The bars there sucked, but I suppose that comes with the territory, being an Islamic country and all. I mean, I wouldn't expect the bar scene in Cow's Asshole, Alabama to be thriving, either.
FWIW, the bar scene in KL is much better these days.
JAWI (religious police) came into the restaurant, and she had left her ID card in her car. She had to go all the way out and get it, to prove that she was a Hindu, and therefore not subject to jail for eating during daytime (it was Ramadan
There was a funny article in the newspaper a few years back where they interviewed (and showed photos of) a bunch of Chinese people who looked sort of Malay-ish, getting them to share their stories of being harassed during Ramadan. Some said they just gave up and ate indoors, others wore giant crucifixes, others turned around and got pre-emptively aggressive with the lunch police.
The cultural revolution was the crowning abuse in a tragic sequence that began with the rise of the communist party. The rise of the communist party is the consequence of the previous social order, an order which is rapidly being recreated today.
I don't see the point of continuing this hair-splitting game in which every statement I make is attacked for not including ten paragraphs of context which should be obvious to anyone who has paid the remotest attention to China. Yes, you read some book or whatever, congratulations, I kowtow to you.
You realize people dealt with this soft of problem before the Internet existed right? People actually... talked to each other... rather than twiting it up or facebooking.
People can talk to the people they know, and the people in their community, sure. But that is very limiting:
No possibility for anonymity
Limited number of viewpoints
Limited access to externally verifiable information
The internet has transformed politics in Malaysia, by bringing people all over the country together based on their shared views rather than based solely on whom they happened to live nearby. It's allowed people to have open, frank discussions that previously they would only be able to have with their closest confidants. It's allowed facts and evidence to be brought to general public attention which would previously have been squelched by the BN-owned mass media.
Of course humans can survive without the internet. But in my mind there is no question that it has enabled a transformative level of communication which we are only beginning to see the full impact of.
We wouldn't know; that movie was banned in Malaysia.
Of course the government has no problem with the endless movies that depict assassinations of other heads of state, but even a joke about Malaysia and the petulant UMNO children pulling the strings behind the censor's office go haywire. Ironically, in the process, they make Malaysia into more of a joke than ever.
Rape of the labor force led to the Cultural Revolution? WTF dude? The CR was caused by Mao Zedong losing control of the CCP and trying (successfully) to regain control.
Take a step back. The cultural revolution was the culmination of a movement which was able to gather critical mass because the labor force had been so miserably treated under the incumbent feudal regime. I used the word "rape" figuratively of course (though it does apply literally as well).
He'll kill you first; that's the one thing he does well. He already had Altantuya Shaariibuu and Teoh Beng Hock taken care of; you don't want to be next.
Every year the government holds a meeting to plan its latest net censorship scheme, then every year the internet industry people leak it out to their big clients who create an uproar and then it gets quietly put away for a while.
Sooner or later they'll adjust their strategy and sneak it through. Recently we had our first major political censhorship incident when SKMM tried to block heroic gadfly website Malaysia Today, but backed down after a couple weeks when it became clear they could not keep up with the flurry of mirrors that appeared, and when Malaysia Today's readership soared in the face of all the attention the ham-handed move caused. BN politicans tend to be quite stupid (the party's power dynamics select for it) but over time even the stupidest can succeed when backed up by enough force and enough deliberately under-educated voters.
China's economic growth is built directly on unprecedented rape of the environment, and on well-precedented rape of its labour force. Both situations are unsustainable; the latter is just part of the same cycle that led to the cultural revolution last century and similar upheavals as you go backward throughout Chinese history. They never lurch that far forward before consuming all their progress in violence and chaos, and there's no reason to believe the present lurch will be any different.
The internet is at best a triviality in this grand epic context.
Filter content how? Just to their own end nodes or everything that passes through? There is no way to know how a government initiative to do this will be implemented. One would have to assume that if they thought certain content was inappropriate for their own citizens, they wouldn't want anyone else to access it either. When I am in Thailand, and connecting to someone in Indonesia, if my traffic routes through Malaysia, will they filter it?
In no case would it affect through traffic (e.g. from Indonesia to Thailand, though I doubt much of that traffic comes through Malaysia anyway; Malaysia's link to Thailand is puny and Thailand has direct connections to exchange points in Singapore and Hong Kong). Nobody who's not bound by Malaysian law would pay anything for transit filtered by Malaysia.
From what I've heard behind the scenes, it would be implemented by ISPs and not affect corporate clients. There are multiple international links controlled by different companies (Telekom controls the cable landing stations but for technical reasons that's not an effective place to impose traffic filtering) so a decentralised approach would be necessary in any case.
Well, in the most obvious way in Malaysia, it prevents people from calling attention to all the problems caused by the corrupt relationship between the government and monopolist Telekom Malaysia. TM provides remarkably bad connectivity at remarkably high prices and manages to maintain iron fist control over the wired last mile for 98% of the population due to a weak regulatory agency (SKMM/MCMC) that spends its time sucking TM's dick instead of doing its job. If people can't shine light on this state of affairs due to political censhorship - and mark my words, that is the single and only purpose of the filtering proposal, porn is a red herring - then there's no hope for change.
This has already driven away the much-hoped-for internet economy that Cyberjaya was built, at billions of ringgit in taxpayer expense, to host.
Then there's the simple fact that a filtered internet is a slow and erratic internet. It's true in China and Saudi Arabia and Iran and it will be true here.
The ID number is safer because at least then you have a prayer of getting reliable data.
If you do have robust end-to-end security then you can see the canonical biometrics for the person in question and validate them with local equipment.
If you rely on something that is entirely under the control of the public, someone will find a way to tamper with it, it is only a question of how long it will take. Once they do, you will have to issue new cards to everyone, which will cost millions and just start the cycle over again.
RTFA please. They altered the information on the cloned card and it read true. Clearly there is either no, or a very weak, cryptographic validation mechanism.
the person that designed the SIP protocol in such an incredibly NAT-unfriendly manner should be drawn and quartered.
SIP was around long before NAT got big. And the workarounds are quite mature these days.
I have X-Lite on my laptop and often travel with a little Linksys SPA box as well. Both of these are configured to use STUN and talk with my public-IP-having Asterisk box which is in turn configured to deal with NAT. I travel all the time, use new networks almost daily, and rarely have any NAT-related problems.
Why didn't your wife just tell her boss, "No Skype? No travel."
Or "no Skype, huge bill for personal calls on the company mobile phone."
That aside, though, with a cheap triband phone you can stay in touch for very little money pretty much anywhere on earth. Just buy prepaid SIM cards and forward a VoIP number from your home country to them using a service like voipcheap.com. For example, I was just in France. I paid EUR10 for a SIM card and then my incoming calls were EUR0.07/minute. In some European countries the direct-dial rates are even less. In the Netherlands Lebara effectively charges EUR0.045/minute for calls to the USA and many other countries dialed straight from your cell phone.
One of Skype's big advantages is conference calling (and now, desktop sharing as well). I don't think either Google Talk nor any SIP providers I know do that.
You misunderstand at a fundamental level. I have been doing conference calling with SIP for over 7 years. With SIP, you can make your calls do whatever you want. It's not a question of what party X, Y, or Z supports - it's a question of what you can imagine and make use of.
True. There are cases where working on a secure office is absolutely a must. For example if you're writing embedded code for prototype hardware that your company doesn't want competitors to know about. How are you going to do just that in a coffee shop?
Or if you're the handyman in a bank's safety-deposit-box department. Hard to do that from Starbucks.
Why do people keep coming up with all these silly exceptions? Of course there are some jobs that can't be done remotely, nobody is disputing that. It's the straw man that Just Won't Die.
My employer is located three blocks from my house and has air conditioning (ahhhh!) and an underutilized T1 circuit, so I just go there.
Maybe people are going to coffee shops so they don't have to be constrained by a T1. In an era when we can pay $100/month for a connection 80 times faster than a T1, it's hard to go back.
I do use Debian stable, though. Do I get cool points for that?
Nope, sorry, I use it too, and I'm definitely not cool.
Yep, I'm older than you, I remember well all those agonizing hours of the Palmer Method and the solid-dash-solid paper.
Today I can't write cursive at all, and I can barely print.
When I type, I go error-free 100wpm, and never need spell check.
When I try to write more than a couple sentences out by hand, I drop letters, make weird hybrid words, and even create symbols which are clearly not letters at all. The only time in 10 years I've had to write more than a few paragraphs was when making a police statement after witnessing a death. It was full of cross-outs and inserted letters; the detective probably thought I was traumatized or just plain stupid, but in fact it was simply a matter of my brain no longer squandering neurons on being connected to my hand in that way.
Other than the occasional third-world police statement, I hardly see why this is a problem. If all the computers suddenly disappear one day, my penmanship is going to be the least of our worries.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, the bar scene in KL is much better these days.
There was a funny article in the newspaper a few years back where they interviewed (and showed photos of) a bunch of Chinese people who looked sort of Malay-ish, getting them to share their stories of being harassed during Ramadan. Some said they just gave up and ate indoors, others wore giant crucifixes, others turned around and got pre-emptively aggressive with the lunch police.
The cultural revolution was the crowning abuse in a tragic sequence that began with the rise of the communist party. The rise of the communist party is the consequence of the previous social order, an order which is rapidly being recreated today.
I don't see the point of continuing this hair-splitting game in which every statement I make is attacked for not including ten paragraphs of context which should be obvious to anyone who has paid the remotest attention to China. Yes, you read some book or whatever, congratulations, I kowtow to you.
People can talk to the people they know, and the people in their community, sure. But that is very limiting:
The internet has transformed politics in Malaysia, by bringing people all over the country together based on their shared views rather than based solely on whom they happened to live nearby. It's allowed people to have open, frank discussions that previously they would only be able to have with their closest confidants. It's allowed facts and evidence to be brought to general public attention which would previously have been squelched by the BN-owned mass media.
Of course humans can survive without the internet. But in my mind there is no question that it has enabled a transformative level of communication which we are only beginning to see the full impact of.
We wouldn't know; that movie was banned in Malaysia.
Of course the government has no problem with the endless movies that depict assassinations of other heads of state, but even a joke about Malaysia and the petulant UMNO children pulling the strings behind the censor's office go haywire. Ironically, in the process, they make Malaysia into more of a joke than ever.
Take a step back. The cultural revolution was the culmination of a movement which was able to gather critical mass because the labor force had been so miserably treated under the incumbent feudal regime. I used the word "rape" figuratively of course (though it does apply literally as well).
He'll kill you first; that's the one thing he does well. He already had Altantuya Shaariibuu and Teoh Beng Hock taken care of; you don't want to be next.
Every year the government holds a meeting to plan its latest net censorship scheme, then every year the internet industry people leak it out to their big clients who create an uproar and then it gets quietly put away for a while.
Sooner or later they'll adjust their strategy and sneak it through. Recently we had our first major political censhorship incident when SKMM tried to block heroic gadfly website Malaysia Today, but backed down after a couple weeks when it became clear they could not keep up with the flurry of mirrors that appeared, and when Malaysia Today's readership soared in the face of all the attention the ham-handed move caused. BN politicans tend to be quite stupid (the party's power dynamics select for it) but over time even the stupidest can succeed when backed up by enough force and enough deliberately under-educated voters.
China's economic growth is built directly on unprecedented rape of the environment, and on well-precedented rape of its labour force. Both situations are unsustainable; the latter is just part of the same cycle that led to the cultural revolution last century and similar upheavals as you go backward throughout Chinese history. They never lurch that far forward before consuming all their progress in violence and chaos, and there's no reason to believe the present lurch will be any different.
The internet is at best a triviality in this grand epic context.
In no case would it affect through traffic (e.g. from Indonesia to Thailand, though I doubt much of that traffic comes through Malaysia anyway; Malaysia's link to Thailand is puny and Thailand has direct connections to exchange points in Singapore and Hong Kong). Nobody who's not bound by Malaysian law would pay anything for transit filtered by Malaysia.
From what I've heard behind the scenes, it would be implemented by ISPs and not affect corporate clients. There are multiple international links controlled by different companies (Telekom controls the cable landing stations but for technical reasons that's not an effective place to impose traffic filtering) so a decentralised approach would be necessary in any case.
Well, in the most obvious way in Malaysia, it prevents people from calling attention to all the problems caused by the corrupt relationship between the government and monopolist Telekom Malaysia. TM provides remarkably bad connectivity at remarkably high prices and manages to maintain iron fist control over the wired last mile for 98% of the population due to a weak regulatory agency (SKMM/MCMC) that spends its time sucking TM's dick instead of doing its job. If people can't shine light on this state of affairs due to political censhorship - and mark my words, that is the single and only purpose of the filtering proposal, porn is a red herring - then there's no hope for change.
This has already driven away the much-hoped-for internet economy that Cyberjaya was built, at billions of ringgit in taxpayer expense, to host.
Then there's the simple fact that a filtered internet is a slow and erratic internet. It's true in China and Saudi Arabia and Iran and it will be true here.
Just googled it... it was Berzerk. Could have sworn it was Robotron. Oh well.
They altered data on the cloned card. No need to get that surgery, just fudge the data to match your drooping cheekbones.
The ID number is safer because at least then you have a prayer of getting reliable data.
If you do have robust end-to-end security then you can see the canonical biometrics for the person in question and validate them with local equipment.
If you rely on something that is entirely under the control of the public, someone will find a way to tamper with it, it is only a question of how long it will take. Once they do, you will have to issue new cards to everyone, which will cost millions and just start the cycle over again.
RTFA please. They altered the information on the cloned card and it read true. Clearly there is either no, or a very weak, cryptographic validation mechanism.
I can still hear the pseudo-synthesized voice that called out once in a while when the game wasn't being played.
SIP was around long before NAT got big. And the workarounds are quite mature these days.
I have X-Lite on my laptop and often travel with a little Linksys SPA box as well. Both of these are configured to use STUN and talk with my public-IP-having Asterisk box which is in turn configured to deal with NAT. I travel all the time, use new networks almost daily, and rarely have any NAT-related problems.
Or "no Skype, huge bill for personal calls on the company mobile phone."
That aside, though, with a cheap triband phone you can stay in touch for very little money pretty much anywhere on earth. Just buy prepaid SIM cards and forward a VoIP number from your home country to them using a service like voipcheap.com. For example, I was just in France. I paid EUR10 for a SIM card and then my incoming calls were EUR0.07/minute. In some European countries the direct-dial rates are even less. In the Netherlands Lebara effectively charges EUR0.045/minute for calls to the USA and many other countries dialed straight from your cell phone.
You misunderstand at a fundamental level. I have been doing conference calling with SIP for over 7 years. With SIP, you can make your calls do whatever you want. It's not a question of what party X, Y, or Z supports - it's a question of what you can imagine and make use of.
In a theoretical world where the economy keeps getting worse, the rational choice is to cash out and buy a private island while you still can.
Also found:
John Smallberries
John Whorfin
John Bigbooté
.3 is 300 out of 1000.
.3% is 3 out of 1000.
It's similar to the confusion created when idiots write "It only costs me .25 cents to make a phone call" when they really mean ".25" or "25 cents".
Or if you're the handyman in a bank's safety-deposit-box department. Hard to do that from Starbucks.
Why do people keep coming up with all these silly exceptions? Of course there are some jobs that can't be done remotely, nobody is disputing that. It's the straw man that Just Won't Die.
Maybe people are going to coffee shops so they don't have to be constrained by a T1. In an era when we can pay $100/month for a connection 80 times faster than a T1, it's hard to go back.
Nope, sorry, I use it too, and I'm definitely not cool.
Yep, I'm older than you, I remember well all those agonizing hours of the Palmer Method and the solid-dash-solid paper.
Today I can't write cursive at all, and I can barely print.
When I type, I go error-free 100wpm, and never need spell check.
When I try to write more than a couple sentences out by hand, I drop letters, make weird hybrid words, and even create symbols which are clearly not letters at all. The only time in 10 years I've had to write more than a few paragraphs was when making a police statement after witnessing a death. It was full of cross-outs and inserted letters; the detective probably thought I was traumatized or just plain stupid, but in fact it was simply a matter of my brain no longer squandering neurons on being connected to my hand in that way.
Other than the occasional third-world police statement, I hardly see why this is a problem. If all the computers suddenly disappear one day, my penmanship is going to be the least of our worries.
...if your argument excludes Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, etc...
Morocco is the poorest of the bunch and I can get decent 4mbps broadband in any large city for about US$40/month.