The big FB goes public today, making a lot of people very happy and few people very very rich, including one Eduardo Saverin – who will probably be barred from ever entering the US –EVER AGAIN!

However, that’s a story for another day, today Facebook is the hottest bit of tech news you can get your hands on, the last time an IPO this exciting occurred it was for a search engine named Google. Google IPO-ed at around $80, today it shares hover between $550 - $650. Just saying.

So it’s really awe inspiring to look at the numbers, 845 million active users (just slightly smaller than India) 2.7 Billion likes/comments everday, 250 million photos every single day and 100 Billion friendship. You my dear readers could own a small –make that VERY small- part of the company for the $38 share price tag people are talking about.

So how does the $38 price tag for Facebook Shares compare to Malaysian companies?A quick calculation puts Facebooks market cap at USD100 Billion, or roughly RM300 Billion. Malaysia doesn’t have a RM300 Billion dollar company  (or at least one that is public listed), so in order to give you an idea of the magnitude of Facebook, I had to combine a few Malaysian companies to reach Rm300 Billion. With the Rm300 Billion Facebook is worth, you could buy outright:

So you want to develop an iOS application for your iPhone or iPad.

Thinking of being the next big app to hit the appstore.

Only one problem, developing applications for the iPhone and iPad require a Mac or more specifically a machine running Mac OS X. It could be you actually own a Mac, you could go and buy yourself an RM1800 Mac Mini, or you could try a hackintosh, although just creating a hackintosh would be a small project in itself.

Now Hackintosh is actually way beyond the scope of this article, so rest assured I’m not asking you to do anything ridiculously technical or suspiciously illegal. (although those are my favorite type of things to do)

If you’re reading this though, chances are you have a windows PC at home, or even Ubuntu, that’s quite standard and sufficient if you wish to develop Android apps, and they rake in money too.

iOS apps however, are a different beast all together and require a Mac OS X device, which is pretty easy to purchase in Malaysia, but they don’t come cheap. You may want to think hard before plunking down an extra 2-3 thousand ringgit just to ’try’ your hand at app development. Just like you wouldn’t want to buy 3 year subscription to your neighborhood gym only to go 5 times in the first month – and then never again!

You may remember a previous post about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement that the Malaysian Government (our Government) is looking to sign under the pretense of protecting intellectual property to  “encourage investments, innovation, research and development.” Read up this article from the star to learn more.

Like any other law regarding copyright, this one is complicated and hard to understand (at least for me). However, Techdirt recently had two brilliant articles regarding the TPP with regards to Chile. The first article outlines the fact that Chile (another tentative partner in the agreement) was questioning the benefits of joining the TPP, citing the high cost of complying to Intellectual Property obligations:

In my previous post, I wrote about how I bought and Amazon Kindle, and how I can use gift cards to purchase ebooks from the Kindle store. So far the Kindle has been an amazing experience and I personally recommend you get yourself one. However, there is a downside, since there is ’technically’ no legal way to obtain ebooks for your Kindle device.

Today I hope to explore the legality of downloading ebooks from Amazon, and how stupid copyright laws, badly behaving book publishers and a Malaysian Sales Tax  all contribute to making it impossible for you to purchase ebooks for your Kindle while still complying with any and all laws pertaining to them.

One thing is true of all governments, the most reliable records are Tax records. That is one of the coolest quotes from a very cool movie (which is saying a lot). In V for Vendetta, the heroes try to piece together a puzzle by visiting the tax records to locate some missing information, in real-life we’re also faced with the same problem. No matter how corrupt or bureaucratic you think the government is, there will always be a paper-trail for money and sooner or later someone will find it. The solution for a crony-heavy government was simple, load the system with bureaucracy so no one will find out. The problem was while no ‘one’ may have found out, a group of inspired citizens armed with nothing more than a proper system can troll down all the bureaucratic walls you can build.

A couple of years ago, the Guardian newspaper set out to go through all the tax and expense claims of every single member of parliament. While the fallout from the reports were clear, less publicity was given to the actual method that the newspaper used. People naturally assumed that when the news read “Guardian reports MP claims….” , that a regular journalist working for the paper trolled through some documentation and arrived at the results. Usually the assumption includes a snarly eyed journalist with big black thick-framed glasses, gulping down gallons of coffee while his tie came loose, just an assumption of course.

Digi.com has an annual Internet for all awards where they aim to with the aim of “showcasing the incredible creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism of ordinary Malaysians using the Internet in extraordinary ways” . A much simpler way of thinking about the Internet for all awards is that it’s just like the Grammys for Malaysian blogs.

Digi have actually increased the breadth of the awards to include categories like

Says.My :: Online shop of the year

Malaysiakini :: Photojournalist of the year

Google :: Most inspiring internet for good Award ; and my favorite

Lowyat.net :: Fave Tech Head 

In a moment of shameless self-promotion and drunken debauchery, I submitted this blog right here keithrozario.com into the Lowyat.net :: Fave Tech Head category, hoping that I may be considered as a Fave Tech Head. Of course, it’ll be a difficult task, considering the category consist of people like the legendary Paul Tan, or the immensely successful Hongkiat.com so I actually can be lumped in the “Doesn’t have a pray in Hell” category. Then again this blog has always been about me trying out new things, and trying to win an internet award is a new thing!

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.