A random thought occurred to me while I was taking my morning shower. The thought wandered towards criminal activities and how the disconnect between technology and law can be used to the advantage of the criminals.

While encryption is a powerful tool that can be used, as the little comic above shows, it is most easy to compel the criminal to surrender the password or keys to decrypt the information. However, there is another bit of technology that will come in useful: virtual machines.

As the name suggests, a VM is a software implementation of hardware. It fakes software into thinking that it is running on real hardware. Simply put, it allows a virtual computer to run inside a real computer.

To the end user, a VM can behave just like the real thing. In fact, an entire industry has sprouted up in selling ‘virtual servers’ for people who wish to have their own servers. It is a cost saving measure as several virtual servers can share an actual server.

Now, the thing is a virtual server is just like any other software. In fact, Xen advertises the fact that they have live migration capabilities – the ability to transfer a running virtual machine from one real machine to another, via the network.

This means that a criminal, should do all of their illicit work in a VM. Then, when they law comes knocking, they can just transmit the VM to a machine located elsewhere. If the machine is located in an unfriendly foreign country, this will frustrate any attempt to retrieve vital evidence from the VM.

However, the authorities can still compel the criminal to transfer the VM back into the host country. C’est tres interessant, n’est pas?

A bunch of friends and I went to watch the Dark Knight last night. Although I lived closest to the cinema, I ended up arriving the earliest, a full 30 minutes before the show began. The cinema was packed full and we were lucky to get the seats that we managed to get.

Right after they had finished showing the trailers and we were eager to get going with the film, the lights in the cinema came on and the screen turned off. Then, a bunch of red lights turned on as well and a calm voice came over the sound system telling us that an “incident had arisen”, which required us to vacate the whole cinema. So, people began filing out using the nearest emergency exits.

At this point, I thought that the Joker might make an appearance in the cinema. Maybe the cinema had some extra plans to make this movie a memorable experience. We had even seen some of the staff members made up as clowns earlier. So, there was a basis for this thought. Maybe some of the staff would invade at that point and put up an act in front or something.

Then, a member of the cinema staff came in to tell us that it was a false alarm. So, everyone quickly returned to their seats while the staff members went to chase down those who had already left via the emergency exits. We waited for about 10 minutes for them to fill up the cinema again. Then, they restarted the film from where it stopped. And the show began.

Some things that I thought were interesting about the show. Neither the opening credits nor the end credits mentioned “Batman” anywhere. The opening credits merely showed a DC Comics and Warner Bros intro and the symbol of the Bat. This took all of about 60 seconds and the show started. It was only during the end credits that “The Dark Knight” appeared, as part of a monologue by Jim Gordon.

As for the show, I have to say that I didn’t realise that 3 hours had passed. That is good. It shows that the film kept me at the edge of my seat throughout. Good thing was that the whole cinema was silent as well. Although some friends complained that the first half was a bit slow, I felt that it was important as it had to introduce a whole bunch of new characters and also set the tone of how desperate the situation in Gotham had become.

It is a little unfortunate that Heath Ledger has passed away. His portrayal of The Joker was awesome and I think that anyone else who tries to fill his shoes is just going to suck. I don’t know how anyone could possibly better his performance, which made me feel like slapping him and afraid of him at the same time. I seriously think that they should award him a posthumous Oscar for it. For once, the villain carried the whole show through, instead of the hero. Batman felt like a supporting role, compared to The Joker.

One of the interesting moments in the show was when the Prisoner’s Dilemma made an appearance. That was an interesting 15 minutes of the show. I also loved the way that they portrayed Batman’s fall from grace and it sets the tone for the rest of the franchise. Now everyone can understand why Batman behaves the way that he does, seemingly without morals.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was also a much better Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes was. Although I had never thought that Maggie was that hot, her first few minutes on screen were very much so.

At one point in the movie, they showed a piece of technology marvel that Fox had used in Hong Kong. And my engineering brain immediately began to think about how I might possibly build such a thing using the technology today. This is one of the reasons that I like the new Batman franchise. All the gadgets and toys used are very “realistic” and can actually be built using standard technology today.

Anyway, I think that I’ve talked enough about Batman. Go watch it! I might go watch it again in a couple of weeks time.

Recently, our new Minister of Information has announced some minor changes to our dearest RTM television channels. Beginning the end of this month, RTM will broadcast live parliament proceedings whenever parliament is in session, between 10:00 and 10:30am daily.

Broadcasting parliament proceedings is a common practice in most democratic countries as a means to encourage accountability and transparency. It serves to inform and educate the public on various national issues and it also allows the voters to gauge how their various MPs are performing at their jobs. So, it is certainly a move that I feel is, although long overdue, thoroughly a welcomed one.

However, some friends have harped that it’s the time chosen is not a very good one as it’s during mid-morning when most people would be at work. But there’s obviously some rational in choosing that time.

Firstly, it’s probably the timeslot with the least number of advertisers. So, filling up with something as boring as parliamentary proceedings, would not affect the bottom line much. Then, it is a good opportunity to gauge interest before evaluating whether or not to start a dedicated parliament channel similar to BBC Parliament.

But the main concern would actually be the actual show that we will be seeing. I would think that the opposition members who have always complained about not getting any airtime, would relish the opportunity at getting free airtime now. Hopefully, they’ll later expand the timeslot so that we would be able to see more of the parliamentary proceedings.

Regardless, I do think that it is a good overture that there are some changes happening in government. Whether or not we’re moving in the right direction is yet to be seen. But it is still good to know that we are moving somewhere, one step at a time.

Actually, everyone should make sure that we support this move and tune into the parliament proceedings everyday. Somebody should actually automate the task of recording the broadcast at 10am each day and uploading it to YouTube. It is something that is fairly trivial to do, with the right knowledge and equipment.

I recently thought that I might dabble in a little bit of comics. That’s when I found out that it isn’t easy at all. This little comic that I did, took me a few hours to do. I had a simulation running at the time. So, I was technically “working” on my research project. Anyway, I think that I will try to make a little comic to supplement my entries. I hope to get better at it as I go along.

I was never very good at drawing on a computer. So, most of the graphics used are public domain clip-art that I got from Open Clip Art. I used the free (as in speech) software, InkScape, to create the illustrations. I then exported the illustrations into a PNG format, which is an open graphics format. See a pattern developing here? Lots of freedom and openness involved.

As a result, I am also releasing the comics using a free (as in speech) license. I have decided to release them under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. I hope that you’ll all enjoy the comics!

As reported here and here, it is kind of good to see that Linux was the only operating system left standing in the end. If we read into how the hacking competition was conducted, it becomes quite clear that the Open Source way of doing things is probably the best way to do things.

For many years, the main selling point for the Open Source way was the fact that anyone could look and modify the source code of computer programmes, freely. The logic behind this is that with many eyeballs looking at the code, the chances of spotting errors is higher. This is also the logic behind peer-review in science.

In this particular competition, three different laptops were configured and the hackers were challenged to break into the system “as-is” and if they succeeded, they would walk home with some cash and the laptop that they broke into. Surprisingly, the first one to fall was the AirBook. You could possibly consider that the AirBook, being such a beautiful machine, would have attracted the most attempts. But that still doesn’t change the fact that it fell so quickly.

Some slightly more technical people will, at this point, quote that OSX is based on an Open Source operating system, Darwin, which is itself a descendent of FreeBSD. But then, there are many parts of OSX that is proprietary, like the graphical user interface running on top of Darwin. Also, it is reported that the culprit that caused the downfall of the AirBook, was actually a piece of software by Adobe.

Then the rules were relaxed further to allow the machines to be compromised using any pre-installed software on the system. This caused the Windows machine to be breached, again due to a problem with a piece of software from Adobe. On the last day, the rules were relaxed further, to allow the machines to be compromised using any commonly installed 3rd party software. And surprisingly, the Linux machine held on without being compromised.

Instead of gloating on the strengths of Linux, I would just like to point out that there is a correlation between openness and security. When I was a boy, I was once told by a Debian developer that, security by obscurity is not security at all. That totally confounded me at the time but I have since learned the wisdom of such words.

A truly secure system is one that is thoroughly open, that you could fiddle with as much as you’d like, and still remain secure. The Linux operating system is developed on an open platform. All the various bits running on top of it are also bound by the same rules. Even random 3rd party software are often developed along the same lines. So, openness breeds security.