According to a report from Channel News Asia, a total of nearly 200 DBS and POSB customers in Singapore have been hit by unauthorized withdrawals averaging S$1000 each. The withdrawals were done in Malaysia “while the ATM cards were with them safely in Singapore”. Which begs the question what does ‘safely in Singapore’ mean?

Channel News Asia goes on to report that withdrawals were made in Kuala Lumpur (not neighboring Johor Bahru) and done approximately the same time as ‘valid’ withdrawals. ZDNet has reported DBS is working together with its IT vendor, NCR to understand the issue and investigate further. It’s also suspended all suspected cards and are contacting customers to give them what it says would be a full refund. NCR also happen to make almost 90% of all ATMs in Malaysia, and according to Yahoo! news, this was “a security breach to its anti-skimming devices installed on ATM machines”, so I’m just wondering why this wasn’t done to Malaysian accounts of local banks? 

There’s been a recent surge of Anti-SOPA and Anti-PIPA sentiment over in the Unites States, Wikipedia blacked out it’s entire webpage and Google, Twitter and Facebook all joined in the fray. I’ve even received multiple emails from the Mozilla foundation on how to combat SOPA and recent a congratulatory cum Thank you note from Mozilla for joining the fight. Make no mistake, SOPA isn’t dead, it’s just been shelved for the time being, get ready people round2 starts soon.

In Malaysia though there has been little reporting on the issue, while some local blogs did mention SOPA, and a few newspapers briefly covered it, not much has been discussed on either of the laws. It’s typical of the Malaysian media to report less on matters that actually matter, and more on frivolous material like this article from the New Straits Times that read “Unity is Priceless: PM”. Really? Cause the rest of us thought Unity was worth around about Rm2.75 . I mean apart from pointing out the obvious, the article has absolutely no content, apart from the big picture with the “We Love the PM” nonsense.

That being said, there were a few articles on SOPA and PIPA, however those articles for censored to a certain degree, and here’s how.

Back in 2007, I had a n

ew year resolution to run 5km in 25 minutes, or more specifically to get my body in good enough shape to run 5km in 25 minutes. That was my aim, it was partly driven by some research I read that it’s better to have just 1 resolution and making that resolution specific rather than generic. So rather than, ‘I’ll exercise’, I needed a goal or a target to reach–and I chose the target of being able to run 5km in 25 minutes, because about 14 years ago, I ran 8km in 40 minutes at my high-schools cross country, and I thought 5km in 25 minutes was a pretty reasonable number to me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t accomplish my resolution in 2007, nor in 2008 or 2009, not even in 2010 and finally didn’t even jog in 2011.

So for the last 5 years, I’ve made just one new-year resolution and failed to accomplish it. That is a big FAILURE!!

or is it…..

I’ve posted a couple of post around SOPA and PIPA, and today there was a protest from one of the most web-traffic websites of all – WIKIPEDIA.

Wikipedia, today was blacked out to protest SOPA and now you know. Every college student looking to do a term paper, every high school student looking for information on a term paper and if you’re looking for just about anything online, you’re going to see a blacked out wikipedia– and so now you know about SOPA.

I basically live on Google servers, the first sites I visit when I wake up are Google Mail and Google Reader, without these two sites I’m basically lost. I seldom log on to facebook anymore and twitter may keep me occupied for about an hour, but after that I need my fix of Google. Google is such an integral part of our lives, in fact since 70% of my readers come here via a Google search, chances are you wouldn’t be here reading this very post right now–without Google.

The question then becomes how much do we trust Google? Have we really thought about trusting Google given how much we rely on it. Think about it if Google were to go down, where would you go for more information. Chances are you’d head on over to bing, take bing away and you start having problems.

How do you search for search engines, when you don’t know any??

[catlist name=copyright-censorship numberposts=500 excerpt=yes]

Late last year the Government announced the Kampung Wi-Fi (or Village Wi-Fi initiative). The initiative was mooted by The Information, Communications and Culture Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Rais Yatim. Currently there are already 1,400 villages with Wi-Fi access and the Government hopes to increase that to 4,000 by year end.

That’s good news to a lot of villagers, broadband penetration is considered a right in certain countries, and bring internet access to rural Malaysia is a moved to be applauded. However, there doesn’t seem to be much on the technical aspect of the project available to the public.

According to this report from the Borneo Post, the Kampung Wi-Fi is a public-private sector initiative that involved expertise from Pernec Paypoint Sdn Bhd, so that’s an unknown company to me. The cost of the Kampung Wi-Fi initiative is anywhere from Rm25,000 to Rm32,000 per village, which for the additional 2,600 villages we plan to deploy to brings total cost of the project to RM65 million (onwards).