Kampung Boy

Now that it has become a common knowledge, let me jot something about my hometown, Sitiawan. It was in the good old days, when as a kampung boy I grew up with the company of friends. Somehow, my dear dad enrolled me in the SRK ACS rather than the ones nearby my house. Thus, I had two groups of good friends, viz. the town boys and girls during school hours and the kampung boys and girls after school. 

At school, I was amongst the best Malay student. I managed to get at least the top 5 in the whole form. I represented the school in almost all of the reading contest, plays and sketches, recitation of the Holy Quran, you name it. After school, I did all sort of things with my band of kampung colleagues i.e. fishing, playing police-sentry, playing lala (something like rounders but with holes), hence nurturing my future cricketing skills, guli (marbles), spinning top, rubber band, self-made catapult, galah panjang, congkak, ad infinitum. I also joined the kompang group and made performances during weddings.

With our retro 70s bicycles, my kampung friends and I did the ‘round satu kampung’ rituals almost every day. The best of times were during the rambutan seasons. My house was surrounded by at least 13 different types of rambutan trees. There were sweet ones, sweet and ‘lekang’, slightly sour, etc. That’s why until now, I can’t stand to eat the rambutan bought from the fruit sellers, as the tastes are not to my liking and certainly they are not freshly picked.

My dad was a teacher in one of the school in Sitiawan. Every day he brought me two story books, of which I finished reading them in no time. In fact the whole collection of the 20 plus 20 volumes of the Grolier Encyclopedia and The Book of Knowledge respectively, in my house were my true close companions during the day and night.

By age of ten, I practically knew all the names of the 50 states of the USA and their respective details (flags, capital cities, rivers, flowers, birds, places of interest, population, etc.), and have read the abridged version of all famous literary works like Wuthering Heights, Huckleberry Finn, les Miserable (except I do pronounced Jean Valjean as ‘Jin Valjin’), etc.

Life then (with no Astro, no internet, no smart phones) was very interesting as all the international magazines such as Time, Newsweek brought by my elder brothers as well as all the Dewan Bahasa, Dewan Sastera bought by my dad, all of them were all accessible, and I read them all.

Then, there’s standard Five Assessment Test, and I managed to get good result. The next year, when I was 12 like all the other boys, I had my bersunat (circumcision) at the kampung health centre.

Later that year I was offered a place at a boarding school in Ipoh, the big city.

MIS750_5: Mobile (Smart) Phones, Mobile Phones Every Time

Ever been to a restaurant, either with friends or your own family nowadays, and when everybody starts staring at their mobile phones?

Yes? No?

Yes, mostly yes.

Mobile phones are in fact an important part of modern life. We somehow have to admit this very fact. However, during mealtime, especially so at the restaurants, there should be some of etiquette on using mobile phones, if possible.

Firstly maybe nobody should be allowed to look at a phone during dinner. The phone must be placed facedown, you can look at it but never touched. Not even a minute to check the email.

Definitely not Facebook, especially if you want to 'hipsterly' snap the photo of the food or selfie your ownself and upload it via your Facebook (or Instagram) to get as many likes.

What about when going to the toilet? Yes, using your phone is permissible, else like me I still bring the car magazines.

If during the dinner conversation to need to check some facts when suddenly you are out of ideas, then 'googling' Google might be permissible, but not encouraged.

What about Twitter? Especially you want to find out what actually happened to Spain in the FIFA World Cup, when it was the former champion which the first to pack their bags and did not survive the first round. Maybe a yes.

Sources:

New York Times, Wikipedia, Information Technology for Management 6^th Edition

MIS750_4: Alien Software

Ever watched the blockbuster movie called “Independence Day” (ID4) recently shown in Astro, starring Will Smith? In the movie, an alien mothership enters Earth's orbit and deploys several dozen saucer-shaped destroyer spacecraft, each about 24 km wide in circumference.

However, a MIT graduate computer geek devises a plan and introduced a computer virus and disrupted the force fields of the destroyers, and the aliens were defeated. In a not related circumstances in Chapter 9 of MIS750, there is a topic on Information Security and the many types of software attacks including the term alien software.

Among the types of alien software for humans like us are as follows:

1. Pestware: Clandestine software that uses up valuable system resources and can report on your Web surfing habits and other personal information.
2. Adware: Designed to help popup advertisements appear on your screen.
3. Spyware: Software that gathers user information through the user’s Internet connection without their knowledge.
4. Spamware: Designed to use your computer as a launch pad for spammers.
5. Spam: Unsolicited e-mail, usually for purposes of advertising.
6. Cookies: Small amount of information that Web sites store on your computer, temporarily or more-or-less permanently.

Back to ID4, during the movie screening, back in mid 90s the audiences (in America) were standing up in cinemas to cheer the trailer, which showed such US landmarks as the Empire State Building and the White House being obliterated by giant flying saucers. The truth was, ID4 was never going to be anything else but a massive box-office hit of over US$800 million.

However, once you've got past the “too much” explosions and the astonishing amount of vehicular, architectural, and airborne carnage, ID4 is basically a boy's own adventure with soap opera elements that has an entire species of technically superior aliens bested in all departments by good old Uncle Sam (an American) and his can-do (Amerika Boleh) spirit.

Sources:

New York Times, IMDB, BBC1, Wikipedia, Information Technology for Management 6^th Edition

MIS750_3: Strategy on Targeted Advertising

In MIS750 Chapter 7, we are exposed to a topic on “IT Strategy & Planning”.

In short, strategy is the direction of an organisation to achieve competitive advantage by allocating its resources for growth especially within a challenging environment. The organisation will then need to develop a strategy of performing activities differently than its competitors.

This includes making radical changes to the business processes for producing or distributing products and services innovatively which sometimes the fundamental structure of the industry.

For example Facebook has recently announced two major changes to its advertising policy that will let it track users across the web while giving them access to the advertising profiles created by the social network of their likes and interests. The site creates profiles in order to sell targeted adverts tailored to the individual but has never before let users view or edit the information in those files.

In addition to Facebook users, other web browsing activities outside of Facebook will also be added to this profile through the Facebook ‘Like’ button. Even if individuals do not click this on third-party sites it still registers their presence if they are logged into Facebook in the same browsing session.

Similar buttons from Twitter and Google have identical abilities, but this is the first time Facebook has chosen to utilise this wealth of data. If users don’t want to be tracked in this way then they can opt out via the Digital Advertising Alliance or for mobile browsing adjust their settings on their handset.

The strategy adopted by Facebook is via “targeted advertising” that the aim to make it clearer to individuals why they were seeing certain ads. It is anticipated that although Facebook is giving people more control over what sort of adverts they see they’re also becoming more aggressive regarding the types of data they collect.

Targeted advertising is a type of advertising whereby advertisements are placed so as to reach consumers based on various traits such as demographics, psychographics, behavioural variables such as product purchase history.

Most targeted new media advertising such as the one by Facebook uses second-order proxies for targeting, such as tracking online or mobile web activities of consumers, associating historical webpage consumer demographics with new consumer web page access, using a search word as the basis for implied interest, or contextual advertising.

A conducted a study on targeted advertising in 2009 revealed that targeted advertising has secured an average of 2.7 times more revenue per ad as non-targeted "run of network" advertising.

Sources:

New York Times, Wikipedia, Information Technology for Management 6^th Edition

MIS750_2: How to Steal a UAV?

I confessed that I’m a kind of a movie buff, especially if the movies or TV series are with a spy-thriller genre, the intelligent ones off course ...

In my last MIS750 blog entry, I did mention about the UAV. This time I wanted to elucidate a little more with regard to this wonderful piece of high technology and how actually MIS works in practice.

In Chapter 5 of MIS750, we learned a bit about what is called as the Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). An example of the deployment of EIS is by the United States (US) Military to enhance communications by allowing quick dispersal of combat intelligence and connecting support applications with tactical applications.

In the recent and on-going ‘24:Live Another Day’ shown every Tuesday 10.00 pm on AXN, the tv series plot is about a group of terrorist who managed to capture 10 drones (UAV) that belongs to the US Military and wanted to launch attacks at designated targets in London as possibly creating catastrophic disasters.

Actually at first the plot seems strange enough, as how a group of terrorist could hijacked sophisticated US Military drones. However,  the fact is, this has been done before by Iran in December 2011. Iran’s cyber warfare unit stationed near a city of Kashmar managed to brought  a US Military  drone down with minimum damage. 

According to one report, the drone was captured by jamming both satellite and land-originated control signals to the UAV, followed up by a GPS spoofing attack that fed the UAV false GPS data to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its home base in Afghanistan.

There is also an unconfirmed news that the very same drone technology is said to have undergone reverse engineering, fully decoded and was being smuggled from Iran to China via a supposedly safe route i.e. MH370 flight, and the rest is history (yet to be uncovered).

A typical US Military drone like the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-170 Sentinel (the model captured by Iran) posses highly advanced avionics and complex mechanical systems technology to perform in any airspace environment.  These drones are equipped with precise and independent inertial position information for navigation, targeting and attitude reference. The drone power plant for example was designed for low size, weight and power consumption operating across the spectrum of rugged military environments.

For the US Military the EIS workload is largely handled by their Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). The DISA provides, operates, and assures command and control, information sharing capabilities, and a globally accessible enterprise information infrastructure in direct support to the US national interests.

As for the case of mobilizing the drones, the DISA provides support to engineer, develop, maintain, and operate a global net-centric enterprise in direct support to joint and coalition across the full spectrum of the drones’ operations. This includes designing and implementing a high-capacity, strategic communication network to ensure reliable communications and less dependency on satellite communications and tactical microwave links, which had limited bandwidth capacity and other limitations including possibly exposed to hostile cyber warfare attacks similar to what Iran has done in 2011.

MIS750_1: Where Exactly is MH370?

Sometimes, one needs to keep everything within perspective as well as keeping it simple. To borrow Einstein's word of wisdom, 'everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler'.

I was in my EMBA class today when the good professor asked his students, 'Where is exactly flight MH370?' He didn't asked this question directly to me. Else, I would have answered him like this:

The MH370, or to be more specific the MAS Boeing 777-200ER ('ER' for Extended Range) is somewhere in a huge Faraday cage where the 63.7m long aircraft is shielded from any external electromagnetic radiation and will be almost free from any electromagnetic interference, or simply means the aircraft cannot be detected by radar or any reconnaissance satellite.

Can this huge Faraday cage fit a Boeing 777-200ER ?

If you watch the Scott brothers (Tony and Ridley) spy-thriller movies like 'Enemy of the State' and  'Body of Lies', the deployment of continuous and recorded satellite imagery or live feed from remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will basically enable the US National Security Agency (NSA) or CIA to have almost full access in global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including surveillance of targeted individuals. Therefore, tracking a huge aircraft like the 777 would be simply a piece of cake.

A CIA operative was tracked via UAV imagery miles above the ground, seen here in the movie 'Body of Lies'

As the saying goes, 'the truth is stranger than fiction' which basically means the real world is stranger than fiction. Fiction is made up stories and all imaginations like novels, movies etc. Whereas the truth is in fact sometimes can be out of this world, so strange that it is even stranger than fiction.

The disclosure by Edward Snowden by whistle-blowing the NSA secret intelligence documents amply testify to their capabilities such as collection of internet browsing, email and telephone data of not only every American, but citizens of the world as well. In short, our spending habits, our location, our every movement and conversation, are visible to others whose motives we cannot know. The free apps like Waze which is a GPS-based geographical navigation developed by the Israeli start-up Waze Mobile, now in most of our mobile phone, including my own iPhone.

Waze, the harmless looking free apps is indeed outsmarting the traffic, and all of us.

So back to the question again, where exactly is flight MH370, my assumption would be that it was tracked by a reconnaissance satellite, then deliberately hijacked via remotely (like remote UAV), landed in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, refueled, and now in a Faraday cage somewhere in Israel.

There will be a lot of activities with regard to the management information system (MIS) to ensure adequate provision of information that NSA/CIA/Israel require to manage themselves efficiently and effectively. There will be a lot of hardware, software, data, procedures and spies (people) will be involved and used to analyse and facilitate this strategic and operational activities to ensure MH370 to keep on missing until today.

Allah knows best.

5 + 7

That's the term that we use in my company. Five months already passed by in the year 2014. There will be seven more months to go for this financial year. My team and I will be reassessing our business performance so far, and will make necessary adjustment and recalibrating our approaches and strategies where necessary. Next, we will conduct similar assessment during 8 + 4. Yes, you have got it ... in the month of August.

Wait a minute, what am I saying ?

All praise to Allah. I have made a career move to another company, which is actually my former company back in 2001 to 2006. This new job poses quite a challenge for me as I'll responsible for the entire business. May Almighty Allah give me strength and wisdom to excel in my job.