Bersih 2.0

Quoting a local news portal, ” Information, Communications, and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Rais Yatim today expressed belief that yesterday’s mass attacks on local websites may be connected to the upcoming Bersih rally. Rais described the cyber attacks as politically-motivated and intended to disrupt the workings of the government, but did not provide details as to how the denial of service attacks were related to the July 9 rally pushing for electoral reforms.”

He claimed that, “These cyber attacks are strange and, sadly, politically motivated.”

I’d like to know what he has been smokin’.

I am particularly unhappy with how the government is starting to censor the Internet. Blocking websites for whatever reason, is a form of censorship – particularly if there is no evidence nor proof that any of these sites actually broke any Malaysian law.

Even if the websites have been found to be guilty of copyright infringement, the law spells out the necessary punishments in the form of fines of up to RM10,000 per infringing copy. The law does not spell out blocking the site or shutting down a shop, as a valid form of punishment.

All I hope for is a government that adheres to the law and has a sense of justice and fair play. At the moment, our government has clearly got neither with delusional idiots running the show at the top – people who think that they know everything but know very little i.e. bodoh sombong.

I’d love to be at the Bersih launch party but I’ve got a party of my own to attend. I’m scheduled to be out of town during the first week of July but I’ll try my best to get back. 🙂

OpsMalaysia Aftermath

TPB FTW!Seems that #OpsMalaysia has ended yesterday with a fizzle. While there were a number of hackers who had managed to attack a number of government related sites. However, most of these sites were able to recover quickly as corrective action was taken.

I would have to say that I do not think that most (or any) of these sites were attacked by Anonymous but were just attacked by other individuals or groups of individuals under the cover of the operation.

That said, I think that this is not the end of the operation as our country has basically extended an open invitation to subsequent waves of attacks. Sites, such as The Pirate Bay, have been blocked by some of our local ISPs and remain blocked.

However, it is really simple to work-around these blocks. Just point your DNS settings to one of the public DNS servers such as the ones provided by Google. You can get some configuration instructions here.

Then, you can continue to use TPB as if the censors weren’t in effect. While I do not condone illegal file-sharing, I do not think that our governments’ actions in this case was right. It should take more than just accusations to block a site.

Which court in Malaysia has found TPB guilty of breaking the law? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the due-process?

As I understand our Copyright Act, TPB is not guilty of breaking any law. Our law has a ‘fair use’ clause that allows a person to have up to three copies of a copyrighted work. But the most damning fact is that the TPB does not possess nor store any copyrighted works. It is just a search engine and an index. Hence, the government has no legal grounds to block TPB.

If the government wishes to block a search-engine or an indexer, they need to block Bing, Google, Yahoo as well.

Anonymous vs Malaysia

I just read an article in TheStar saying that the hacktivist group – Anonymous – has scheduled an attack for a Malaysian government website later tomorrow. The article claims not to know why the hacktivist group is targeting the Malaysian government. The reporters are quite possibly daft if they cannot even hazard a guess.

I might hazard a pretty obvious guess – our censorship of 10 very important file-sharing websites, particularly The Pirate Bay (TPB).

Since the website runs on he .Net framework on top of IIS7, my advice to the government would be to call up Microsoft support immediately and get their people down to do all necessary, either to strengthen the security of the site, to go on the defense, or to stay around to collect useful forensics.

I wonder what the government was thinking when it asked the ISPs to block access to the list of file-sharing websites. It is just such a blatant abuse of power on the Internet that it invites an organised response. It is a threat on Internet freedom and hacktivists are very vigilant against such things.

I would have advocated a legal response, by local users mounting a legal action against the government. However, this hacktivism response is just to be expected as well.

Good luck, Malaysia.

Update: Turns out I was spot-on – it was the censorship. Our reporters are clueless.

Amazing Voices

Found some stuff on-line and thought I’d share. Amazing voices from 16-year olds. Better than Bieber/Black.

Where's the Law

According to various sources, our SKMM (Malaysian Communications and Multi-media Commission) has asked our local ISPs to block access to several file-sharing sites on the excuse that these sites are found to have broken our local Malaysian laws.

Seriously.

I thought it was the job of the judiciary to determine if and when someone breaks the law and if the judiciary finds that the laws were broken, then the SKMM should enforce the law and order the ISPs to block the websites.

However, I am wondering when, if, these sites have been found to have broken any Malaysian law. As far as I understand it, the SKMM is not in a position to interpret any laws and determine if anyone is on the right or wrong side of it. If the SKMM has the power to act as it wishes, it risks taking one step overboard.

So, unless I am wrong, the MCMC has jumped the gun here and ordered the blocking of these sites. The right thing to do would be to take the issue to court and get a court order to legitimise the action. As it is, I personally think that this action is possibly illegitimate.

I am not a lawyer of course.

That's Rich Soilek

Quoting to the article in TheStar, “Time to stop thinking along racial lines, says Soi Lek. The people must start thinking of themselves as Malaysians first rather than the racial group they belong to, said MCA president Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek.”

Coming from the president of the Malaysian Chinese Association – that’s rich. Maybe, all he meant was the first part – time to stop thinking.

Sleeping in Alor Setar

Yesterday, I was asked to attend a meeting in Alor Setar, Kedah. I have never been up here before. So, I bought myself a new Garmin GPS yesterday and I drove up first thing this morning, from KL.

I noticed a few things during the journey up but I think that I have found the secret to driving long-distance without fatigue – context switching. Normally, I would be quite tired just driving up to Ipoh. However, this time around, I did not feel any tiredness until I had actually passed Penang and was approaching Alor Setar. I am also not fatigued and am able to write this blog entry at 10.30pm.

I am really glad that I bought a GPS yesterday as I would have gotten lost otherwise.. I only bought it because I will be making a long working trip up to both Kedah and Penang this week and I am not familiar with the roads at either place. I wonder how people got about before the invention of the GPS.

During our evening break, I decided to go take a look around central Alor Setar (where I am staying) and I found that it reminded me of Kajang in the early 90s. In fact, they even have the same departmental store that we had in Kajang two decades ago!

While I do not buy pirated discs, one thing that caught my eye was RM10 pirated blue-ray discs. These things cost about RM25 back in KL and I am surprised that it is so much cheaper up north.