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Malaysia Mulls Compulsory Registration of Tech Workers
Viceice writes "Hot on the heels of recently passed legislation further restricting Freedom of Assembly, the National Front-led Malaysian Government is now working to make the registration of all tech workers mandatory, making it an offence punishable by a stiff fine and jail for anyone to plan, deploy, service and maintain any computing system without a license. A leaked draft of the legislation has ignited a backlash among the IT community, which fear the law, when passed, will be devastating to the tech industry in Malaysia."
Whats wrong with requiring tech people to be licenced, we require it of doctors, lawyers, teachers, police need a warrant ..so why not IT tech workers.
Only they call it "visa".
I see you have your papers, but do you have your papers for your papers?
Ahh you do not. You shall be escorted away to be dealt with accordingly.
Malaysia had had passed on to an islamist party government. and they have been trying to increasingly implement sharia-compliant measures. internet irritates them to no end with its freedom and possibility of pursuing anything 'non islamic'.
this is simply another measure - if you make all i.t. workers registered, noone can set up stuff that may prevent/circumvent censorship or anything and still remain in business. this includes proxies, servers, networks - anything. basically its just a control scheme.
Read radical news here
By itself, licensing isn't a big issue. Many trades require licensing. However, if it's meant as a knee-jerk reaction to people who might pose a threat to a totalitarian government, perhaps it is not such a wonderful idea....
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This will kill any Malaysian's ideas for growth...
"In other words, if I don’t register, it is technically illegal for me to even email ANY MALAYSIAN with even an IDEA for a tech-related project. It would be against the law for me to even sketch, on a napkin, my idea for a new app while having coffee with someone.
Want to know the hilarious part? The country with a bill nearly identical to ours isNigeria. So we’re taking a leaf out of their book? Brilliant, Malaysia, totally brilliant. "
This could also affect everyone that develops open source on any project.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This will happen in the US. Count on it. It will serve two purposes.
1. National Security or some such crap.
2. Students have too much debt because of the degree bubble. Thus, they should be fast-tracked into employment to pay it off. Your 20+ years of experience with no degree? Back of the line with you and a mound of debt in tuition to boot.
Life is not for the lazy.
Who knew Mugatu was actually the hero?
...is the modern economy going past them.
managers needs them as well in other fields they can't just sign off on building plans with no idea about how they work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#Malaysian_institutional_racism
its the reason Singapore exists (a Chinese dominated enclave that was not exactly going to submit to the concept)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
licensed people like plumbers have them and they are a mix of class room (non therey loaded) and real work that is lacking in many CS degrees.
"Mulls" is an awkward verb that only gained a foothold because newspaper headline writers had to meet a size limit.
On Slashdot, which has a huge amount of space for headline title, it should never be used - instead replaced with words like "Considers".
Thanks Malaysia. You've just made for better job security in India and the US. We Americans won't have to compete directly against you because only a minority of your people will be able to afford to comply with this (thus making them a highly paid minority) and Indians will have fewer competitors, making it easier for their wages to increase (which again, makes it easier for Americans to compete).
If I didn't know better, I'd wonder how much a US Trade Representative paid someone to make this happen!
By itself, licensing isn't a big issue. Many trades require licensing. However, if it's meant as a knee-jerk reaction to people who might pose a threat to a totalitarian government, perhaps it is not such a wonderful idea....
so maybe some licensing is not that bad of a idea and poor security can let hacks get in and take info that should not be out in the wild.
The country has a diverse population with a Muslim majority and economical strong Indian and especially Chinese minorities. The last two make this a quite well off country.
Historically this mix has been tightly controlled by an undemocratic government, this government knows the economy would seriously suffer when they would let slip the present (enforced) balance of power between these groups.
It's no surprise the present government tries to continue this control and protect the relative strong economy by among others regulating new means of communication like computers and especially the internet.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I mean, really. What do these people think it will do, besides *restrict* technological innovation? That is defact the point with this kind of legislation.
In the case of licensing doctors, it is to *restrict* people with dodgy credentials performing surgeries, or proscribing medications. Ideally, this is to protect patients, as it helps regulate a standard QoS in that industry. Same with legal professionals. Likewise, that restriction reduces the number of people performing those services. This has two immediate effects: 1) it reduces supply for that service, increasing costs. 2)it reduces the number of people doing that work, naturally reducing the number of minds that would bring innovative ideas to those service industries.
The whole reason why the internet exploded with applications (both computational, and user service oriented) and service providers was *because* of that lack of regulation. The emergence of top players comes about as genuine success stories in an unregulated/minimally regulated system. If providers were abusive, people stopped using them, and other providers gobbled them up. The reason for this explosion of innovation was because literally *anyone* with an internet connection and some intelligence could contribute to, or create a new idea, and promote it. This is how free software thrives. Anyone with an internet connection can download a code repository, read it, and suggest improvements. It doesn't matter if you are a millionaire payboy, or an ammonia scented cleaning woman, if your suggested changes are sound, you have improved the collective work, and everyone benefits from your innovative idea.
Instigating this kind of licensing would block out the vast majority of users from legally engaging in this process. As such, their ideas, even if perfectly valid, and even game changing, are withheld from inclusion, because "they aren't licensed."
This applies to every level of internet culture and its distributed source of innovation. It is poison to the very infrastructure they want to control.
The addage "don't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance." Is stretched very thin here. How can you create such legislation, knowing what the internet is, and NOT see how it is antithetically counter opposed to the very foundational source of that system's recourcefulness and robustness in terms of innovation?
Stifle innovation? Really? Ya think?
... I fully support other countries destroying their IT Outsourcing Industry.
And the facts are that licensing is a good thing. If it is done in a transparent manner, with equal opportunities. Alas, Malaysia is far away from that. A country where you can get an 'A'level in 8 month, officially, when you belong to a specific (governing) ethnic group, while others need 2 years, and where you have a university with 140.000 students of just one ethic group (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kvTrpVwzX4), officially, that country is just different.
This measure is not undertaken to increase the quality of IT-services. It is solely meant to keep the more enterprising ethnic Malaysian Chinese and ethnic Malaysian Indians out of opportunities and create a competition-free environment for the ethnic Malaysian Malays.
Who defines computing system? A lamp or light switch could qualify. So anyone who plans to or actually installs a lamp, or changes the light bulb, would be in violation of law if not licensed. While an extreme case, its not as ridiculous with even slightly more complicated devices.
Anon to the Malaysian helpdesk line please!
Whats wrong with requiring tech people to be licenced, we require it of doctors, lawyers, teachers, police need a warrant ..so why not IT tech workers.
Quality of service in not why they want to regulate people that work with computers. It's a matter of controlling communication, repressing opposition views.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The leaked draft bill is here:
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/75107593?access_key=key-22cz53lb62552asmdd43
The pertinent part is paragraph 18.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
It was back in the 90s, if I remember correctly, and unlike some licensing laws that were passed to protect special interest groups, this was just because a legislator had met a licensed civil engineer at a party who was complaining about how he needed a license to build bridges and buildings, but people could design safety-critical software without knowing what they were doing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so the legislator cribbed the state's civil engineering licensing laws, turned them into software engineering licensing laws, and by the time she was done you couldn't operate a microwave oven without a four-year degree from an accredited software engineering program, much less tell a web site designer what you wanted your web site to look like. And because she was in the majority political party in the state assembly, it not only passed her committee without any intelligent thought being applied to it, but also passed the state House. (And after all, most of the legislators were lawyers who also needed licenses to practice, so it didn't occur to them that this actually mattered.) Fortunately, a reporter from the Bergen Record saw the bill, thought about what it might mean, and asked the PR person from a major high-tech firm in the state what their opinion was. They looked at it, said "[expletive deleted]!!", told their friends, and all of them told their state senate contacts to kill the bill or it would cripple all the high-tech business in the state, and it died quietly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The tech industry is Malaysia.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://yangyuer123.blog.com/2011/12/09/this-is-not
Addendum:
Any lawmaker proposing legislation on computer law without being a "Registered Computing Professional" shall be removed from office and fined for unlicensed practice of computer legislation without a license.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
While there may appear to be justifiable reasons to implement this now, the long term unintended consequences may be devastating.
Malaysian government ministers have recently been required to enroll in special yoga classes where they learn to bend their heads forward an incredible 270 degrees.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I've read the leaked draft of the bill linked by @Viceice. Lacking background on the bill's authors, I'll hazard a guess that this is the work of incumbent local IT firms looking to lock out new entrants, and thus reduce competition and pressure to reduce billing rates. As such, it would be no different than taxi cab or barber licensing stateside, whose purpose is usually similar... while using the fig leaf of ensuring qualified vendors.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It's also a good way for them to enforce their Affirmative Action policy against the disliked Malaysian Chinese and the disliked Malaysian Indian minorities in favor of the "disadvantaged" Malay majority.
After all, it's very difficult to implement a quota system without some kind of registration and licensing requirement first. For instance, this licensing distinction between University graduates and non-graduates will only ensure that the two minorities that are being "positively" discriminated from attending the Malaysian University system do not attempt to try to bi-pass the system and steal the tech jobs away from the Malay graduates.
Note that the registration of computer professionals only applies to those working in the 'Critical National Information Infrastructure' (wtfever that means), but I doubt your iPhone app or that Open Source project falls into this category.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Since when "tech worker" equals someone working with computers?
Some people have pointed out that this only applies to government or CNII http://cnii.cybersecurity.my/main/about.html. This is all the public have info on, and it encompasses almost every economic sector in Malaysia. Would ISP, Telekoms and Mobile operators come under critical services? How about Banking? Would this be another layer of requirements on top of existing ones to provide IT services to banks and financial institutions?
National Security is also a red flag. Malaysia has history of using National Security laws to hide information related to corruption or even arresting opposition politicians under this pretense.
Long term wise, the public statement has already stated that the objective is increasing quality for *all* IT professionals. So their intentions are obviously not limited to just CNII requirements.
.MY is a spam cesspool, and has been for 10+ years now. Maybe if they destroy their IT industry, it'll fix the spammers too.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
As other posts noted, the background is probably fundamentalist Islamists trying to get a grip on the Internet in Malaysia (which irritates them a lot).
Of course it won't impact the Internet (to any significant degree). On the contrary: I think it will serve to illustrate (once again) the effective limits of legislative powers versus a lot of people wanting to make up their own mind. Stupid and bigoted people need constant and visible reminders of what works and what doesn't, and this is likely to give it to them.
Somehow I can't imagine the Chinese, the Indians, the Koreans, the Singaporeans, the Indonesians, the Thai, or the Vietnamese shedding any tears over this little gem of proposed legislation (from a business point of view).
It happens to be just as easy to offshore IT manufacturing out of Malaysia as it is to offshore it to Malaysia. And when that happens, countries that already have adequate infrastructure and a competent workforce in place (China, Korea, Japan, US, Europe etc.) will be at an advantage. As a matter of fact, if fundamentalist Islamism in Malaysia hadn't already existed, China ought to have invented it. For commercial reasons if nothing else.
Of course it's deleterious to the idea of a free-for-all Internet, and there are enough attempts to stifle it already. In the China, the US, Europe, etc. Fumble-fingered attempts like this aimed at controlling people and suppressing of technologies that are key to free speech, will (in my opinion) only serve to strengthen our own case here at home to keep everyone's hands off the Internet.
So let's look at the silver lining here: yet another costly experiment in the area of social engineering that we don't have to pay for but whose data we can use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_Presses_and_Publications_Act
I am willing to bet if republicans came up with the idea in America, America would go along with it.
I don't see how any offshoring where the tech is above call-center level could work for any length of time. And I see the people one wants at a high-tech company bailing out to saner climates. Countries are struggling to stay above water in a worldwide recession. That law is an anchor.
The growth of engineering, technician, geek, nerd, or "tinkerer" networks in developing nations is critical to successful democratic development. Democracy can either thrive beside, or be stifled under, any religion, there's nothing special Islam does that Christianity hasn't tried. Egypt tried to "put the genie back in the bottle" in 2008, banning imports of used computers. Pakistan tried the same Pakistan Computer Association. These days the usual excuse to crack down on geeks and nerds in converging market is accusing them of "environmental crime" such as the 'e-waste hoax'.. But they will keep thinking of others, like "porn" or "piracy". It's a good idea to improve and reform "e-waste" imports, porn and piracy, but complete crackdowns on internet cafes and affordable white box manufacturers are the usual result. Dictators (usually not religious) create the backwards cultures by arresting network tinkerers, creating the conditions for reactionary religion. But Al-Jazeera will never put up with censorship. Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are all going to be fine... and Iran too... The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth.
Gently reply
For the licensed.
They will enter the same sphere as lawyers, doctors, accountants who have to be similarly licensed.
It is fortunate that IT is too new a field to have yet become infused with these sorts of restraints.
That rather depends if you are a buyer or seller.
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It's brainwashing.
The purpose is control. Think of religion as psyops.
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