Elementary Students Suspended For MySpace Postings

Two students were suspended at an Oak Lawn elementary school last week after the principal discovered questionable postings on a popular Web site, parents said. The MySpace postings allegedly contained foul language, a digitally altered photo of George Bush sticking up his middle finger, pop-ups of women in bikinis and disparaging references to St. Louis De Montfort School and its staff, parents said.

Administrators asked the eighth-grade class to delete their MySpace accounts and threatened to cancel graduation or confirmation ceremonies if they did not, parents said. A boy and girl who allegedly used vulgar words were suspended for four days, parents said. They return to school today.

Guess it does not happen only in Singapore ^_^

Via Make Blog

Very soon, credit card companies and game makers will reward their customers who spend money in the real world using private label “rewards” credit cards. They will use gifts of virtual currency such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft gold and Second Life’s Linden dollars.

Yep, thats Joi Ito‘s gnome mage in World of Warcraft ^_^

Good to Great by Jim Collins

Ever since I left IDA, friends in the industry start telling me stuff they would never say it in my face previously. Was quite a shock initally as I will be in a defensive mode for IDA but after a couple of weeks, I got used to it and just smile and listen.

The comments arent always polite but it has a bit of truth. So while sharing some of these with a former colleague, he asked “Why don’t you send an email to Yeng Kit? You got CE’s email address right?”. “Are you crazy? I’ll be burning my own bridges!” I shot back.

To be fair, Yeng Kit is a very open person and I doubt he would take offense. Unfortunately, IDA is a very big organization and you never know who may take it the wrong way. You dont offend IDA if you wish to survive in this industry.

So I kept my mouth shut. Everything is fine as always…and none the wiser…

First, let me congratulate Boon Leong who has successful setup Resolvo office in Cambodia. It is incredible to have a local partner who can with a phone call get the folks from the company registry to come to your office to register the company, bank clerk to turn up at your office to setup your bank account. And any business partners you want to meet all at a phone call away. (And they say “guanxi” is a Chinese thing ;)

I also have to change my perspective of Cambodia…before I come over, I heard stories about how lawless Cambodia is with guns and stuff. If those were true a couple of years ago, it certainly wasn’t today.

Anyway, this is an exploratory trip for me. Getting accurate data is probably the most difficult so I better record what I found before I forgot them.

1. The average salary for people in the city is 300-400 USD/mth. Yet, you will find people driving the newest 4wheel drives, lexuses and using the latests models of mobile phones. Some may jump into conclusion about corruption until you realized this is a huge segement of middle class. This is puzzling to me until someone explained two things to me (a) while corruptions may occurs at the top, the money stays within Cambodia and thus spur the economy growth (b) many people also do part-time business or hold multiple jobs but only declare one income. This is why officially, the GDP per capital for Cambodia is only 300 USD but the purchasing power per capital is 2300 USD. Go figure!

2. I nearly bursted out laughing when a director at Mobitel I met this morning used the word “incumbent” to refer to the only fixed line operator. There are 20,000 fixed line users but Mobitel alone has 800k (out of 1.3M) mobile phone users.

3. PC pentration is estimated to be at 300k out of 14M population. Not too shabby but lots of room for growth. The sweet spot for CPE (including computer) is 200-300 USD so the 100$ PC would really be great here. While IT engineers are hard to find, people generally knows how to use computer. Internet cafes are popular (0.5 USD/hr).

4. 10 licensed ISPs but only 4 are operational. The latest one, AngkorNet, a 60-40 joint venture between the Anana and MediaRing, is offering 128kbps 5Gb cap for only 230 USD compared to Telesurf (part of Mobitel) 350 USD per month. This is going to be interesting to watch. (Oh, thanks for sharing how AngkorNet deploy their wimax network! Fairly interesting and good luck!)

5. The growth is incredible with the GDP estimated to grow at 7% year to year. As a reference, the land downtown cost 2-3 USD/sq meter 3 years ago is now worth 200-300 USD/sq meter. A friend bought a piece of land for 15k USD 4 years ago and it is worth 125K USD now.

6. The politics also look very stable. The US has the largest Embassy in Asia right here in Cambodia. In fact, I was having dinner with some folks from Intel and they told me they need to get clearance from various bosses before they can go Jakarta but none from Cambodia.

Oh yes, the best office I being to today goes to the Supreme National Economic Council of the Office of the Prime Minister (somewhat like EDB in Singapore). It is a small villa with a huge garden and a private tenis court right in the middle of downtown. I was told they are the think-tank for the Prime Minister on economy issues. I wish I have taken some photos.

And in case you wonder, yes, they are extremely professional. The director I met could pass off as an EDB scholar in the the way carried himself got his master in Australia and PhD in US. Young and smart people are in charge ;-)

Holy Cow! Thats dinner!

Okay, I am in Phnom Phen, Cambodia right now. Its a really last minute trip as a friend of mine is setting up his office in Cambodia and asked me if I would come along. I also have some friends here in Cambodia but guess I wont be able to catch them this trip.

The telecom industry here looks very exciting (at least growing very fast). 1.2M mobile users, 10 ISPs and 2 more coming up. 300 cybercafe and wireless broadband providers are poping up :-) Got to go..maybe update more about it later.

Was wondering why my home wireless network getting slower lately so I downloaded NetStumbler and this is what I found:

11 channels, 13 base stations = bad idea. Time to look for a new place…

(Luckily, I seem to be the only one who knows how to change my wireless channel :-)

I left Vietnam a couple of days ago .. I didnt stay for the whole event as it is really depressing. If we believe everything that is said, my PC is probably infected by a dozen of (undetectable) spywares with maybe a stealth ‘rootkit’ or two, part of being a botnet participating in DDoS against Ebay while sending paypal phishing spams right now. Some of the slides showing what these spywares and rootkit collect and send back are worrisome (they even able to latch up ssl encrypted https so bye bye credit card #s).

CNCERT alone, for example, reported 125,000 security incidents and found 300+ botnets. To put it into perspective, thats 350 security and 1 botnet incident per day! Now, that with 110M internet users of course but if we scale it to Singapore size, we should expect about 1000 security incidents and 1 botnet. I am most concerned with that 1 botnet which we never found…especially we know the # of botnet is directly related to the broadband pentration.

Anyway, I am now in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of meetings. I didnt stay at a fancy hotel this time (hey, I am on my own now!) so I have to hunt around for wireless hotspot. Luckily, that proof to be pretty easy as most building has two to three hotspot operaters: Airzad, Timedotcom and TM.net.

Sitting at a Starbuck in PJ, I noticed a lot others also have their notebook open. I could count 10 notebooks in this tiny Starbuck. This is quite unusual because I dont see that much of this Singapore (except maybe Holland Village starbuck where NUS students gathered). More importantly, Malaysia has a lower notebook pentration than Singapore….I wonder why….

ICANN announced the Timetable of Proposed Testing of IDNS in Top-Level Domains:

ICANN released today a statement outlining a proposal by the President’s Committee on IDNs (co-chaired by Hualin Qian, Mouhamet Diop and Paul Twomey) for a timetable leading to the technical testing of IDNs at the TLD level. The timetable contains a series of consultations and collaborations to ensure that the testing, when launched, will preserve DNS stability and security. It does not purport to be a presumption on any related policy issues which are in the perview of the ICANN policy bodies. The timetable calls for the start of testing in July 2006.

Basically, they are trying two DNS technique, a direct NS delegation vs DNAME assignment (think “soft linking” in Unix). I remember speaking to Prof. Qian in Perth about these briefly and oh gosh, finally!