Face it, PM

It's nothing new, really. Since Mr George Yeo went a blogging some YEARS ago, the trend for other government-types to go online was inevitable. For those who have read George Yeo's blog, it was, well, rather officious. It adopted the civil service style of writing - para 1, para 2, para 3...But it caught netizens' attention, nevertheless. The blogging Minister.

Now no less than Mr Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, has taken to fronting his own FB page. That's great, though he is late to the game. Nevertheless, within a day (or less), his FB page has garnered more than 20,000 likes, though I don't know what there is about it to like at this point in time. Even the Wall Street Journal has seen fit to publish the event. I suppose power attracts, or you just want to be seen hobnobbing with the rich, the powerful, the famous/infamous and the politicians. PM Lee fits all of these descriptors so it is no wonder the overwhelming strength of the magnet of the man. As an aside, George Yeo's Facebook likes lead PM Lee's by a wide berth. But this is to be expected. George has had a head start.

Frankly, I couldn't care less about whether he's had his dinner, but apparently many in Singapore have no other past time than to kay-poh and boast to one and all about when he/she learnt that LHL has had his dinner. Now don't get me wrong. I am not belittling anyone, not least the PM. He has done himself a favour by engaging his stakeholders on the universe's most significant media. Not through a group of admins who purport to speak on his behalf.

But, and this seems never too far away - the perceived threat of action against detractors and abusers of LHL's FB page. No, the law of the internet does not apply. Singapore's Laws do. Just read the House Rules on his FB page, reproduced below for your convenience.

I don't think those were LHL's words. Perhaps his lawyer's, or some smarts in the PMO. But you will agree with me that those words sound ominous.

Yes, Prime Minister! No dirty or abusive words. Otherwise...

OK, we get it.

Somehow these words just take away some of the personal feel of the page. I doubt any netizen puts up those kind of rules. It is live and let live on the internet. You want to join in, then you have to be prepared for the occasional abuse. I have been abused before, and called all manner of the most un-nice things when I took a position that basically agreed with the government's stand. You don't really have to send your lawyers after them. There is a certain intelligence of the crowd, or rather decency of the crowd. On balance, we look after each other. We will wack down anyone who is abusive, unfair, unreasonable and downright abnoxious, no expensive lawyers needed. You just have to trust the crowd, Prime Minister. Look at George. No threats. No House Rules. And he is doing just fine.

Welcome to the Wild Wild Web.

Youth on the Balance

I was reminded today that if you do not want your personal details to be known, then don't put any of it online, on the internet, to be specific. The internet media has a long long memory. You can delete the pages where you posted these info, you can delete your account, but whatever you do, those pages, if they were once openly available on the internet, will always remain there in some cached pages (such as those that Google maintains) - perhaps till kingdom come or the internet is destroyed, whichever happens first. Even Google's demise, should it happen, would not erase those information. So also if you want to post a comment that can be viewed as a threat, especially one of bodily harm to someone living no more than 41 km away (that's the diagonal size of Singapore island). Then you had better be ready to defend yourself. In particular, I am referring to a Singaporean who did just that on his Facebook page - threaten to kill the Sports Minister of Singapore.

He was arrested and questioned, as anyone who has threatened murder should be, and subsequently released on bail. I agree with many who wrote on the incident, that if he hasn't done anything wrong, he should not be afraid. And he displayed this fearlessness by subsequently claiming, on the internet again, that whatever he said wasn't literal. One can argue till the cows come home if his tirade on his Facebook page is a piece of literary art form or a bald threat by a would-be terrorist. That he goes by a Malay name doesn't help. He should have known better, or is he fronting for someone in the shadows? For all that we say about freedom of speech, if this person boarded a subway train, I will not follow him into that same train. Call me a coward, or accuse me of being paranoid, but you can never know, until it is too late. I am not going to put my life on the line for some vague freedom of speech thing, which some claim they will die defending even if they don't agree with what was said. Hogwash. That is the idealism of youth and the folly of the aged - probably a fallacious belief if ever there was one.

It is so easy to criticize someone or something. Sure mistakes were made in the YOG. Everyone could see it, and not a few poured scorn on the organisers. It was very publicly visible, and embarrassing for a Singapore that prides itself on being efficient, and always planning to the last detail. Perhaps our Kiasu spirit showed up and the MOE soaked up as many tickets as it could so that it could send in the 'army' if and when necessary, to fill the stands.- so some tell me. But what is important is that corrective action was taken, it was effective, just like what our young footballing cubs did to secure the bronze medal after a disastrous outing with the Haiti Football Team.  

So was it worth it? Only time will tell. I asked a youth today if he had volunteered to help out in the YOG. He said 'Yes', and I asked what he got out of it all. He was positive about the experience, especially with the opportunity to mix around and converse with so many different peoples of the world. Somehow I was happy for him but felt a tinge of sadness that I could not go back in time to experience what he has for the past week or so. For our young, who are our future and to learn to co-exist with others - this alone makes it worth it.

The Fifa Tango

Perform Group who? Well, this name may be welcome music to football hungry people in Singapore. Just when Singaporeans face the increasingly likelihood of not being able to watch 'live' telecast of all 64 matches of the Football World Cup in June 2010, along comes this company that says that it can stream all these matches, but via the Internet. It further boasts that the streaming will be of good quality  as it has had experience streaming the Australian Open Tennis competitions and others sports competitions. Well, it wouldn't be free. It is likely going to be pay-per-view deal, with prices like S$11 / S$12 dollars per match being quoted based on its past broadcasts.

If this happens, it'll be great for people who use their computers often, and also for those who can hook up their computers to their LCD TV sets. But the quality will not be as good though, depending on your Internet connection bandwidth, and your PC. Even with the Next Generation Broadband (NGB), which is not available to most Singapore households yet, it cannot match Starhub's dedicated infrastructure. So yes, the option will be there, but the experience may not. Internet speeds are only as fast as the connections across the internet network, which may pass through shared undersea and overland cables and various machines hosting the IPs along the same network.No one can determine the exact path that an internet connection passes through, even if you have a million dollars.

The question that must be asked is; why is Fifa willing to do a deal with this London-based company and allow the Worldcup matches to be accessible to Singapore when they will not back down on the reported S$40m they are demanding from Singtel/Starhub? It is not as if Performance Group's technology is out of this world, cutting edge or anything. Why let a foreign company profit from this business and deprive Singtel/Starhub? If all this is true, then Fifa's discriminatory pricing and predatory practices are not only reprehensible, they are puzzling also. Just because Singtel paid an arm and a leg for the rights to the BPL matches doesn't mean that it can levy the same or more for the Worldcup matches. Whether Singtel makes a profit or loss from this BPL deal isn't even certain and anyway, it is their business, not Fifa's.

What is the relationship between Performance Group and Football Media Services, which is the exclusive sales representative for Fifa in Asia? If Performance Group is given the business, then Football Media becomes a real joke. It levies astronomical sums on Asian businesses but gives the same to a London business entity (read: non-Asian business) for a song? This whole Fifa farce has gone on long enough. I pity that Singtel, Starhub and Mediacorp have been hoodwinked into dancing the ultra-expensive Fifa tango. It is sad that Fifa can act in such unprincipled and monopolistic manner, if my analysis of this whole Performance-Fifa shenanigan is correct.

Singtel/Starhub may have been taken for an expensive ride, but lets not have the same happen to all football loving Singaporeans.

Home on the net

This posting is not about life in Singapore. Its about life not in Singapore and the contrasts that it brought, at least as far as accessing the internet is concerned. You see, I have been away for slightly less than 2 weeks in Shanghai, and had thought that I could be connected to the internet and blogging and all, just like what I do in Singapore. I had been to Shanghai 2 years ago, and know for a fact that most hotels provide free broadband internet access. What's more, there is my spanking new netbook that will make the whole thing effortless, especially when it comes to lugging it around in my carry-on luggage.

So, yes, I was connected. All I had to do was to plug in the network cable into my computer and wallah, I am connected, or so I thought. The problem with China, even now, with its liberal capitalist approach in big cities such as Shanghai, is that it censors internet access to websites with a heavy hand. Popular websites such as Facebook and Blogspot cannot be accessed at all in China, or at least using the hotel broadbands in both hotels that I stayed in. Yes, I could not access any of my blogspot blogs!

Mercifully, though, I could access e-mail websites such as Yahoo, Gmail and Microsoft's Live.com. Otherwise, I would have been cut off from the rest of the world while in China, which had been the case before the 1980s, before Deng Xiaoping instituted his Black-cat-White-cat brand of pragmatism that has propelled its economy in leaps and bounds over the last 30 years. On the other hand, any website with the .cn country domain name (i.e. China for those of you who are clueless), such as baidu.com.cn, loaded extremely fast, with zero or near zero latency. Talk about favouritism!

So here I was, missing all the blogs and blogging and thus cut off from life in Singaore. My schedule was busy, and I didn't have ready access to printed news of Singapore, except perhaps to todayonline.com, Today's online newspaper, which I had delivered to my e-mail account. Curiously though, I never opened it up to read. I was more interested in chatting with people back home and then hitting the sack, so tired I was after a day's activities.

Happily though, I experienced no withdrawal symptoms with the limited access to many internet websites I frequent back in Singapore. And so I had a semi-voluntary news blackout for this period. Now that I am back in Singapore, the latest news appears to be Ms Singapore World, and yes, the F1 too. But the former makes for more interesting reading, though.

Glad to be back in Singapore.

EZ Today

I didn't know that Today had a Reader (called EasyReader in version 2.9 BETA now) that one can install on the computer and used to retrieve its news stories. I have all along subscribed to its daily paper in electronic format via e-mail for the odd occasion when I forget to pick up a print copy, or when the print copies for that day run out. It is therefore nice to know that Mediacorp, Today's parent, is printing another 50,000 copies to meet the demand. Mediacorp is also saying that readers should turn to the online editions to get the daily news fix. EasyReader does make reader Today Online more easy and pleasant to read. Reading the e-mail copy can be a real chore, actually. For those planning to install the Reader, be warned that you need to really have your Microsoft O/S patched well to successfully have the Reader installed and running. This is really easy. Just go to Internet Explorer and do a Windows Update. I don't own a Mac, so I cannot say for sure, but the EasyReader is not supported on that platform. You also need to register with Today Online as the Reader will prompt for a userid and password to access the site. Registration for an account is free, for those not already in the know. The Reader is fairly responsive and it has some nice features such as allowing you to annotate the news or articles and to file a copy of a news story - features that costs an arm and a leg for pdf documents.

The only complaint I have with this version of Today Online is that it doesn't have the advertisements that comes with the print copy. You'd think that that would be a god-send as I wouldn't have to waste time flipping through those ads. But I ready find the ads in Today quite interesting and informative. So in spite of EasyReader, I would still want to get my hands on a print copy. Besides, I share this with another person, who doesn't use the computer all that often.

rednano or yes

When SPH labels its just-out-of-the-stove rednano search engine as a beta product, it really means it. So far, I have runned three searches through it - 'LTA', 'ERP' and 'Lee Kuan Yew'. The results returned look ok, but the page loading just doesn't seem to end although all results for the first page is completely displayed in the browser. I am using Firefox 2 (latest stable version, not the version 3 beta) and I can open another tab, no problem. But when I try to tab back to the rednano results page, or indeed to any tab opened earlier, it just doesn't do so. It is as if the browser has hung. A look at the tab containing the rednano page indicates that the page is still being loaded. The only way out of this lock is to first close all the tabs, which will get you back to the tab containing the rednano page, and then click on the browser's stop button. Then only can you take control of that page and do another search, or close the tab. Internet Explorer 7 is more explicit about the problem. The error is 'Stack overflow at line 0', whatever that means. But you can overcome the problem by ignoring the error. (p.s. as of today, 20th Mar, this error seem to have been resolved).

This is not a very promising start to a custom search engine that focuses on searching Singapore sites only. Actually, I wonder if SPH has wasted money and time developing this custom search engine in the first place. A roughly similar result can be obtained through Google by putting the 'site:sg' directive after the search word/phrase on google.com.sg. I tried it, and yes, roughly the same results are returned. Well, the rednano results seem to be more targeted as opposed to google.com.sg, but any refinement to the searches in Google can be handled by further refining the search directive. For example, indicate .gov to return only government sites, or .com sites for commercial related sites.

If this is consistently so, why do we need rednano anyway? But of course, for SPH, it will be a great advertising avenue, though it is a tad late in this game. Better late than never, I suppose.

	rednano search results for 'LTA'. Search done on 19 March 2008
	Google.com.sg search results for 'LTA'. Search done on 19 March 2008

The short(wave) and long of it

It has been some time since my last blog entry. The reason is purely technical. You see, I am now in Suzhou, China, on a mission. I have been here since last Sunday, 25 March 07. Internet access where I am staying now is purely through mooching. Those wireless signals that are not protected are nevertheless so weak that I get intermittent connection. Most of the time that I do have a strong enough connection (usually only in the mornings), I use to check my office and personal e-mails.

Trying to get an acceptable wireless signal which allows me to surf unimpeded reminds me of my days tuning in to shortwave radio. Yep, in those far off days, where the PC and the Internet were still experimental or classified technology, shortwave radio was the best way to tune in to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA). I wasn’t rich enough to own a powerful shortwave radio receiver - I was a poor student then - but I did have a radio that could ‘catch’ the right airwaves when the radio was oriented in a certain position. Those positions usually were good for about 10 or 15, or even 20 minutes before the signal weakens and interference increases. But I did have a whale of a time listening to news broadcast from outside the country. In retrospect, mooching is not very different from my ‘shortwave radio’ days. I keep moving my Centrino Notebook around to a position that gives me a useable wireless internet signal. With the internet connection, I can surf on over to the BBC website, and indeed, even the Voice of America website to catch the latest international news.

The only difference is that some people view mooching as illegal. With Wireless@SG, I wonder whether it is not time to reassess that view. Looking at the ways things are going, mooching will eventually become irrelevant and should be decriminalized – at least I hope so.

Image source: http://www.stockxpert.com/

Free to mooch

Yesterday, I switched on my Office Notebook at home to do, what else, some work. This involved my signing into my office's e-mail system, so internet access was required. No problem, I have had a wireless network running in my home for ages. But I was shocked to note that my wireless connection was hooking up automatically with one named 'linksys' instead of my wireless router, which of course, has a more meaningful name.

Curious, and alarmed, I called up the wireless networks list and sure enough, I was riding on an unsecured access point. In fact, there were more than 10 wireless access points listed, some of which were unsecured. I am a bit disturbed that wireless users still keep their access points totally unsecured even after the high profile court case of a 17 year-old moocher in Singapore, who was convicted of using his neighbour's unsecured wireless internet connection. Do these people with unsecured wireless APs expect to make use of the publicly-funded DPP's time to prosecute violaters?

There was an ensuing debate about whether, essentially, the law was an ass. Shouldn't the person with the wireless access point secure it in the first place, failing which his connection should be considered free for all? Indeed, I find it increasingly harder to justify the law that says riding on an unsecured wireless access point is a crime. Often, it is more a life-saver and a great convenience because it allows us to stay connected via e-mail and other wireless devices, albeit without paying a single cent. Tell, me, Mr Judge and Mr Public Prosecutor, when you are in a remote location with your Notebook and you find a 'free' wireless internet connection, would you refuse to use it? Really? Honestly?

I believe that it is up to the owner to secure his/her access point failing which that access point should be considered free to use. As the law says, ignorance is no excuse.

Sue me.