Finally… it’s arrived!!

It was a long wait since my first iPod, but finally the iTunes has landed in Malaysia. Apple made a rather quite launch of the iTunes Store in Malaysia, meaning the days of logging into iTunes with US accounts and gift card purchases are over. Malaysians now have access to an entire treasure trove of songs available for the same prices as they are in the US. That’s about $0.99 - $1.69 per song, or $9.99 per album (roughly).

I was so excited, I immediately logged onto iTunes with my Malaysian account to check out the details, it took a while, since I’d forgotten my Malaysian account password, but soon after I was greeted at the iTunes store by Jason Mraz himself. I was also informed that the iTunes Store in Malaysia had more tailored local content these include songs from P. Ramlee, Man Bai, Chinese songs as well as Hindi songs (kuch kuch hota hai for $0.69 anyone?). It’s also good to see that Kau Ilhamku by Man Bai was Top of the Charts, signifying locally driven content. Where else would you see Belaian Jiwa and Moves Like Jagger on the same charts?

Also there are more P. Ramlee songs on the Malaysian iTunes store than there is on the US iTunes store, so it’s tailored to Malaysian taste.

Of course that raises the questions, are there more ‘American’ songs on the US store than Malaysia?

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a cool card game based on Computer processes, in hindsight the only thing that post proved was that I’m a geek. The card game was funded through a crowdfunded initiative, and that was really what made it cool.

The instagram camera is cool on its own, and the fact that it’s currently  being crowdsourced through Indiegogo (a website similar to Kickstarter) makes the cool factor– cucumber cool.

In fact, as of now, it’s already reached $6,000 dollars from it’s $50,000 target in just one day. I’m willing to bet that this project will eventually reach it’s pretty low target of just $50,000 – easily.

There are however, some copyright concerns surrounding the camera, particularly since Facebook now own Instagram and they don’t even like wordpress developers building themes that ’look’ like facebook, much less an entire camera that is based on a trademark they own.

If you choose to fund the project, you’re promised a discount on the final item, which the creator hopes to price at under $350 (that’s in US Dollars). However, based on the specs, that may be a bit difficult, we’re talking about a:

With the newly enacted Evidence Bill Amendment, you would have been deemed to have published everything that originates from your IP address. What that means is that if someone hacks your Wi-Fi and then uses it to publish malicious or seditious statements online, you will be deemed to have published it, and the onus is on YOU to prove you’re innocence rather than for the prosecution to prove your guilt.

So obviously with the new law floating around, Wi-Fi security should be at the top of every Unifi Subscribers agenda–if it isn’t already.

However, how secure is your Unifi Wi-Fi connection?

The brilliant blog Lifehacker recently posted an article on how you can hack Wi-Fi connections secured by a WPA or WPA2 password. The post is quite detailed but even I have to admit the technical skills neccessary to pull this off is somewhere between intermediate and expert. At the end of the post is a link to a spreadsheet detailing all the devices that are susceptible to this hack, and one of those devices is the DLink Dir-615 Wi-Fi router, if it doesn’t sound familiar let me refresh your memory–it’s the router that Unifi gives out to all Unifi customers!!! (que bone-chilling Alfred Hitchcock Movie sound)

Now taking aside the fact, that I could probably call all Unifi customers to request the Wi-Fi password printed at the bottom of their router, and 50% would probably provide that to me with no issue, this also means that for those people smart enough to hide their passwords – I can still hack your Unifi Wi-Fi connection no matter what you do on your router. There’s literally nothing you can do, hiding SSIDs don’t work and neither will MAC address filtering. Of course this is all theory, and testing this theory took a lot more time than I had, so I’m not sure.

What I am sure is that Unifi have their own firmware for the DIR-615 router, and that’s a partially susceptible router, meaning some firmwares are susceptible some firmwares aren’t, and it’s a coin toss and whether your router at home is susceptible.

Now, while I know of a few people who hack Wi-Fi passwords just for the fun of it,and there’s a lot of references and material online detailing the steps required–so we all know this works. In fact you can buy packages online that allow you crack the routers easily :). This blog written in Malay claims that they’ve successfully hacked a DLink Dir-615 router, I’ve no doubt it’s possible, but it’s not easy and it takes time.

Either way though, it’s always good to remember this. There is no such thing as impossible to crack, merely inconvenient and infeasible. Don’t believe me? Check out this story of how a group of University Students manage to hack a US Military Drone in mid-flight using nothing more than $1000 worth of equipment, do you really think your Wi-Fi at home is more secure a ‘death from above’ US Predator Drone? Every Wi-Fi access point hackable, it’s only a matter of how much time, effort and money is required.

This week I was attending a Project Delivery Conference in Putrajaya and was neglecting my blog a bit. The last post on the blog was more than a week ago, and that falls short of my target of 2-3 post a week. That being said, I do have some cool stuff that I’d thought you might be interested in.

Samsung Microsoft Surface

Let’s get straight to the point, the latest case where the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department (Jawi) is prosecuting a store manager is both disgusting and without merit. Not only is she just a Manager carrying out here duties–thereby making the bookstore liable instead of her, but the raid on the bookstore was carried out BEFORE the book was banned by the Home Ministry. So here in Malaysia, not only will the Government be able to persecute you in a guilty until proven innocent manner, but apparently government agencies can persecute for possession of a book before it is banned.

However, politics aside, let’s talk technology!!

What if I used Technology to bypass all government censorship. So instead of buying the book from Borders (or MPH, Popular or Kinokuniya for that matter), I simply download the Kindle version of the book online?

I did an online search, and indeed found that Amazon has a Kindle version of the book retailing for $11.99, if you already own a Kindle in Malaysia, then you can bypass all this drama and simply download the book to your Kindle. Of course, there are legal concerns with just downloading regular books from Amazon, much less banned books–so be warned!!

Now I wouldn’t recommend it and there are huge legal questions, but technically–it can done, and it can done easily. I’m start to finish in 5 minutes–it really is that easy.

My point isn’t that the book should or should not be banned, my point is that the ban can be circumvented with ease using technology. So how effective can any ban be, when most Malaysians have access to the internet?

On top of this is a very interesting question, Does a banning a physical book constitute internet censorship–probably not. However, does banning an electronic book constitute internet censorship? Of course you may say the law makes no distinction between and e-book and an actual physical book, but the law makes no distinction between and ebook and webpage either (they’re all considered publications), and if banning a webpage is obviously internet censorship, isn’t banning an ebook internet censorship as well?

The question I believe can be synthesized into Does Banning and ebook constitute censoring the internet? I don’t have the answer, but I believe there are 2 aspects:

1. The Traditional legal aspect as covered by the Printing and Publications act 1984.

2. The goverment promise as outline in the MSC Bill of Guarantees to not censor the internet.

If you’re a lawyer, I would love to hear your comments.

It’s an irony that while the internet was the first place you could create avatars and split personalities to impersonate others, it has now turned into a free for all buffet for private data. I previously shared on how the ads you see on facebook were inherently tied to the Google searches you perform, and how ad companies have probably gathered so much data on you that they can find out if you’re pregnant before even you do.

With that in mind, many people still have an antiquated concept of a fully private and anonymous internet, in fact in most cases its easier to track an internet connection than an actual physical person, and its actually quite possible that a confiscated computer from your home could prove your whereabouts for the last 2 years. Earlier this year, a 19 year old girl was strangled to death while she was asleep, her alleged killers were actual stupid enough to perform an internet search on “chemicals to passout a person,” “making people faint,” “ways to kill people in their sleep,” “how to suffocate someone” and “how to poison someone”. Needless to say, the evidence seems rock solid, and these dumb criminals would go behind bars.

On the other hand, some criminals aren’t so stupid. In fact, the FBI, Interpol and various other law enforcement agencies have entire departments looking and searching for online criminals who do everything from fake money Nigerian scams to trafficking child pornography on the internet. These guys have proven quite difficult to track because of something called TOR.

Finally after a long long wait, I managed to get my Samsung Galaxy S3 from Maxis. I got the phone last Wednesday and now after just 5 days with it, I have to say – best Rm999 spent EVER!

For those of you still curious as to how I got it for Rm999 when I recently complained about Maxis advertising a “while stocks last promotion” as a “4 day long promotion”, here’s a nifty little piece of information that isn’t widely shared, Maxis is STILL offering the Samsung Galaxy S3 for Rm999 but only to Maxis One Club subscribers, you’d still need to subscribe to the Rm68 data plan which brings with it a good ol’ 3GB of mobile data, but any smartphone needs a data plan anyway. The maths is simple, you’d need a minimum Rm48 data plan which is for 1GB/month, so the difference between the Rm68 and RM48 is Rm20/month. Over the 2 year contract, that’s a Rm480 difference, the phone price itself is nearly Rm400 cheaper. So might as well, if you ask me.

I wrote a very long time ago, about cool Top Level domains you could buy. For instance I wanted to buy the .TH top level domain so that my website could be http://kei.th . Unfortunately, I found out that the .TH domain name belongs to Thailand and they’ve pretty made it very difficult for a non-Thai to get a hold of their domain names. You’re probably also familiar with the .TV top level domain belonging to a private enterprise and the country of Tuvalu. Or the .FM top level domain used by most radio stations including Hitz.FM and Mix.FM, this domain belongs to the Federation of Micronesian Islands. However, as cool as Top Level Domains are, they’re pretty limited, the UN list out just 190 member nations, and all in all, we’re looking at no more than 250 Top Level Domains in existence. *my guess

Malaysians have always been deprived of real-time video content online.

We’ve no access to Netflix or Hulu, we can’t watch the full episodes of the Jay Leno show online, we can’t watch the BBC replays of the football matches, we can’t even watch videos from TheOnion for crying out loud.

Why? because NBC, FOX, Netflix, Hulu, BBC and even the Onion restrict access to this content to users from only a certain part of the world (specifically America). Americans even get to watch Euro 2012 from ESPN–WHAT?

This an entire country where football is called soccer (ugh!), and they get watch it online?!!

Now, I’m not certain as to why the Studios and Channels would not like to share this content globally, while Americans (and only Americans) get access to this great content, the rest of us, specifically in Asia-Pacific are left in the lurch, waiting for our local Cable company to have it or we resort to torrents. However, what if I told you there was a way for you to access all the great content Americans get to watch online as well, and you could do it from the comfort of your own home.

Netflix cost just USD7.99 (roughly RM30), and full access to Hulu Plus for around the same price. In fact, Hulu is free if you can live with a little out-dated content and some adverts thrown in. If you’re wondering what Hulu and Netflix is, let me break it down to you based on their content.

Imagine paying just RM30 for full access to 8 seasons of Top Gear, 6 seasons of mythbusters, 5 seasons of “How I met your mother”, 7 seasons of Greys Anatomy, 6 volumes of Futurama, 2 seasons of white collar, 8 seasons of that 70’s show , 9 seasons of scrubs and 4 seasons of Heroes–and I’m not even done. On top of it, you have access to hundreds of movies including Iron Man 2, Thor, Kick Ass, The Expendables …even the older movies like Groundhog Day, Meet the Parents , Lost in Translation and if you really wanna go waaay back–GHOSTBUSTER!! (who you gonna call?)