RFID Tags on Cars, Porn Surfers in Malaysia

Malaysia to embed car license plates with microchips to combat theft

“‘The first thing thieves do after a car theft is change the registration plates,’ Road Transport Department Director-General Ahmad Mustapha was quoted as saying. The microchips, using radio frequency identification technology, will be fixed into the number plates and can transmit data at a range of up to 100 meters (yards), the report said. They will have a battery life of 10 years, it said. “

Cool. But I don’t see how it can prevent car theft. Isn’t it now all the thief has to do, after stealing a car and changing it registration plate is, replace the RFID tag? Or do they think the thief would be smart enough to steal a car with all the security features that are built in modern cars, and would be dumb enough to not have a replacement RFID tag or not knowing how to overwrite one, or at least just disable the battery? “Ooops. My batt has run flat.”

I was thinking why RFID tags need battery until I read it in wikipedia that it is an active form of RFID tag for range enhancement. Maybe this whole vehicle RFID tagging is so that the authority can have a vehicle monitoring system right from the office, just like you see on sci-fi, with the blinking dot tracking every vehicles in the country.

[ Via Slashdot ]

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Most porn surfers from Kota Baru and Kuantan

Someone tells me why is this news? Some reporter from the paper got bored after his porn-surfing sessions (that’s how he knows the keywords), and discovered the data on Google Trends and decided to make it into a news article.

Try this:
’seks melayu’ (malay sex)
‘bogel’ (nude)
‘gambar bogel’ (nude pictures)

Universiti Malaya psychologist Assoc Prof Dr Jas Laile Suzana Jaafar viewed the development as a normal phenomenon, especially in Kelantan which practised conservative policies in sensitive matters such as sexuality.

“If a teenager was the one who searched for it, it is normal because of puberty and he has to learn about sexuality to understand the changes they experience.

“If teenagers ask their parents or peers, how much information can they get? In Kelantan, parents are not open to talking about sexuality with their children,” she said, adding that some parents tend to regard the subject as a taboo.

While they are conducting a study using the statistic from Google Trends (bad idea) and wondering why the porn surfers in Malaysia are mostly from the small towns rather than big cities, let me beat the professor at Universiti Malaya and close this stupid ‘issue’ once and for all, though I’m no psychologist nor a professor.

Believe it or not, the reason behind this trend is nothing about the culture as published. It’s all because of language. English isn’t as commonly-used in the towns mentioned. People in the big cities search for ’sex’, ‘porn’, ‘nude’ rather than the malay counterparts.

Bet me any amount, I’m sure the English keywords that I’ve mentioned are being searched for more often by the Malaysians than the malay keywords that appeared on paper. And bet me any amount, there are more porn surfers in big cities like KL and Johor Bahru than the small towns mentioned in the paper.

Please use your head, Prof. Think!

And maybe I can link this ‘issue’ to this news.

[ Thanks Sek Ling for alerting me to this news ]

IE7 - My Turn, Finally

But I had to reject it.

I have finally received an offer to auto update to Internet Explorer 7 yesterday morning when I turn on my laptop.

As my work is all about web, I would need to test my work on at least the browser that most people are still using today, IE6, I had to reject the offer and stick with the ugly and useless IE6.

What I’m surprised that my desktop is on almost throughout the day everyday but haven’t received the IE7 auto update offer. Why can’t Microsoft be more efficient in distributing IE7 like how they distribute their security patches every first Tuesday of the month?

I want people to switch to IE7, so I can switch. It just sucks that way that IE is part of Windows XP and I can’t have 2 versions of IE on the same machine. Maybe after Microsoft is pushing IE7 hard to the user in their automatic updates, IE6 might still remain as the dominant browser for the abundant of pirated users of Windows XP in this region. Then I guess I’ll have to wait until Vista is out before I upgrade.

I’m actually looking forward to upgrade the IE on my desktop as my laptop is more like a workstation where I do most of my web programming work, but I haven’t got any offer to upgrade so far. I know I can manually download it off the web, but I do not want to and I want to see how long it takes for Microsoft to offer the upgrade to my desktop.

I really do not understand why Microsoft is taking so long to distribute IE7? Is it because they are not confident of IE7 and are conducting sort of an open beta-test to the current IE7 users?

Weird.