Now for an artist to copyright a song or a piece of work, for that artist to then legally make a living of is fine.

It’s not fine if you need to pay royalties to use Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream speech”, because his family own the copyright to a speech that is a part of US history. They later sold those rights to EMI, and now a recording company owns the rights to the speech that encapsulates the civil rights movement, and that same recording company is patrolling the online alleys to catch the copyright infringers.

Yesterday, I was over at a friends house fixing up a PC that was ridiculously infected with malware. The only complaint they had however was that they couldn’t access malaysiakini, a local news site that they subscribe too. True enough the page wasn’t loading completely, and it was frighteningly slow even when it did. Now, this sort of symptom usually doesn’t lead to much, maybe bad browser plugin or something like, but browsing from all 3 browsers on the machine (Chrome, Firefox and IE) yielded the same results.

So I decided to do what I always do and perform a Google search, and Google wasn’t loading…gasp!!

Then I thought, I’d try bing instead…and it wasn’t working either.

Finally I did a simple netstat -a on the command prompt and I was horrified.

A recent article from the Star noted that Malaysia was about to sign a new Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that would make subject local copyright laws to those imposed by the US. Now according to the article from the star the purpose of us looking into a stricter Intellectual property law was to “encourage investments, innovation, research and development”. That is a false premise.

The laws by themselves are useless if enforcement isn’t there, and if you can’t even enforce the current IP law, then why bother changing the laws if there is no plan to up the enforcement? Also this premise that we will encourage research and development with a strict law is both flawed and without basis. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that innovation thrives when Intellectual property is strictly enforced, in fact innovation is effectively crippled when you’re afraid that anything you produce might infringe on someone else’s copyright. It would lead to a point where corporations would spend more checking on copyright infringement then they would actually innovating and producing.

Pinterest is an awesome social site that let’s you ‘pin’ up interesting articles on boards that other users can view and then continue sharing. It’s absolutely amazing, and I’m in love with it. If you’re still curious about what Pinterest is or want to snag an invite (it’s still invite only btw), then just leave a comment at the bottom of this page and I’ll send you an invite as soon as I can. If you don’t know what Pinterest is, just head over a board I created from random quotes I saw from other users over here http://pinterest.com/keithrozario/quotes/.

Alright, so my Unifi is back up and running, apparently it was an area wide network issue that caused half my town to experience a Unifi Blackout, I have thus named this debacle, the Great CNY blackout of 2012. I was left 9 days without an internet connection and was forced to reload my Yes Broadband package to go online.

Anyway, with a little credit left on my Yes broadband account, I decided to test out the speeds of Yes against my Unifi connection and see who comes up tops.

Some disclaimers before I continue, I ran this test on a Saturday morning where web-traffic shouldn’t be too high in Malaysia, and I subscribe to the 5Mbps Unifi Package and a standard Yes pre-paid package. I also decided to run 4 test per ISP, and then compare the results. First I tested against 2 local servers (Singapore considered local here), and then 1 test each to the US and Europe. I used speedtest.net and while the results will probably be inconclusive, it’s a good benchmark to use in case you’re wondering whose faster.

I just finished Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, the definitive book on crowdsourcing, and although it was written nearly 4 years ago, I was really bowled over by key insights throughout the book. Crowdsourcing is more than just the design work or iStockphoto, there’s also an offshoot into the world of Crowd-predicting. Utilizing the wisdom of the crowds to predict anything from sports results, Hollywood sales or even Presidential elections, and it appears these prediction markets actually do a pretty good job of predicting the correct outcome. They’re not right 100% of the time (then again neither are the experts), but overall the Crowds can –and do–predict with great accuracy.

The premise of crowd-predicting is simple. Get a whole bunch of people together and then ask them to predict the outcome of a particular event, once each individual prediction comes through you then aggregate that information to get the final result. Proponents of crowd-predicting say this result often beats the ’experts’, and they have some data to back it up.

[blackbirdpie url=“https://twitter.com/#!/keithrozario/status/167140677531074560”]

I posted the tweet above about 40 minutes ago, complaining about my omni-present (or omni-absent) Unifi connection issues about an hour ago.

Barely 30 minutes later, a friend of mine retweeted it and cc’ed a TM twitter account @TMConnects

A rather interesting take on Social Media courtesy of douglaswray via instagram.

Check out more cool stuff from Douglas [here]

I used to be a strong believer of organics, until I saw the prices of organic foods at my local Jusco. Needless to say, I stopped believing in organics pretty quickly. Of course, I understand the premise, which is that organic food is 100% natural, without added chemicals or fertilizers, no herbicides or pesticides leaving your food 100% wholesome. There is strong justification for this, although limited scientific proof.

The way to think about organic is that, mankind evolved to consume certain types of food and nutrition, but with the advent of ‘industrialized agriculture’  things changed. We now consume tomatoes all year round, although it’s a seasonal fruit, the concept is simple–pluck the tomatoes when they’re ripe and then spray them with chemicals just before they hit supermarket shelves, that way nobody needs to worry about seasons. This is true for nearly all your seasonal fruits that appear ‘all year round’. All this makes the fruit un-natural or at least–less nutritious than it’s purely organic counterpart.

Just this morning I wrote about how my Unifi services went down and how I wrote a letter to what ‘appears’ to be Telekom Malaysias CEO email address.

A lot of Malaysians are skeptical that CEOs would actually respond to emails. Steve Jobs has responded to many emails personally and so has his successor Tim Cook. There have even been reports of Palm's CEO responding to customer query and even non-tech companies like home depot doing the same.

These however are American companies, not Malaysian, would a Malaysian CEO actually respond to an email from a small-time RM150/month customer like myself? I figured why not give it a try, I was already internet-less -- what more is there left to lose?