While they may have caused “The Great 9 day downtime of 2012”, and I ‘might’ have been terribly upset with them. Over the past few months, I must admit– My Unifi Connection Speed is Absolutely brilliant!!

Say what???!

You heard me right, although I had a terrible 9 days of no internet earlier this year, Unifi has been nothing but buttery silky smooth ever since. It’s really amazing, and for the price I’m paying I’m not complaining, in fact I’m actually congratulating Unifi for their great service. That’s right Unifi, here’s a congratulations to you!

It’s true, many people have wrote to me (some publicly, most privately) to complain about the service they get from Telekom Malaysia, and I still think they could do more to improve the quality of their customer service, as well as the processes behind them. I also think that these downtimes should be avoidable on Telekoms part, and Telekom should work better to win back and compensate affected customers.

However, it must be said that for me at least, my Unifi connection speed for torrent downloads and youtube videos is more than good enough, and here’s the proof.

Ever wonder how come the ads you see on Facebook or Malaysiakini reflect the searches you just recently made. Ever felt freaked out about it, there really is nothing to freak out about, unless of course you’re worried that a Multi-Billion dollar company may be keeping information about your searches and sharing them with ad sites that build profiles to uniquely identify you. Or that your personal search isn’t really private data, yet it can reveal very private details about yourself including your religious beliefs, sexual inclinations, medical conditions and even credit rating.

This is a blog about technology, but as of late it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus only on technology without looking into copyright, censorship and privacy. I can’t blog about technology while ignoring these aspects, anymore than financial analyst you look at Apple ignore the technology around their products.

*Update: Malaysiakini have confirmed the update on their facebook page, looks like you need to look for other sources of Bersih 3.0  news, this could take a while. It’s also note-worthy that 10 people ’like’ this on facebook, obviously over-looking the fact that nobody should ’like’ this.

With barely 12 hours to go before Bersih 3.0 starts to swing into action, Malaysiakini servers appear to be down. I was trying to logon online to check the news only to notice that I couldn’t access the site, PINGs to the site seem to time out as well. Could this be a repeat of when Malaysiakini went offline in the run up to the Sarawak elections? Plus, I know this doesn’t affect me, because as a Google Chrome user I know when other users are also experiencing problems accessing a site.

The star today reports that:

e-Filing looks to be a definite winner among Malaysians well over half of the country's estimated 2.5 million tax-paying citizens have gone the paperless route.

Inland Revenue Board (IRB) figures showed that as at yesterday, 1,621,647 Malaysians had filed their taxes, with online filings accounting for nearly 75% of the total

I must say, if the numbers are true, that this is a fantastic achievement. I think there will always be people (particularly from the older generation) who prefer to file paper based tax forms and a rough estimate maximum e-filing rate would be around 85% in my view, so 75% isn’t quite far off.

So Maxis launched their new ebook portal aptly title www.ebuuk.com.my, far be it from me to point out that an ebook portal should at least have the word book spelled correctly (don’t you think so Maxis), also judging by the SSL certificate it appears wanted to go for a more generic myebooks.com.my domain name before switching to ebuuk.com.my.

I’m an avid reader and was excited when I heard the news, so I headed over to the Maxis ebuuk page, and noticed that it wasn’t up to my expectations. I was completely annoyed by the fact that in some cases the prices for ebooks via the ebuuk page was about twice the price of books you could download from Amazon. And the proof is below, it includes a book I’m about to purchase called The Progress Principle, retailing for USD9.99 on the Kindle for Amazon, while Maxis ebuuk retails it for Rm68.99. Now USD9.99 is about Rm30 or RM32, and Maxis is retailing it for about twice the price, that’s ridiculous. This is an ebook we’re talking about.

The Lowyat.net forum is abuzz with news and photos of a broken down Proton Preve. Not good news for a car Dr. Mahathir called the best proton ever. The rumour mill is abuzz with the reasons for the breakdown, but as of now it looks clear that the Proton in question didn't crash, but rather than some part 'lower arm assembly' gave way, or something like that.

I remember graduating from university and heading over to Intel for my first job interview. I can’t remember most of the interview (and maybe that’s why I never got the job), but I do remember telling the interviewer my dream was to work for Google, in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have said that.

Even then, and more so now, I had a huge admiration for Google. I admire they way they walk the talk in terms of innovation, but it’s becoming increasing hard to ignore the privacy concerns of having nearly all the worlds search traffic focused on just one engine. It could be argued that Google has more data than any other organization in existence… Governments included.

There are other search engines, of course, but they’re no where close to Googles precision or popularity (those two are actually intertwined), and Bing has recently offered to pay me to search with them and I might just take them up on the offer.

So how much do we trust Google?

A reader nicely pointed me to this wonderful infographic that I’d thought I’d share.

*update: there’s been an announcement that the organizers are setting up a second show due to the huge demand. I’d recommend waiting for that before you start buying 2nd hand tickets.

Dissapointed you didn’t get your hands on Russell Peters tickets for the KL show?

Upset because you spent the whole night waiting for it, only to find out that the 7000+ tickets were sold almost instantly?

Update 1: Russell Peters World Tour in Malaysia was sold out in hours. I failed to get a ticket online, couldn’t even log in. A friend of mine lining up in KLCC was told at around 10-ish in the morning that only platinum tickets were available. 

Update 2: There are ‘strong’ rumors suggesting there will be a 2nd show due to the overwhelming response. stay tuned.

I remember watching my first Russell Peters video at my cousins place, and that was the classic gig which included “be a man” and “Chop some bong”. I remember laughing so hard my stomach hurt, and I also remember asking my cousin to burn me a copy of the video onto the CD so that I could watch it over and over again.

Then I remember sharing it with my friends. Again burning a whole bunch of ‘illegal’ cds.

Then I remember going onto youtube to get more Russell Peters, for free and technically illegal as well.

Finally I remember bit-torrenting Red, White and Brown, and laughing my ass off in front of my PC monitor.

And Lastly, I remember watching a Russell Peters video where Russell calls guys like me “fucking downloaders!’, as a direct reference to us getting all our material online rather than watching his show.

Well guess what, Russell Peters is coming to Malaysia, and the only thing I’m worried about is whether I’ll be able to get a ticket. Cause I know of at least 100 people who are just waiting for April 18th so that they can finally buy their Russell Peters Tickets. The Russell Peters Dubai show sold out in 8 minutes…..8 minutes. My family PC at home takes 10 minutes to boot into windows, AirAsias free Air tickets don’t sell out that fast…it’s every man for himself here people. I wonder if Russell gives Indian discounts?