10 Taiwanese caught in a massive online scam syndicate who have made Sabah as their base since May 26th, have been deported from Malaysia to Taiwan on Monday. These ten Taiwanese are part of the total of 37 people arrested in Sabah during an extensive 6-country crack down, including in Thailand, Taiwan, China, Cambodia and Indonesia. The other 27 people who are from China will be deported soon.

According to news report, the modus operandi is that these scammers will use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to contact victims, who are mostly Mainland Chinese, and sell them their sob stories, which could, of course, be solved with money.

I wonder why they need to be based in Sabah when they could use VoIP wherever they are. Isn’t the internet global?

The Netherlands is set to be the first country in Europe to make net neutrality a law. This means that smart phone users will be able to use applications on their phones at no extra internet connectivity costs. Think Skype and Fring.

As far as I know, we in Malaysia do not pay extra for those services. We can Fring and Skype all we like, while just paying our 3G subscription. The same goes for using 3G mobile hotspot. Well, I don’t know about other people but my friends and I have been doing so at no extra costs, even when we are subscribed to different telcos in the country.

So does this mean that we are enjoying net neutrality in Malaysia? I hope greed by telcos don’t cause us to regress!

When I first started using an Android powered mobile phone, I read glowing reviews of how Dropbox has made life so easy for users to store their files and move those files from the phone to computer. I wanted to get a Dropbox account as well, but procrastinated. More than six months since changing a new mobile phone, I still didn’t have a Dropbox account.

Well, what a blessing in disguise. Did you know, yesterday, Dropbox users reported that there was a bug that caused Dropbox accounts to be accessible even though the password was wrong! This means that anyone could access all the Dropbox accounts (and files) even though they did not have the actual passwords and just simply typed in whatever comes to mind.

What a glitch! Even though Dropbox says that only a small number of accounts were accessed during that frame of time, trust is already out the window, I believe.

While Malaysian government websites were threatened to be hacked or defaced or DDoS attacked a couple of days ago, the first signs of the “attack” happened hours before the time Anonymous said they will start attacking these sites. in the end, over 90 Malaysian government websites went down, though some were unplugged from the internet to minimize damage.

However, no hacking group has stepped forward to claim victory, and according to Malaysian authorities, most of the hackers are based in Malaysia. I have been following #OperationMalaysia on Twitter through the night and I found it strange that Malaysian web users were supportive of the hacking operations!

Anonymous said that they are hacking because they are against internet censorship in Malaysia, but still why did Malaysians cheer? There are ways to access these blocked sites by proxy easily.

I read with amusement that up to 35% of Americans, the majority of them iPhone users, regret what they have posted online through their smart phones. These respondents to the survey by Retrevo, claimed that they were not sober at that time, though many of them said that despite the mistake, they were able to move on in life without an repercussions or they were able to remove their accidental postings.

I too have mistakenly posted text and even sent the wrong email to another recipient two times but I was very sober at that time! With the internet where everything is instant, we just work faster and sometimes, even though we realise the mistake soon after, it is already too late to undo.

Just a couple of days after launching 1pengguna.com, the public has had problems logging in to the site and checking prices of consumer products being sold at all the malls and hypermarkets in the country.

And now, a news report has just come in that there has been a security breach on the site and 2,000 accounts have been exposed. Besides the login IDs of these accounts, password, address and contact number are also accessible for each of these accounts.

Hhmm the government spent RM1.4million on this website and it looks like only a little portion of it has been spent on securing the website. Now what? Will they need another RM1.4million to beef up the security of the website?

A few days ago, a friend told me to have a look at a video on YouTube which shows a woman in Holland getting tattoos of her Facebook friends on her arm. I felt incredulous watching it because I thought it’s not possible that someone would want to do that since as you know, friends come and go, even if we are good friends for now. And I also thought, wouldn’t it be painful to get all the tattoos in the few hours that she mentioned?

Now, I am glad that the entire video was a hoax and it was only temporary tattoo that would wash away in a couple of hours. The video was made to promote something. I don’t remember what it was. See, even if the video was viral and it garnered a few hundred thousand views within a short few days, the message wasn’t able to come across to me.