The hacktivist group Anonymous has announced that they'll target Malaysia due to over-censorship.
The following is the transcript of the video.
Greetings, Malaysia, We have seen the censorship taken by the Malaysian government, blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, and WikiLeaks. Malaysia is one of the world's strictest governments, even blocking out movies, and television shows. These acts of censorship are inexcusable. You are taking away a basic human right. The internet is here for freedom, without fear of government interference. Do not think that no one else notices. Your structured government has done the talking, and we hear loud and clear. Let this be an announcement to all your people. This is a sign, a warning, and an opportunity to listen to ideas above your own. In a way you are being stubborn. But how will this help anyone or your country. We fear that if you make further decisions to take away human freedom. We are obligated to act fast and have no mercy. For rules were meant to be broken. And corruption was meant to be washed away and forgiven. Now we will wash your corruption away so be prepared. Take this as a favor.
As a Malaysian myself, I was at first wanting to comment on this but the group seems to have everything summarized in the video. Well said.
Now, to wait for the judgement day, 15 June 2011, 19:30 GMT…
This is a World Blood Donor Day 2011 post
It's this time of the year again, and it's the World Blood Donor Day. Celebrated every 14 June worldwide, this year's theme is More Blood, More Life.
I'm writing this post from The National Blood Centre Malaysia after donating for my 89th time. We are having a little bit of celebration here, and I get a lot of freebies to bring home. It all doesn't matter anyway because I'm here just because I enjoy coming and feel good after each donation. I try my best to come here every 2 weeks to donate blood plasma and it's also one way for me to break free from my work, slow down on life, and get myself relaxed for a little while.
By law, you can't sell your body part even after you're dead. In Malaysia, donors in return get hospital benefits, vaccinations, full blood screening, and surely on every donation get served with light meal and snacks. Some countries however (and in a big country like the United States of America, it varies between states) 'compensate' donor's time with some cash, and some people take this as one way to earn some extra income. For any reasons however, it's always a good thing to donate blood; if you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for others. Who can tell if one day the coin flipped and you're on the receiving side of blood donations?
To end this post I would like to take this chance to wish everyone a happy World Blood Donor Day 2011, let's all donate more blood, and save more life.
While waiting for someone at KLCC recently, I naturally go to the nearest bookstore to fill my time, which in that particular case was the Kinokuniya bookstore. In there, I go to some of my favorite sections, and couldn't find a book to buy. That's because I already bought most of the bestselling books in these sections.
To just have a book to read in the next hour or so, I execute my not so random algorithm in choosing a random book, which is to pick any book with the word 'bestselling' on the cover. I ended up buying the book 'It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be' by Paul Arden.
It's a good book by itself, but there's just one problem; I already have that book in my current collection. I didn't notice that until I flip open the first page. It's not the first time that such thing happened to me, and there's no telling that it won't happen again in the future.
That however is a good news for anyone who want that book, and I'll just give it away for free. If you're interested in the book, say so in the comment section below, via Facebook, twitter, or anything. If after a week you're the only person interested in having the book, I'll make an arrangement to have it couriered to your preferred address. If there's more than one interested person, I'll figure out how to pick just one person. You can also suggest how if you have some brilliant ideas.
The book itself is not really expensive, so this deal is preferably done with somone not too far away from where I am to be practical. I also have quite a number of books that I finished reading, and might make similar offer later. Till then, tell me if you're interested with this one!
On February 2011 Google started to roll out a major update to their ranking algorithm to improve their search engine results, called the Panda Update. Named after a Google engineer, this update is aimed at low quality sites in general, with some content farm reported to be the most affected. Quoting Google Webmaster Central blog;
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
While the update started on February, Google has only rolled out the update to all their English-language users on mid April. During that period of time, my content-based website, TechRecipes, doesn't seem to be negatively affected by the update. In fact, visitors to the website was slightly increasing. Only after 12 April however (the day that Google rolled out the update globally), the visitors dropped significantly.
Being a technical how-to site, most of the visitors come from the Google search engine. With the sudden and significant drop of traffic from Google, I call the result as devastating. Due to server outage, TechRecipes has recently been de-indexed by Google. Different URL structure due the migration from WordPress to DokuWiki platform could be the cause that the site's PageRank dropped 2 level not too long ago. I'm still working on bringing the site back to life, and I don't think I can afford to revive it from 'dying' again.
Since yesterday however, I see that TechRecipes has started to get back Google's traffic. I didn't do any significant changes to the site the past week (other than updating it's contents of course, which I occasionally do), and I can only hope things will only get better over time. Until now, I still don't know what temporarily caused the problem.
So, what about you? Are your websites affected by Google's Panda update?