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Malaysian Government Offers Free E-mail To All Citizens
jfruhlinger writes "Attempts to move governments to electronic communications often hit a serious snag: Governments must serve all citizens, and not all citizens have email addresses. Malaysia's solution to the problem: offer free email to every Malaysian adult. Citizens will be able to get their @myemail.my address by inserting a smartcard into a reader or presenting it in person." Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?
> Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?
I don't trust my government to be my government!
Sure. Since email's not remotely secure anyway, this would eliminate any "I wonder if my government is reading my mail" concerns. If you need secure coms, PGP is very easy to set up, so much so that I wonder why it's not used more. I would think that if Google supported it in GMail it would probably be more popular. Of course PGP doesn't hide who you're communicating *with*, only what you're saying.
The second MIB movie makes much more sense now. Thanks!
it wouldnt matter zit, whether government is your email provider or not. either way, they will spy on you.
Actually, a government department is less likely to spy on you because they have no economic incentive. All you need is privacy provision in the email act, and the chances become very slim. I've worked in government, and they like to do things by the book.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The question "Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?" is pretty irrelevant: if they government can subpoena your mail account for any reason, without notification, you know, to prevent any sort of "terrorism" (against the state, content providers, the prevailing political ideology)... then they already are your de facto mail provider.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
Considering these e-mail addresses are meant for communication with the government, I see no problem with them being hosted by the government. Just do all your normal e-mailling with a regular provider and communicate with the government using either your own e-mail address or the government-hosted one.
They could spy all they want; all e-mail in these boxes is either from or to them anyway.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We already do....http://www.usps.com. Now the key thing is that USPS is a mail transport. At any time given appropriate legal action, they are authorized to read your mail. The question is, what do you choose to do to protected the contents of your mail knowing that you have an insecure transport? Oh I'm sorry, I forgot that most of the stuff that you send is irrelevant and nobody could give a rat's ass about it. Granted, electronic mail can be copied and archived for many years with minimal cost where as archiving copies of physical mail requires significant resource investment. So now you have to decide what to do to your mail knowing that you have an insecure transport where your information can be cheaply duplicated and stored for many years. Then the biggest question has to be asked, what will the Malaysian government do to people that make their mail difficult if not impossible to read by an unintended party?
Over twenty years ago the USPS was working on a plan to install Group IV fax machines in post offices and offer a very fast document delivery service. Congress stopped them because they thought it would compete with private services. (Group IV fax produces copy about like a laser printer, and about as fast, but requires ISDN.) I suspect the same would have happened had they tried to offer email.
Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?
Not personally, but if they're only offering this as a backup for people who don't have their own address already, it seems like a great idea
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I don't really think that is the correct question. Perhaps we should be asking the question "Do we want to continue to pay for governments sending us physical mail rather than using more efficient technology?"
There is nothing going on here that requires you to use this email address for your own personal communications.
Yeah, nobody freaks out about the government being in charge of postal mail, and that's actively scanned by xray. And, there are always alternatives if you don't like it.
Actually, a government department is less likely to spy on you because they have no economic incentive. All you need is privacy provision in the email act, and the chances become very slim. I've worked in government, and they like to do things by the book.
I8-D
I believe the USPS DID have a plan to set up "official" USPS e-mail addresses for people back in the 1990's.
I think it was the brilliant plan of charging people $0.15 per e-mail that did them in.
If they had just done a free service and charged advertisers (who provide the bulk of their revenue anyway) they could have preempted gmail, yahoo, hotmail...
Do some reading on the Malaysian government, though.
They do not do things by the book. There is no book. The corruption, the nepotism, the thuggery, the ridiculous government-endorsed racism, the sheer idiocy and ignorance....
They (the party that's been in power since the 60's -- not a good sign, is it?) don't come under pressure to clean house from the wider world because there aren't genocides going on, no large-scale horrors. They keep the abuses relatively low-key (like heavy "affirmative action" for the majority race, gross misuse of government funds, only occasional murders), so even their own citizenry generally think it's not worth it to stick their necks out to fix things. Sure, the education system sucks, and if you aren't of the right "race" you have to send your kids out of the country to get any higher education, and the corruption is embarrassing, but it's fed by oil wealth more than out of citizen's pockets directly, so it just goes on & on.
Er, if it's not clear, no, I would not trust the Malaysian government-run email service. The internet is finally making it possible to fight back against government abuses in Malaysia with some level of anonymity and safety, and I have no doubt they're dying to get their hands on a good way to keep an eye out for citizens who might become troublemakers. Admittedly, you'd have to be a bit stupid to use your government-given email address to talk to your friends about a protest, but their education system nowadays doesn't exactly focus on critical thinking.
Yeah, nobody freaks out about the government being in charge of postal mail, and that's actively scanned by xray. And, there are always alternatives if you don't like it.
You must not live in america. In the US, the Republican half of the population dislikes the idea of government doing anything other than defense and law enforcement. A much smaller part of the population takes hatred of government over the line into mental illness. For some reason, the news likes to give these people a platform.
To decrypt a few dozen people's communications? Sure. To decrypt every connection? Hardly.
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When you elect people who loudly and proudly proclaim to hate government or who want to "drown the government in a bathtub", why would you be so surprised when they do an absolutely terrible job at running things? You want someone to blame? Look in the mirror.
What, so they're happy to give the government lots of guns and money to invade other countries and protect themselves, but they're unhappy at the idea of the government actually providing any useful services? Talk about whipped.
which is totally what she said
I am from Malaysia. The problem for this project is more complicated actually. There are several concerns that we as citizens of Malaysia are worry about:
1. The project is run by a public company named Tricubes. The company is under financial difficulty and is listed under GN3 in the Malaysia stock exchange market (which means near bankruptcy). Because of this announcement, the share price of Tricubes raised from RM0.055 to RM0.325 within a week - a whopping 491% increase.
2. Tricubes claim that the RM50 million investment is a private investment. Citizens however believe that the government will eventually pay a huge amount of service fees to Tricubes.
3. A simple analysis on the domain shows that the domain myemail.my is merely using Microsoft Windows Live Mail as the back end provider. It is hard to believe that a service that directly use the domains.live.com API can cost that much, not less to say the entire potential vendor lock-in by Microsoft to this email infrastructure.
4. Tricubes will charge 50 cents (RM0.50) for every email sent. Do some calculation and you can tell how much it will cost the government to make an announcement by sending one email to each of the 27 million citizens in Malaysia.
From the facts that we have, it is obvious that there is a high possibility that this is yet another corruption of the government to let people with internal connection make free money.
While I understand that building an email system do cost money, it is absurd to spend RM50m in something that directly uses Windows Live services and provide nothing more than that. And it is even more absurd to charge that much for an email delivery that is essentially free. Even though we have the freedom to decline this project by not using this service, it is impossible for us to stop the corrupted government from sending costly emails to our inactive accounts, thus giving tax payers' money to Tricubes.
So your argument against government is that they're like corporations? So wait, who CAN we trust to provide us services? Nobody?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Additionally, they believe that corporations do everything better, because they do it for a profit. They also trust corporations (which, thanks to them, have no oversight) more than the government (which has a lot of oversight, and general accountability to the public). Boggles the mind, but it's true.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
... is not that they can't operate like a business. It's that Congress won't LET them operate like a business. They're legally prohibited from offering all kinds of services (wouldn't want them competing w/ private industry, dontcha know). They can't close the hundreds of remote rural post offices that operate at a loss. They can't eliminate Saturday service. And really, that's fine - it's a government agency, why should they have to make a profit? But holy jeebus, Congress - make up your mind. You can't prevent the USPS from doing the things they would need to do to get profitable... and simultaneously bitch because they're not profitable. Pick one.
Even further OT, but Amtrak has the same issue. They have to compete with heavily, heavily subsidized federal highways, aren't allowed to discontinue money-losing routes... and get bitched at because they lose money. Well, no shit - of course they lose money under those conditions.
Yes, there are plenty of republicans who feel the government should only do two things, kill brown people, and keep them out of the country.
There are sane people, but for some reason many of them refuse to take a stand against the bat shit crazies. The crazies on the far right (including teabaggers) wont be happy until every single piece of the government is chopped up and sold off piece meal to a for profit corp that will require a profit margin to do the same job that the government did without the profit margin.
That what I never understood about "fiscal conservatives" how can we save money if we have a new cost, namely profit margin. Until I hear a reasonable answer anyone who wants to offload government duties to a corporation will be just plain stupid in my book.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The [theoretical] Republican idea is that government is grossly inefficient, so it should only do things the public cannot be entrusted to do. For example, the military and police are justified only because we can't reasonably allow vigilantism.
(I say "theoretical," by the way, because all the small-government rhetoric goes out the window when you start talking about the Republican social agenda.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz