Did you know Malaysia has a Multimedia and Communication Commission that oversees the quality of service for telecommunications companies including the broadband services they provide. I also understand that they are the enforcers of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, with a determination on the mandatory standards for the Quality of Service (Broadband Access Service) .

In not so many words, there are actually laws in place to ensure that your broadband provider meets a minimum standard in terms of uptime and service availability.

However, after reading the a short snippet of the Act from the SKMM website here, I was surprised to find that while it did have a specific outline for the quality of service, it did not have an outline for the penalty imposed if the quality of service was not met.

A couple of days back, I wrote about how copyright law was preventing a lot of us from listening the entire Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech because it was protected by copyright, and in order to listen to it you had to pay Martin Luther Kings family royalty. Today I did some searching on pinterest, and found some rather remarkable works of art around Martin Luther King that were pinned in pinterest, these works of art would not be possible if the family had further copyrighted other aspects of MLKs life, and with newer stricter copyright laws that could very well be the case.

Remember for a pinterest invite, just leave a comment on the post and I’ll send one to you as soon as I have the time. For now, enjoy!

From pinterest User Effeluna 

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]