He had sworn to leave the country if Anwar became the PM, remember? Imagine the father of Malaysian Corruption Culture having to go into self-exile if PR takes over, a worst case scenario for Malaysia?

He doesn’t mention anything about the worst case scenario for the country if UMNO-BN wins the next GE and decides that because of its win, real reforms are not necessary and it can go about with business as usual.

Of course he has to. He is from UMNO. Do we expect him to point out the positive possibilities of PR taking over?

From a different point of view, i say it would be a disaster for Malaysia if UMNO-BN retains the federal govt. in the next GE.

The reason simply is, if UMNO-BN still wins the next GE, they will take it as a confirmation that the rakyat is happy with the current way things are being run, that NEP is desired, communal policies are ok, bribery and manipulation of the courts,police,MACC,ISA OSA are just fine by the people as long as there is food on the table.

Corruption will continue to rise; NEP will drive most investments away. Unfair policies will lead to talent moving away; No meritocracy means universities will continue to flounder; and the worst, BN influence and control of police and MACC will become even more entrenched.

By that time we would become a net oil exporter; we would become a true police state; neghbouring countries like Thailand would be far ahead of us taking all the FDI; inflation would have skyrocketed without oil money for subsidies and the workforce would by then be sorely depleted by continued decades of migration.

Of course this disastrous prediction will be dependant on BN being unable to reform and adopt new progressive policies.

So which is more likely, PR imploding or BN remaining unrepentant? Both has equally disastrous outcomes for our nation.

NAZRI – 1…… MAHATHIR – 0

During Isa Samad’s 22 years’ rule as the MB of Negeri Sembilan, he had given many agricultural lands through state land grant with nominal premium charge to the Pro-Isa Umno Branch Chairmen. For instance, the Umno Kundur Branch Chairman cum Penghulu of Kundur, Dato Mokhtar, had been given 100 acres oil palm lands located behind Kundur’s abandoned Osama Islamic College.

Perhaps it is time for PAS candidate to raise question on behalf of Bagan Pinang Umno members, specifically this question, “How much dividend have you Umno Members of Bagan Pinang received from Isa Samad’s property holding nominee, Dato Mokhtar, each and every year throughout the past 10 years?” “Why did Isa Samad only make Dato Mokhtar alone a multi-millionaire in Kampung Kundur and ignore the economic interest of many other Umno members in Bagan Pinang areas?”

It’s not an easy problem. If you, as a KFC manager, wanted to ensure the few hungry people in the crowd got fed, as opposed to your staff being asked nonsense questions by the thousands of people from the Anti Fried Chicken League who would never actually buy anything, how would you identify the chicken-eaters?

The site is up this very moment: 29/09/09 @ 9:45am. Interesting. Response from the MT server somewhat slow but to-le-ra-ble.

With regards to what the site administrator of MT had revealed, I wonder if path identifcation packet marking is already in use (i.e. adopted as part of the IP). Maybe not. Otherwise MT would not be facing the problem now. I ask this question only because the idea is not new. It was first proposed a couple of years ago for the specific purpose of countering site flooding by DDos attack. Has that idea any wings?

Isnt blocking also a possibility (in addition to DDos), especially if it was of the concerted type where the blocker unblocks the site once in a while (albeit randomly) to allow intermittent access with the aim of camouflaging the actual blocking effort? After all the umno gobermen have not forgotten (I hope) that their earlier blocking efforts (under directions to the Commission) had attracted widespread negetive reactions.

Onto another matter. Umno now bans all mention of cow head during the coming by-election. Wow.

What happened to Malaysia Today
=====================
By Malaysia Today’s technical team

With so much confusion and speculation making its rounds about what is happening to Malaysia Today over more than a week, we are compelled to offer our explanation so that the record can be set straight. Only limited technical details will be mentioned to allow you to appreciate the scale of challenge the site is facing.

You may now be aware that the site has been up and down since Friday, 17 September 2009. This was due to malicious activities by those behind the effort to cripple Malaysia Today. This is just one of the many rounds of cyber-attacks that we at Malaysia Today have had to face for more than a year now.

Coincidentally, this latest round of attacks started immediately after RPK’s explosive expose two weeks ago on Tuesday regarding the Malaysian Cabinet’s knowledge and ‘approval’ of the PKFZ scandal long before it became public knowledge. Suspicious activities against the site happened as early as Wednesday, but the first damage was done in the afternoon of Thursday, which brought the site down.

The site was quickly recovered and by 6.00pm we were up and running again although with some loss of data. The attack revolved around the long-time problem faced by the site – a rather old version of Joomla content management system and the use of third-party components.

Lack of resources (financial, manpower, etc.) has always been a challenge faced by Malaysia Today, which affected the maintenance and operations of the site. During the recovery process, we locked down the site to reduce the danger of further compromises.

The next wave of attacks came the following day on Friday. This time it was in a wave of DDoS traffic crippling one of our nodes at Singapore. The Singapore node operates with about 30Mbps of bandwidth, a luxury by Malaysian standards but far short if we need to match any serious DDoS attacks. The node was basically choked with illegitimate traffic. Typical of DDoS network attacks, the origin of the attacks is difficult to pinpoint and sometimes pointless as the attack agents/zombies are likely compromised systems themselves.

We then activated our resources at our US node to recover the site. The process required optimisation of the site to cope with demand. (The demand on the site seemed much higher, possibly due to the interest on the PKFZ expose.) Hence the intermittent site outage, due to either overloading or optimisation process.

Being a service provider of a larger scale and sophistication, the US node has a higher capability of sustaining the attacks. Still, the attacks persisted on a daily basis and we tried deflecting them as far as we could. The DDoS traffic we suffered ranged from 227Mbps to 835Mbps, a mammoth scale for anyone familiar with maintaining Internet sites. The attacker does not appear interested in defacing the website, typical of self-styled college hackers. He/she just deleted articles published on Malaysia Today, literally one by one, with the single-minded aim of erasing all the explosive stuff on the site.

Further complicating the trace of attacks is the use of free proxy servers, on random basis, by the attackers. This is an irony, as we have been advising our users to use such proxy servers to overcome any potential content filtering by the government.

All the malicious activities and behaviours bear the hallmark of professional, for-hire hackers. These are certainly no amateurs, judging from the persistence and frequency of the attacks, with the main objective of making the content of Malaysia Today inaccessible to the public.

We believe that there is NO explicit blocking of the site by the various Malaysian ISPs. The inconsistent and intermittent accessibility of the site in the past many days are the result of the situation described above, although we must caution that it is almost impossible to detect any clandestine censorship.

The MCMC has in the past failed to silence Malaysia Today officially through blocking it in August 2008. Now, with even more revelations of various scandals of the government exposed through this site, we can’t help but suspect that there is a more significant force, a hidden hand at play aimed at bringing down Malaysia Today.

Mahathir also thinks Nazri is somewhat of a disrespectful bludgeoning fool. Mahathir is quite right about Nazri too.

The moral of it all is that UMNO is just a circle game
…round and round and round…the fools and jesters take their turns to clown and fiddle while malaysia burns.

Malaysians will be quite right to put the last nail on UMNO in this 8th by-election. Then UMNO, Mahathir and Najib will surely step down as their circle game ends.

There’s not a lot you can do about DDoS attacks – it’s like going to KFC for your dinner, only to find a 100 times more people than usual queueing. You have to leave with an empty stomach.

I see no sign of hacking or blocking. Annoying isn’t it? I write broken websites too. Fortunately for me, mine aren’t at all popular.

There is something responding occasionally (mostly not responding at all – see this one success, followed straight away by a fail):

$ curl –head http://malaysia-today.net/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Connection: Close
Pragma: no-cache
cache-control: no-cache
Refresh: 0.1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

$ curl –head http://malaysia-today.net/
curl: (7) couldn’t connect to host

That’s not what was responding last week, and note the weird case in the Connection field value and the Cache-Control field. Also the ‘Refresh’ header field which is not part of the W3C standard. M2day was using a lame meta-refresh last week, but it seems their programmer is now taking intravenous espresso.

It would be nice if a m2day person would just put a little comment somewhere to the effect “sorry, borken, be back later”. Still, I suppose saying nothing and letting everybody decide that Pink Lips is to blame is probably better for ‘the cause’.