TR EMERITUS

作者：冀居·谢 “新邮政涂鸦邮箱”事件是一件看来好笑又好气的闹剧，剧中新邮政、警方和主流媒体都很好笑。来龙去脉可以参考严孟达的 《难得胡“涂”》。 先说好笑的部分，世界上很多国家的政府都因为公共财产如建筑物、邮箱、地铁、火车、厕所被人涂鸦，而每年花上千万元的清理费，在新加坡这种事是没人敢做的（要鞭刑的，还记得迈克·菲吗？），所以政联的新邮政要搞宣传竟然会动到“涂鸦”这个歪脑筋上，还叫做“表达自己运动”（Express Yourself Campaign）。问题是，要是新加坡的年轻人受到新邮政的感召，开始在新邮政的建筑、商店、车辆、当然还有邮箱涂鸦的时候，请问：新邮政会不会报警？ 好气的部分当然是执法的问题。在台湾选择性办案，有些案件当办而不办，就叫做“吃案”；把案件吃下去的执法单位是会受到社会舆论的谴责的。什么叫做选择性办案 呢？就是犯了法就得法办，不能看对象或者受害者是谁？这使我想起看过的《法律与秩序》片集的一个故事，说一件谋杀案在几乎要失去时效的前夕才水落石出，调查下来那个死者是个十足的混蛋，而凶手是个好人。负责的检察官虽然有很好的理由和方便“看向另一边”，放过那个无心杀人的好人，但是他也有内心的挣扎，为了维护法治的完整性，杀了人的好人也得捉起来，因为正义女神是蒙着眼的。 可是“新邮政涂鸦邮箱”事件却是以轻喜剧收场，新邮政市场部副总裁吴毅刚开记者会道歉，警方假假生气，说对这个事件浪费了无谓的人力去调查，就不了了之了。哦，这 件事还有一个伏笔，就是新邮政的代理在去年底曾询问警方，说将会有在邮箱上作画的活动，但却没具体说明活动的进行方式，也没有提到蒙面人，所以警方的回复说：邮箱是属于新邮政的，无需提出申请。——这点上警方好像吃了闷亏。 当然“涂鸦 ”是犯法的，这点毋庸置疑，还有YouTube的影片佐证，可谓法网难逃。通知警方将会在邮箱上作画和法律条文上理解的“涂鸦”应该有段距离，如果这回不 是新邮政的代理，而是路人甲乙丙丁在邮箱上艺术性地作画的话，新邮政是不是会报警呢？况且邮箱算是公物，它的存在是为大众服务的，而不能视为新邮政的私有财产。新邮政这么大胆的宣传花招当然会考虑到踩线的问题，可能也已经准备好罚金，但是警方却不执法到底，这就是选择性办案！ 严孟达在他的《难得胡“涂”》里说了两个故事，第一个就是“新邮政涂鸦邮箱”，而第二个是酒廊女老板让顾客上台唱生日歌，结果当衰被罚了一千元。对第一个故事以轻喜剧收场，他说：“这些新气象突显了新加坡越来越开放的一面。”对于第二个故事呢？他说：“被告触犯的是公共娱乐与集会法令第19(1)节条文。执法人员的职务就是要执法，能怪执法人员吗？” 这样的一个人在为主流媒体的新闻把关，你放心吗？ 来源：大马论坛  Read More →

Written by Our Correspondent Former Miss Singapore World Ris Low has found herself in the spotlight again after the fiasco last year about her language skills and probation record which saw her relinquished the crown she won amid pressure from the public. Espire, a condom brand, has appointed Ris to be their spokesperson to promote its latest product as well as practising safe sex to Singapore youths. Espire has just introduced a new condom - "Inspiral" which uses "new revolutionary spiral technology" to help "stimulate (women) to achieve quicker and easier orgasms." It is not known how Ris is going to promote the product well unless she has prior personal "experience" of it. However, being a nurse by training, she should have few problems imparting the basic (not necessarily right) knowledge of safe sex to the intended audience. Ris hit the headlines last year with her less than ideal command of the English language which attracted a barrage of criticisms from netizens. Two weeks after she was crowned Miss Singapore World, it was leaked to the press that she was put on probation last year for credit card fraud, sparking an outcry from Singaporeans which eventually led to the organizers replacing her with the third runner-up Miss Pilar Arlando. In an interview later with the media, Ris said she was not "ashamed" of what has happened and all she wants is to be "famous." She also vowed to take part in another beauty pageant two years later. Almost immediately, she stirred another round of controversy by the liberal use of vulgarities on the Shan + Rozz show by radio station 98.7 which shocked both the hosts and audience alike (watch video here) "Ris Low" became one of the top search terms on yahoo and rednano.sg search engines last year and she even made it to CNN's list of "top 25 most influential people" in Asia. Ris will be calling a press conference on 14 January next week. Perhaps she will share with Singaporeans her experience of using "Espire" then. News source: Lianhe Wanbao  Read More →

OPINION On 9th January 2010, The Online Citizen, one of the two major socio-political blogs in Singapore was incapacitated by what is known as a DDOS (Denial of Service) attack which is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users to prevent an internal site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. The site is only accessible intermittently for the last two days and has been down for the past few hours. According to the last posting on TOC's Facebook, the attack is still going on. A day later, the Temasek Review came under a similar DDOS attack too, but fortunately with our new anti-DDOS firewall blocking the attacks, our site is able to stay up though the loading may be slow. A week ago, TR will be completely inaccessible like TOC now. (Some readers are unable to access TR not because of the attack, but due to DNS propagation issues which we have already resolved.) The Temasek Review has come under such attacks on several occasions in the last few months beginning in September last year. The first attack on our site completely overwhelmed us and it was down for more than 24 hours, sparking a controversy in cyberspace. This is probably the first time that any socio-political blog in Singapore has come under such an attack and it is therefore understandable that some netizens were skeptical about our claims. One prominent gamer in Singapore's blogosphere and a former guest columnist of Temasek Review, "Darkness" went around disputing our claims and accused us of "faking" an attack to publicize our site. (Is there any blogger out there who can grow his/her blog's readership by having it accessible only half the time?) We challenged "Darkness" to substantiate his allegations which he was unable to do so and he was subsequently evicted from the "Brotherhood", a guild of gamers whose "Council of the wise" apologized for his indiscretion on our site. (read the comment here) Since the first attack, we have been attacked on an increasing frequency, initially on a monthly basis followed by bi-weekly, weekly and now once in a few days. Due to the complexities involved, it is not possible for us to explain clearly each time our site becomes inaccessible because it may not be caused directly by the attack. Sometimes, it is not a DDOS attack, but a sync attack, a smurf attack or a massive "content grabbing" like what SPH did to us which has the potential to slow our site down if we do not have a firewall to block off its requests. In the past, everytime we come under an attack, we will have to move our server or change a IP address to strengthen our security system which explains why some readers may see our page as "upgrading in process" at times which our detractors used to "prove" that we did not suffer a DDOS attack. These were evasive measures necessary to safeguard our original site's data and hardware from further damages. Since then, with the help of our present host, we have migrated our site onto a clustered cloud server environment with load balancing and network level firewall which promises better availability, stability and defensibility against most attacks. Who is responsible? Both TR and TOC have a combined readership which is high enough to challenge the mainstream media and it doesn't take a "forecaster" to warrant a guess who the culprits are. Initially we thought the attacker(s) may be some bored youths or a netizen who had an axe to grind with us. However, the attacks are so well-coordinated and relentless that it is likely to be started by a group of hackers with the implicit support of an organization which has the resources to fund them. The attacks follow a classic pattern: 1. They come suddenly without any warning with IPs flooding in from all over the world at the same time which overloads the server and brings it crashing down in no time. 2. It usually lasts more than 48 hours. The longest duration of attack we suffered was 4 days. The site was not down for so long because we had a dedicated IT team to trouble-shoot and find ways to keep the site accessible to some readers. 3. They were not isolated attacks and will come again, again and again. Why is this happening? The short-term aim of these attacks is to prevent readers from accessing our site to decrease our growing readership and to prevent damaging articles from reaching out to a larger audience. The long-term goal would be to discourage us from continuing to work on TR and give up completely which we did consider as unlike TOC, we do not have somebody to manage TR full-time. All of us have full-time jobs outside and we cannot afford to spend too much time bogged down by these perplexing problems with the site. A secondary goal will be to deplete our resources so that we are unable to devote our time, energy and finances to expand the site which they (the attackers) have succeeded in a way. We have spent nearly SGD$10,000 upgrading our server, bandwidth and firewall which leaves us with little money for other more pressing tasks ahead. We had initially wanted to register a company early this year and employ permanent staff to man TR, but now we have to postpone our plans indefinitely till we make our IT system more secure, especially with the next general election around the corner. There is no point spending money to improve the quality of the editorial content when the site is crippled frequently by these irritating and disabling attacks. What can we do? No site in the world is completely safe and impenetrable. Even mighty sites like Yahoo and Ebay were attacked and brought down and most recently, China's gigantic IT portal Baidu. We can only keep beefing up our security system to make it as secure as possible. Right now, our site is hosted on a cluster of three dedicated servers in different parts of the world all protected by an anti-DDOS firewall on a high-level security network. The attacker(s) will have to overwhelm our firewall and take down three servers together at one go before our site crashes and even then we have prepared a few backups in store. Only a professional hacker will be able to breach our security wall. Right now, there is an attack going on, but you are still able to read this article because only one server is being flooded, the other two are holding up. Due to our unfortunate "experience" in dealing with these attacks which have made us literally "vomitted blood" many times, we are more than willing to provide some technical advice and assistance to TOC.  They have three options currently: 1. Move to a dedicated server and increase their bandwidth and RAM to accommodate more communication requests. 2. Strengthen their firewall or install one if they don't have it. 3. Purchase a dummy server and mirror their main site to divert the attacks so that at least half their readers will be able to access the site. Whoever these attackers are, they are unlikely to stop at only one attack. With Temasek Review becoming more and more difficult to attack nowadays, they may change their target to TOC which will have to bear the brunt of it. Despite some petty differences between us, we, more than anybody else, will want to keep TOC up simply because we share the same goal of providing an alternative voice to Singaporeans. Furthermore, with TOC down, the authorities will have one less target to monitor and will now place all their attention on TR which will put us in a precarious situation. If anybody from TOC needs any friendly advice, they can always contact us at [email protected]  Read More →