TR EMERITUS

By Kevin Voigt from CNN As political and business leaders representing more than half of the world's economic output start to gather in Singapore for the weeklong annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a question looms: Does APEC matter? As the Group of 20 nations -- nearly half of which is represented by APEC member states -- ascends as the dominant global player of the world economy, the role of APEC appears at a crossroad as it celebrates its 20th anniversary. Designed to promote Asia-Pacific trade liberalization but without power to make binding agreements such as the World Trade Organization, the question of relevancy has dogged APEC almost since its inception. In 1993, Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and chairman of the first APEC meeting, famously quipped APEC was "four adjectives looking for a noun." "Some wag described it as an international dating service for leaders," said Charles E. Morrison, director of the East-West Center in Hawaii, a U.S.-funded organization that studies the U.S. and Asia-Pacific relations. If it is an international dating service, there are more belles at the ball this year than ever before: the CEO summit has more than 1,500 business leaders taking part, plus the heads of state from 21 countries including the U.S., Russia, China, Japan and Australia. Even if APEC has acted more like a matchmaker for bilateral agreements and relations among member nations than the group as a whole, that is not an insubstantial role given the extraordinary changes in the world the past 20 years, Morrison says. "If you think about what APEC was like 20 years ago, before that you never had a meeting where the leaders of China, Japan and the U.S. got together -- never in history," Morrison said. "I think territorial issues would have festered and gotten worse (without APEC) and there would be more tendencies toward protectionism. "It may not establish trade rules, but it deepens adherence to rules that are there and at the same time promotes free trade as the norm," he added. C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently wrote the dynamism of APEC in its first decade was lost after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997-98, which "generated strong and lasting distaste in Asia for the Washington Consensus and its institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund." While APEC still remains an important stop for national and business leaders to meet on the sidelines, it has been marginalized as a group the past decade and "failed to adopt leadership positions on any of the key issues facing the region and the world economy," Bergstein wrote. But others see the evolution of the G-20 as an opportunity to reinvigorate APEC as an avenue to influence global policymaking -- nine of the G-20 member nations are also APEC members. "APEC has never had it so good," said Tan Khee Giap, chairman of the Singapore National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation Council. "The fact that the G-20 has nearly have its members from APEC has made APEC far more important than it ever has been in the past." He believes APEC can be influential in helping small but important Southeast Asian nations such as Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand shape global policy matters. "A smaller economy like Singapore could never get into the G-20, but for smaller economies APEC can be very important," he said. - CNN  Read More →

[Read our latest rebuttal to Mr Geoffrey Pereira's second article on 13 November 2009 here] Last week, we published an article about a SPH IP address caught "grabbing" content from our site. (read article here) SPH has since published a reply to our article by Geoffrey Pereira on his ST blog here Read our latest updated article on the Freudian slip made by Mr Geoffrey Pereira here First of all, before we began, we must thank Mr Geoffrey Pereira for giving us such extensive publicity on the Straits Times. We are sorry that he was "arrowed" by his superiors to draft a reply to us with the aim of putting us down and demolishing our credibility altogether. We have nothing personal against Mr Geoffrey Pereira and we understand he is merely an employee of SPH. It is most disingenuous of Mr Geoffrey to distort the version of events, put words into our mouths and throw a smokescreen to obfuscate the matter and to confuse and mislead readers into thinking that we have hurled a false accusation at them. Let us correct the three FACTUAL INACCURACIES in Mr Geoffrey's article: FACT #1: We did not accuse SPH of launching a DDOS attack against our site. In the first place, Mr Geoffrey's choice of the title of his article - "Attack on Temasek Review: not SPH" is completely off the tangent because the article was never about any "attack". Nowhere in the article did we ever accuse SPH of launching a DDOS attack to bring down our site. Mr Geoffrey wrote an entire section on IP sproofing which is totally irrelevant because its was not about DDOS at all. The server log we published showed an IP address belonging to SPH "grabbing" content from our site. It is easily understood by a layman that "content grabbing" is not equivalent to a DDOS attack which is the point we are trying to get across. In fact, we took pains to explain what a DDOS attack means in the beginning of our article to prevent readers from getting the wrong idea because it occurred only a day after our site was down by a DDOS attack. Unfortunately, Mr Geoffrey deliberately misquoted us to create the impression that we are accusing SPH of being culprits of his imaginary "DDOS attack". We find it amusing that SPH actually asked a staff of its Network Intrusion Protection Services (NIPS) vendor to check 7 days worth of data who found no DOS activity originating from SPH before reaching the conclusion: “My opinion of the situation is Temasek Review released the article with very little research into what happened on its server.” It is SPH who did not bother to do any "research" on our original article. Mr Geoffrey should read through our entire article carefully again and emailed us for clarifications first before publishing his article. Had SPH bothered to ask us if we had accused them of launching a DDOS against Temasek Review, we would have told them straight in the face: "NO, we are fully aware of the fact that SPH DID NOT launch any DDOS attack on us at all. What we are keen to know is whether SPH did "grab" our content". FACT #2: Timing of the incident occurred between 31st October 2200 hours to 1st November 0100 hours. As our article had stated clearly, the flurry of network communication requests from the SPH IP took place on 31st October 2009,  around 2200 hours to 1st November 0100 hours. Our correspondent first received the call from the system administrator on 1st November 2009 at around 12.10am. He typed the article on the spot which explained why the initial date was published as 1 November. The exact dates were subsequently amended to between 31st October and 1st November after the relevant portion of the server log is printed out by the system administrator and forwarded to us together with cPanel's Apache access snapshot. Mr Geoffrey wrote: "In fact, from midnight on Nov 1 to about 6 am, (covering a period of the alleged attack) no one from SPH accessed the TR site." Of course nobody from SPH accessed the TR site during this period of time because our server log did not show otherwise! This period was not even stated in the initial draft of our article, so where did Mr Geoffrey get it from? Another figment of his imagination? The key question is, did anybody from SPH access the TR site from 31st October 2200 hours to 1st November 0100 hours? This is the critical time period when the "grabbing" was proven to have taken place by our data center and ISP in China. Mr Geoffrey got the timing of the incident completely wrong and therefore how can he use it as a basis to disprove our claims about the SPH IP address "grabbing" content from our site? He should get his facts check first before making such an embarrassing mistake which cast doubts on the logic, consistency and accuracy of his article. We understand that Mr Pereira is probably not acquainted with IT issues like us, but surely there must be an appropriate person from such a big organization like SPH to proof-read his article before it went to publication? FACT #3 The "grabbing" has the potential to slow and overload our server Mr Pereira wrote in his article that nobody in SPH try to "grab" content from our site which will load our server: "Neither did anyone in SPH try to “grab” TR material in a way that would load its server; nor did any SPH staffer launch any attack on the server." The fashion by which contents are being accessed is consistent with search robots or a web grabber – ie – a website is archived so that a string search can be made. While this is perfectly legal, some software uses multiple sockets when downloading content, and CAN potentially hog resources from the web server and slow other user’s access. It WILL HOG the server’s resources but in this incident, it didn’t because the software firewall on the server itself banned the offending IP address minutes into the action after the IP address exceeded 60 connects per minute, the threshold set by the system administrator. Technically, if the server were to be not protected by firewall and had been configured poorly, a multiple of requests in excess of 60 connects per minute WOULD HAVE brought the server down and that would technically be classified as an attack. FACT #4: Our log shows SPH's IP address accessing material from 2008 As we can see from a snapshot of our log, the IP address 203.116.232.234 which was traced back to SPH by our data center and showed it getting our content from as early as 2008. Mr Geoffrey claimed that SPH logs showed otherwise: "SPH logs also determined that no one from the company tried to access material from 2008, as claimed by TR." There can only be three possibilities: 1. The SPH logs somehow omitted the period between 31st October 2009, 2200 hours and 1st November 2009, 0100 hours. 2. Our system administrator, who is a Chinese national, had either falsified the server log or made a mistake about it but that is quite impossible as we use cPanel on our servers and can see for ourselves under its GUI that the said IP was indeed registered as accessing our site on the date and time in question. 3. The engineers at China Telecoms, the largest ISP in China who owns and runs the Data Centre where our server is located had falsified both the network and firewall logs as well. Our servers are hosted with RTG (Asia) Network in a China Data Centre. Our system administrator had double checked and verified the logs with their Data Centre before we decided to publish the article. The said IP address was registered on our server's Apache log, cPanel's access logs and even at Data Centre level. Frankly, we don't see any reason why someone will go through all the trouble to spoof an IP address to incriminate SPH instead of launching a DDoS attack if that someone has anything against us, as claimed by SPH. Besides, the Data Centre we use has hardware firewall to detect and drop spoofed IPs and Packets. [Read why IP sproofing is technically IMPOSSIBLE in this case here] Furthermore, the company's staff are all Chinese and have NO vested interests in TR or SPH and stand to gain NOTHING by hurling false accusations against SPH. There is a discrepancy between what SPH said and what was revealed on our log. None of us are technical people and it will be unfair for us or Mr Geoffrey himself to continue the exchange online. We propose a simple solution to get to the bottom of the matter to resolve the impasse: 1. Get the system administrator of SPH to contact our hosting company RTG (Asia) Network for our full server log as well as China Telecoms Data Centre for the network and firewall logs. (Obviously we cannot reveal them here for security reasons) 2. Conduct an investigation to find out why our log showed SPH IP addresses “grabbing” our content at the stated time frame on 31 October 2009, 2200 hours to 1 November 2009, 0100 hours. If the system administrator at RTG somehow made a mistake or gave us wrong information, request RTG to publish it on its site. We will follow suit with an unreserved apology immediately under our "TOP NEWS" section continuously for 3 days. However, if it is indeed true that the perpetuator is a SPH staff, we hope SPH can give us an explanation of what really happened. SPH should realize that they cannot afford to ride roughshod over us like what they did to others before. Though their sites still dominate Singapore's blogosphere, we are no pushovers either and we have a sizable readership to reckon with as they must have realized which explained why SPH felt there is a need to reply to our article. Unfortunately, Mr Geoffrey's ill-thought article now leaves us with more questions than answers. We are more than happy to cooperate with SPH to find out the truth as we are really concerned about the content of our site being "grabbed" in such a covert manner. IT idiots like us have to depend on our system administrators to provide us with the facts relating to server matters. We will greatly appreciate SPH's assistance in this matter because based on the resources they have at their disposal, they should be able to find out who the real culprit is (assuming if it's not a SPH staff). In fact, since SPH has now blown the matter out of proportions by implicating RTG and China Telecoms, they have to pursue it to the end because the reputations of two companies are at stake. Mr Geoffrey or any SPH staff can contact us at [email protected]. They are advised to consult us first to have their facts checked before publishing another embarrasing article like this to shoot themselves in the foot. Related articles: >> A Freudian slip by Mr Geoffrey Pereira? >> Attack on Temasek Review: not SPH >> SPH IP caught grabbing “content” from Temasek Review >> Debunking Mr Geoffrey’s claims on “IP spoofing”  Read More →

From our Correspondent Most companies are ignoring NTUC Secretary-General Lim Swee Say's call for them to be "socially responsible" and restored wage cuts imposed during the economic downturn. Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong had earlier urged companies to reverse the wage freezes and cuts. His suggestion was echoed again by Mr Lim Swee Say. 'My strong message to management is this: We've done an excellent job in the way we managed the downturn..........Now the way we wrap up this downturn could be even more important. Because if you wrap up the downturn in a way that is socially responsible, it will further strengthen the trust between labour and management," Mr Lim said. Unfortunately, it appears that companies are more concerned with their profit margins than being "socially responsible". According to a report by state media Straits Times, most companies which cut or froze staff pay prefer to wait until the strength of the economic recovery becomes clear before they commit to reversing the measures. A Straits Times survey of 11 firms which had previously announced cost-cutting measures found that only MediaCorp and Apex-Pal International were looking to at least partially restore the cuts. The remaining companies are taking a wait-and-see approach, saying they will monitor the economic situation, or wait until their next wage reviews, before deciding on courses of action. A wider poll of 50 firms undertaken by the Singapore Manufacturers' Federation (SMa) found that about a quarter reduced pay this year and none have reinstated the cuts. SMa president Renny Yeo said: 'They are not confident that this is a sustainable recovery and will only look at restoring the wages in the first quarter of next year after the picture becomes clearer.' Under Singapore's liberal pro-business labor laws, companies are not obliged to restore the wage cuts since there is no mandatory minimum wage in Singapore. Hollow and self-serving words from ministers and NTUC leaders are unlikely to prod the companies to become more "socially responsible". Singapore's workers are at a losing end because of the unique "tripartite" arrangement promulgated by the ruling party to control the trade unions. The largest legal trade union in Singapore is NTUC which is always headed by a PAP minister. Protests, rallies and strikes are all outlawed in Singapore. The last time a strike occurred in Singapore is in 1986 and it was sanctioned by Singapore's late president Mr Ong Teng Cheong who then a cabinet minister and Secretary-General of NTUC. During an interview with Asiaweek in 2000, Mr Ong said he took the risk and sanctioned the strike though he knew it would pit him against the government. "In January 1986 I did sanction a strike, the first for about a decade. It was in the shipping industry where the management was taking advantage of the workers. I did not even tell the cabinet about santioning the strike. And some of them were angry with me about that. The minister for trade and industry was very angry, his officers were very upset. They had calls from America, asking what happened to Singapore? -- we are non-strike. I said: if I were to inform the cabinet or the government they would probably stop me from going ahead with the strike. It only lasted two days. Then all the issues were settled. It showed that management was just trying to pull a fast one. So I believe what I did was right." [Source: Asiaweek] Mr Ong said he did only what is right for the people and not his ministerial colleagues in Parliament. He remained one of the few PAP leaders who are genuinely loved and remembered by Singaporeans to this very day. Mr Lim Swee Say should learn from Mr Ong Teng Cheong and take concrete actions to pressurize the business community to restore the wage cuts to give Singapore workers a better deal. Empty rhetoric simply will not work and it will make him appear as an ineffectual lameduck who talks more than he walks.  Read More →