turn your downstairs bathroom into a public toilet.

Sound crazy right?

No developer would ever convince me to buy a house under such conditions, but Maxis seem to think they can push through something very similar in their Maxis Fibre to the Home (FTTH) Agreement. Before you sign up for your Maxis Home Package, you’re presented with a single page document to sign. The document basically states that you agree to the Maxis terms and conditions (T&C). A single page document sounds rather minimal, until you realize it’s a single page of 2955 words. Maxis squeezed 2955 words onto one page through a straightforward method of reducing the font size, basically making the agreement even harder to read–but you should read it, because point 6 of the Customer Terms for Maxis states:

Just like youtube, slideshare is a free service. However for larger presentations (with Hi-Def Photos) or even videos, you may need to buy the Pro Version which enables up to 100MB uploads per presentation.

I was looking for some detail on Maxis Fibre to Home service until I came across this while trying to to access the Maxis Customer Forum online:

In the early days of the internet, all the data flowing through was done in plaintext, this meant that everything flowing on the internet was fair-game for anyone to hijack and view. It was akin to sending postcards all around, all the post-men and intermediaries could view the entire contents of your messages because it was out there in the open, no need to open sealed envelopes. So everything from your letters to your uncle Bob or your resume for a new job or even your most intimate personal letters could only be sent via postcard–anyone could read it.

There was a strong requirement however to design a mechanism to encrypt data flowing through the internet, because unless you could encrypt data, personal and credit information couldn’t (or rather shouldn’t) have been trasmitted across the internet. So it was important that someone somewhere figure out how data on the internet could be encrypted to enable things like online shopping, social networking, even simple email. So sometime in the mid-90s Netscape (the default browser at the time was Netscape Navigator), took up the gauntlet and invented SSL.

At this point, I’m also reminiscing the days when browsers were actually pay-ware rather than freeware. Remember when Netscape Navigator Gold used to cost money?