Sybreon Ones Nought

Seditious Acts

It seems that RPK is being charged with sedition. I find that rather curious simply because I’m not sure if he had actually committed any act of sedition. According to the article in TheStar, he had written a blog entry entitled “Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell”. In that entry, he had implicated the involvement of our DPM and his wife in the scandal.

Alright, obviously RPK should not get away with randomly accusing people (especially prominent people) of being implicated in criminal offences, especially when the courts have not mentioned anything to such end. Regardless of what had transpired, it is generally considered wrong to fitnah anyone. As I understand it, this is an even more heinous crime than murder, in Islam.

This obviously qualifies as an act of libel. If our DPM or his wife feels slighted in any way, they should very well, sue RPK’s ass off in court for libel. They could very well bankrupt the man seeing that they are very prominent people, with fragile reputations to protect. So, the damages could be astronomical. However, it is rather curious to try to get RPK under the Sedition Act.

According to Wikipedia, under section 3(1), those acts defined as having a seditious tendency are acts with a tendency:

(a) to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against any Ruler or against any Government;
(b) to excite the subjects of the Ruler or the inhabitants of any territory governed by any government to attempt to procure in the territory of the Ruler or governed by the Government, the alteration, otherwise than by lawful means, of any matter as by law established;
(c) to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the administration of justice in Malaysia or in any State;
(d) to raise discontent or disaffection amongst the subjects of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong or of the Ruler of any State or amongst the inhabitants of Malaysia or of any State;
(e) to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Malaysia; or
(f) to question any matter, right, status, position, privilege, sovereignty or prerogative established or protected by the provisions of part III of the Federal constitution or Article 152, 153 or 181 of the Federal Constitution.

As I understand it, an act of sedition can only be committed against a government or ruler. You cannot commit a seditious act against a fellow citizen. So, reading the various definitions of sedition, I still don’t really know which one applies in this case. Obviously, I’m not a lawyer. So, I surrender to the better judgement of the legal people in these matters. However, it still smacks of a strong arm scare tactic in this case. Someone needed to shut RPK up for good and decided to invoke the heftiest penalties on him.

Seeing that RPK has been rather mischievous when it comes to the law, I doubt that he can expect any leniency from the magistrate. However, I do hope that things go well for him because he really seems to have a lot of insight into the inner workings of Malaysian politics. It would be a waste to see him go. I did enjoy reading some of his more flamboyant entries.

Orang Besi

Iron Man Awesome! Finally, a film where the resident engineer gets to be a superhero. Normally, if they ever bother to depict engineers in one of the main roles, it would inevitably be one of a sidekick, or someone who supplies the hero with the requisite technology to blow things up. But, in this Marvel of a movie, the uber engineer gets to play superhero and save dozens of Afghan kids and a hot chick in the process.

But there was one scene in the movie that clearly shows that Robert Downey is not a real engineer. Nobody cleans a soldering iron by dabbing it onto a wet sponge like he did in the film. That just cools the iron without removing any residue, which is bad. We swipe the iron tip across the sponge in order to remove any excess solder. But it’s a tiny error, which will go unnoticed by 99.9% of the film goers.

I’d like to point out that much of the technology featured in the film, already exists today, at least in the labs. The idea of a powered exoskeleton is nothing new. Same goes for the computer interface. Jet packs have also enjoyed some limited success. The only possible snag, as illustrated in the movie, is the power source. Until the day that we have desktop fusion reactors, I don’t think that there’s anything that can produce 3GW/s of power. That’s technically enough power to go back to the future, twice each second.

I have an affinity for flawed heroes that have a shining heart (in this case, his heart quite literally emits light). Robert Downey Jr is the perfect actor, as he carries off the quirky, flawed superhero complex to the maximum. I’m only a little worried about the sequel, where they intend to explore Tony Stark’s descent into alcoholism. Robert Downey has already got troubles with drugs. I hope that they serve him lots of tea in the sequel instead of real alcohol.

Spoiler
And yes, there is definitely going to be a sequel. Not only that, there are going to be a couple of spin-offs. For those of you who bothered to stay till after the end credits, you would have witnessed a scene between Robert Downey and Samuel L. Jackson, who says something like: “I’m the boss of SHIELD and I’d like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative”.

The next two movies that I’m looking forward to are: Indiana Jones and Batman. This is going to be a happy summer for me!

Education Free

Seems like a recent development, but the Public Services Department, has announced that they will be offering scholarships to anyone, who scored 9As and above, in last year’s SPM examinations. In addition, anyone who manages to secure a place in a top international university, will also be given scholarships. All this is regardless of background. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing overall.

Something similar actually came up in our TehTarik discussions yesterday. There are many weaknesses in the system that need to be addressed but I won’t go into them, as we’ve already talked about it yesterday. When the write up is ready, I might link it in here. However, there are some things that I would like to look at:

Purely results based award.
This is a two edged sword. On the one side, it cuts through all sorts of arbitrary ethnic discrimination policies, which is a good thing. However, it cuts away all discriminatory policies, including the positive ones. Now, a 9A student from a rich family will be funded, while an 8A student from a poor one won’t be, which I think is not a great idea. The whole idea of getting an education is to gain social mobility. I also feel that a well-rounded 8A student deserves the scholarship more than a 9A bookworm. So, that is why I’m not sure if a totally blind policy, is a good thing.
Publicly funded education at the university level.
The new policy gives the students a lot of options in getting into university. They would be fully funded if they get into any of the local public universities, local foreign universities, and top international universities. So there should not be any complaints from any quarter. However, I’m only worried about where all this money is going to come from. The funding for public universities could be diverted from the existing PTPTN scheme. I’m a little concerned about the ones who get into top international universities.

Well, I’ve always been an advocate of our government’s policy of funding education. We are one of the few countries in this world, with such a generous government, when it comes to education. I also agree that we need to build human capital, in order to develop the country. However, one of the issues raised yesterday, was what to do with all these graduates.

We need to really ask ourselves if the existing job market is capable of absorbing all these people. With the numbers of unemployed graduates coming out each year, numbering more than 60000, we need to really ask ourselves what are we going to do with these people. I cannot help but wonder if the civil service actually has enough vacancies to staff all these scholars.

What will most likely happen, as has always been happening all this while, are that these scholars will not be absorbed into the civil service and be cast into the wind, so to speak. In the end, it wastes the tax dollars and the scholar’s time. So, maybe it’s a better idea to divert all that cash, into improving the economy and creating a job market first.

Some will say that this is a chicken and egg problem. But I think that it’s not and the evidence speaks for itself. The fact that our graduate unemployment rates are so high, means that there aren’t enough jobs for us. It is telling when we are importing foreign labour, to fill up all our low level jobs. When we start importing foreign nationals to fill up our professional jobs, that’s when we have a need for more graduates.

Production Reproduction

My favourite humanities professor, who taught me cultural anthropology, used to say this often. He said that the history of Man, is entirely about production and reproduction. If you look at the way we often look at history, his statement is rather true. History was essentially about lineage and what great people did. Hence, the two words. This random memory popped into my head when I read this article in the Beebs.

A local council employee in Japan has been punished after it was discovered he had accessed porn websites at work more than 780,000 times in nine months.

Shock! Horror! How could anyone possibly surf for porn at the rate of 20 pages per minute?! The dude must have been neither productive at work, nor reproductive at home. Granted, I’ve recently learnt of how progressive the Japanese are at sex but this is just a bit too much. I cannot even begin to put my shock and horror into words. The fact that he was 57 years old, shocked me even more.

He only got discovered after he caught an infection from a visit to a porn site. His computer caught a virus, which alerted the tech people in his office, who then investigated the source of the infection and discovered his habits. If you read this paragraph again, it’s kind of funny how, someone can catch something by visiting a porn site. It’s kind of ironic.

Well, I know that some people do regularly surf porn in the office, cause of the high speed connections that companies usually have. I’ve personally seen it happen at a place that I’ve worked at before. Some companies institute certain policies on what their networks can and cannot be used for. Most companies aren’t tech savvy enough to have such policies on paper. Regardless, it’s not always easy to police these policies.

The only way to do it would be to adopt a “default deny” security policy, which means denying access to every website unless it’s on an approved whitelist. But this will hamper the productivity of workers who are surfing genuinely work related websites. As a result, most companies adopt a “default allow” security policy, and only block access to certain time wasters like facebook and youtube. But it’s obviously impossible to catch everything like this.

What’s actually needed are Artificial Intelligence based network monitoring systems. Systems that can decide But these are still in their infancy and unfortunately, there has not been much progress in the field of AI for decades. But I digress.

So, in conclusion, I do think that there’s some truth in the belief that the adult industry is the largest one on the Internet. There’s just not been any conclusive study done on this matter. Maybe some economist should study this.

Information Insecurity

In light of recent developments in Malaysia, with the computers of certain prominent anti-establishment bloggers, consistently being confiscated for dubious investigative purposes, I thought that it might be a suitable time to write a little about information security. The whole idea behind information security isn’t to foil justice, but to make sure that the rights of people are not infringed.

With harddisk sizes going into the Terabyte range, there are lots of things stored on a person’s personal computer, including personal information that nobody has any right to access. Sometimes, these confiscated computers are subject to random checks in the hope of finding something, anything, that can be used to entrap the owner. So, let’s start with the basics.

Email Security
Although the technology has been around for more than a decade, I’m surprised that most people do not know about it, much less use it. Email, is transmitted in the clear. So, anything that is said through an email, can be easily intercepted and read by others. The only way to protect the content of email messages is through the use of public key (PKI) cryptography.

The most commonly used software is PGP or if you want an open source version, GNUPG (GPG). Both these software integrate fairly well with all popular email programmes, whether it be Outlook, Thunderbird or Kmail. So, you wouldn’t even need to know any voodoo to get it to work. If you use a webmail programme, these tools also provide a regular text based mode, which can encrypt/decrypt plain text documents, which you can then cut-and-paste into the webmail client.

This software allows you to encrypt every email that you write, so that the only person who can read it is your intended receipient. So, I would urge everyone to install and learn how to use these tools. These tools should be used for all business communications as well, if you don’t want your competition eavesdropping on your sensitive communiques.

How PKI works is by exchanging public keys. A public key is a very large number that is represented in text, as shown below. When you send me an email message, your private key and my public key is used to generate a secret key that is used to encrypt the message. When I receive it, I will be able to decode the email using my private key and your public key. So, at no time would either of us need to expose our private keys. All these things happen mathemagically.

Any eavesdropper would only end up reading a bunch of random letters and numbers (much like the ones above). As an additional step of protection, do not store your emails locally in an unencrypted form. Leave them encrypted and have your email programme decrypt them each time you wish to read them. All these steps add an additional layer of protection.

There are no known exploits that can easily defeat this scheme, at least not until computers can factorise extremely large numbers quickly enough, at which point, you just double the size of the encryption key and continue using it. The easiest way to steal a PKI protected email is to just haul you to court and force you to divulge it’s contents.

Harddisk Security
It’s no use just protecting our communications channel if we do not protect our data storage as well. So, all harddisks, whether internal or external, should be encrypted. Truecrypt is a tool that runs on all platforms, which allows on-the-fly-encryption (OTFE). OTFE essentially intercepts all access to the harddisk and encrypts anything being saved and decrypts anything being read, transparently.

So, if you ever lose your laptop due to carelessness, theft or legal confiscation, at the very least, your data is safely tucked away. Anyone who tries to access your data without the correct keys, will only end up reading a bunch of random gibberish again. So, all your private communications, photos and videos, will be protected under heavy lock and key.

However, there is one caveat to using OTFE encryption, which only applies if you’re traveling to the US. The government is legally allowed to make copies of your harddisk data at the border. If your computer is encrypted, they are also empowered to deny you entry or to confiscate your computer. So, it may not be a good idea to travel with encrypted data through US customs.

There is one currently known exploit, to defeat this system, but it involves a lot of preplanning. The attacker would need to physically compromise your computer within minutes of it being shutdown, and preserve the memory contents by freezing your memory module, as illustrated through the following video. The solution to this problem is to not leave your computer running, unattended. Given enough off-time, the following attack would not be plausible.

Dancing Wrong

I had recently landed a job interview with a very prestigious technology company. Although I ended up getting rejected, this is not going to be a bad rant because I am quite happy. I am glad to have even been given an interview as this company is known to receive thousands of CVs each day. I’d also learnt quite a few things from the process itself, that I could possibly apply to my future endeavours. So, it is not a totally wasted experience.

With this particular interview, when I asked for feedback, the interviewer mentioned that he was quite impressed with me. He even thought that I was particularly suitable for a secret project that they had going and spent a few minutes describing it to me. I was really enthusiastic about it and I thought that it was a great idea. So, I was quite happy at the end of the interview and was waiting for the good news from my recruiter.

After several days of not hearing anything, I took it as a good sign because it is in my experience that when I do badly at an interview, I get told about it very quickly, usually within a day or two. But after a week, my recruiter got back to me and told me that while they recognise that I have great skills and experience, after careful consideration they have determined that I am not a direct fit for the job.

When I asked my recruiter for feedback from the engineering team, especially areas for improvement, I was told that they couldn’t provide me with any specific feedback, which kind of sucks. I was really looking forward to my next interview where I could impress them further with my abilities. Even if I didn’t get the job in the end, I was going to learn as much as possible from the process. I was particularly looking forward to the final stage of 4 straight interviews.

However, this is kind of symptomatic of my relationship with job interviews. This is not the first time that it has happened to me and I doubt that it is going to be the last time either. Generally, I would attend a job interview for an engineering position and impress the interviewers. I know where I stand among my cohort. They would let me know that I did well for the interview, but they wouldn’t be able to offer me a job.

But the problem doesn’t stop there. Even my sponsor is not getting back to me on my future job. I went home last summer to have a job interview and speak to them about my future job. Because they paid for my PhD here, I am bonded to serve them for several years. I am rather interested to work with them, seeing that I have heard good things from someone, who used to work for IBM and Motorola but, who now prefers working for them.

Since then, I’ve been patiently pressing them for a reply. I’m not familiar with how the organisation works internally. So, I will not comment on their procedures. But at first, I asked my future boss, if he had come to a decision but was told that I should refer the matter to HR, which I duly did, only to be told by them that they are waiting for my boss to get back to them on the issue. So, I’m still waiting patiently for them to get back to me on the matter. As long as I get a reply from them before I finish, I will be quite happy.

But this rather long wait has gotten me to think that they may not have a suitable position for me. I can understand it if they don’t, because from what I’ve been told by my future boss, I’m not actually working on the kinds of things that they are working on specifically, even though I am in the same field. So, I might just one day receive a reply from them, saying that they don’t have a suitable role for me.

The trouble may be that I do not have a conventional background, skills nor experience. So, not all my parts will fit into any specific mould, and the parts the do fit, will have gaps in them. The solution may just be to wipe out parts of my CV, but I do not wish to hide anything from my future employers. I feel that it’s never a good idea to begin a relationship based on half truths. Or, maybe I am just dancing the wrong dance and fated to never land a job in my life.

Any ideas on how to suck a little less?

Colouring Race

Something oddly geeky just occurred to me this morning. You’re probably no longer surprised at my geeky thoughts but it’s still something I found mildly interesting. I’m not trying to be racist but I asked myself a question: How many bits would we need to colour every possible race on earth? More directly: How many bits do we need to colour every possible race in Malaysia? More importantly: Why do we want to colour the races?

Computer Colour History
mono Computer displays started with a 1-bit monochrome display, essentially coloured or non-coloured. These came in different varieties, depending on your computer system. The most popular ones were white-black and green-black.

cga In the early 1980s, people realised that this was very limiting and increased the colours to a 4-bit display, which could represent 16 fixed colours. Every programmer who started off programming in the 80s (me included) has got this 16 colour palette burned into their heads. This fixed palette was useful for highlighting text but not so useful for displaying images. There were other palettes available but these 16 were the most commonly used.

vga After a while, this still did not please our senses. So, in the late 1980s, computers came with 8-bit displays, which could represent 256 colours. However, the palette was not fixed and the 256 colours could be customised. Many entertainment products exploited this new colour space to display vibrant graphics. Many games were proudly advertised as supporting 256 colours and cartoon colour characters bloomed.

But still, our hunger for visually stimulating graphical inputs were not sated. Then in the 1990s, came 16-bit displays, which allowed 65+ thousand colours. Now, we were getting somewhere. It was now possible to view photos and movies with realism. This coincided with the boom in multi-media applications to exploit this colour space.

full But some visual pundits were still not satisfied. So, 24-bit displays were quickly introduced, which allowed the display of 16.7+ million colours. This should keep anyone happy for a long time. Colours were represented in an additive model with 8-bits of red, green and blue intensities.

Finally, as most computers are 32-bit today, they represent colours using the RGB(A) colour model. In addition to the RGB colours, the last 8-bits are often used to represent transparency.

Racial Colours
Now, if we accept the fact that it takes at least 2 individuals to even begin to form a distinct race, we will arrive at our answers. For the world, we would only need a 32-bit representation, which can represent 4.29+ billion possible colours. For Malaysia, we would only need a 24-bit representation. Both types of colour representations have been available on modern computers for years. As evidenced from the series of photos, high colour depths are important so that we can see things clearly and enjoy the vibrant dynamism of different colours.

However, if we were to look at recent developments in our country, we will soon realise that our federal government is still stuck in the graphical stone age. In order to protect the rakyat from being victimised by opposition state governments, they are going to channel development funds through MARA, which is only interested in helping one group of people (1-bit). Our former 2nd Finance Minister has also recently called on Malays to emulate the progressive thinking of Jewish and Chinese societies in terms of development (2-bits).

In conclusion, I think that there is nothing wrong with having a mind coloured by race, as long as it’s of a sufficiently high colour depth. It’s when the colour depth is low (such as that presently employed by the federal government), that we have trouble recognising things for what they are in this world. I would sincerely hope that everyone embraces high colour depths and enjoy the richly colourful world that we live in.

What do you think of this odd thought?

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: