Sybreon Ones Nought

God's Debris

I just finished reading this book over the last two nights. Oh boy, it is good! I don’t even know how to describe the book. So, I’ll just quote the author’s introduction instead:

God’s Debris doesn’t fit into normal publishing cubby-holes. There is even disagreement about whether the material is fiction or nonfiction. I contend that it is fiction because the characters don’t exist. Some people contend that it is nonfiction because the opinions and philosophies of the char acters might have lasting impact on the reader.

The story contains no violence, no sexual content, and no offensive language. But the ideas expressed by the characters are inappropriate for young minds. People under the age of fourteen should not read it.

The target audience for God’s Debris is people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls. After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you’re over fifty-five (mentally) you probably won’t enjoy this thought experiment. If you’re eighty going on thirty-five, you might like it. If you’re twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good.

The story’s central character has a view about God that you’ve probably never heard before. If you think you would be offended by a fictional character’s untraditional view of God, please don’t read this.

It made a really interesting read, especially towards the end. I think that I am about level 4.5 awareness or so. Interesting…

We know about the adage that the customer is always right. I had a little disagreement with an old acquaintance on this subject today. This adage hinges on one assumption, which is – the customer knows what he/she wants.

In my dealings with people in this world, I’ve found that people in general, rarely know what they really want. Everyone has a superficial understanding of what they want but few people truly understand their own motivations sufficiently well to really know what they want.

This is reflected in our everyday lives. What do we want to eat for dinner? What clothes do we want to wear? Where do we want to go this weekend? What do we want to do with our lives? How many people can truly and profoundly answer those questions – particularly the last one?

So, I have built my business philosophy on the assumption that the customer does not know what they really want. However, it is my job as a consultant to help the customer discover their roots and find out what they want, which is not an easy task.

So, my take on the adage is that the customer is always right, if and only if, they know what is right.

Silly, ain’t it?

Redefining Publication

When I read that the government was mulling over proposed amendments to the Printing Presses and Publications Act (1984), I got curious. Then, when I read that they were thinking of redefining “publication” to include Internet media, and that they were planning to amend guidelines on films to include downloaded content, I started to laugh very hard.

ROTFLOL!

I think that the Home Ministry needs to hire some IT consultants, instead of legal consultants, before making this kind of amendments to the law. It would be impractical to enforce such a law. Governments have tried this everywhere around the world, and have failed. While it is easy to expand the definition and scope of the law to include Internet blogs, comments and Facebook, it is impossible to enforce it.

Enforcement would require some sort of review mechanism. With the print media, this is done through the issuing of licenses and shutting down illegal publications. However, it would be impossible for the government to shut down illegal on-line publications. Since most of these sites are located overseas where the government has no jurisdiction, it would be impossible for the government to shut down these illegal blogs.

So, people who want to write bad things on their blog, would still be able to do so easily. What the government will do is just make life more difficult for the legitimate folks – people like TheStar or NST. Malaysia Today will still continue publishing its content regardless of what the government says about it. It’s leader is living in self-imposed exile after all. It’s not like RPK has anything to lose. He can just move all the servers over to the UK.

It is not going to affect the rest of the rakyat much either. Unfortunately for the government, the genie is out of the bottle. Years of government pushed Internet proliferation in Malaysia has turned our citizens into some of the largest on-line communities in the world. The government will have to punish a lot of people in order for this to have any affect. Singling out individual examples, will not work very well.

In fact, it will probably galvanise everyone around a common cause instead. For one, our local hacking community, will definitely come up with innovative ways to work-around any sort of hurdle that the government comes up with. There is nothing that the government can do to stop Internet anonymity and people mouthing off on the Internet.

I have always contended that the only solution to this problem is education – not brain-washing. Educate the people on the facts and let them be their own judge. Looking at on-line communities, they tend to organise themselves fairly well. Someone who says an idiotic thing on a forum, would probably get flamed by everyone else on the forum and/or be kicked off.

Anyway, I wish our government the best. It is good that the Minister says that they are merely studying it and will only come to a decision later. They will only waste more money trying to come up with a system to pantau this thing.

They may be able to tell MyNIC to revoke certain .my domains but how many malicious blogs actually use .my domains? They can tell our local ISPs to block certain IPs and that can be side-stepped using something like VPN or TOR. They can tell our local ISPs to filter certain black-listed domains but that can be worked-around by using Google DNS or OpenDNS.

ROTFLOL!