I recently received an instant message from one of my messenger buddies asking me to check out some pictures… (duh… this should’ve been clue #1).  I would normally be extra cautious when I get these kinds of messages through emails. This time, however, the message comes from an instant message from a messenger buddy and I didn’t know you could get phished this way.

I didn’t think twice and clicked on the link.  It asks me for my username and password, and like an obedient servant I did, only to realize that I’ve been phished once I found random pictures on the site.

Below is the what little information I can gather by doing a whois on the phishing site:

WHOIS information for: cefcell.com:

[whois.enom.com]
=-=-=-=
Visit AboutUs.org for more information about cefcell.com
AboutUs: cefcell.com

Registration Service Provided By: NameCheap.com
Contact: support@NameCheap.com
Visit: http://www.namecheap.com/

Domain name: cefcell.com

Registrant Contact:
   TST Management, Inc
   Jeff Fisher ()

   Fax:
   Edificio Magna Corp.  5th Floor, Office 511
   Ave. Manuel Maria Icaza y Calle 51
   Panama City, Panama 0000
   PA

Administrative Contact:
   TST Management, Inc
   Jeff Fisher (tstmanagement@gmail.com)
   +507.2021577
   Fax: +1.
   Edificio Magna Corp.  5th Floor, Office 511
   Ave. Manuel Maria Icaza y Calle 51
   Panama City, Panama 0000
   PA

Technical Contact:
   TST Management, Inc
   Jeff Fisher (tstmanagement@gmail.com)
   +507.2021577
   Fax: +1.
   Edificio Magna Corp.  5th Floor, Office 511
   Ave. Manuel Maria Icaza y Calle 51
   Panama City, Panama 0000
   PA

In any case, please be extra careful with your passwords and always double check with the source, especially when the message seems generic and lacking specific information.

When in doubt, you can also check if a site is a phishing site by visiting https://www.phishtank.com/.  If the site is found there, then it is a phishing site. If not, then it may or may not be a phishing site.  In my case it didn’t show up because apparently they created a new page for each potential victim by using the victim’s first name as a subdomain.

Questions have been asked of whether twitter could scale if it really hits the mainstream, when, say, top celebrities joined and are followed by their fans, and twitter has to serve all these updates from these celebrities to all their fans.  Could that day be the end of twitter ?

In any case, perhaps it will be a good thing…. For once perhaps people, including myself, would stop tinkering with their mobile phones… then again there are lots of other social network types of apps to keep us busy on our mobile phones..

Information Technology, ofcourse, has been at the forefront of giving us innovations that better our lives overall. This area hasn’t gotten old yet. In fact, it keeps coming up with new and breakthrough things for years to come. Just look at all the sites covering the topics of new technology: web 2.0 social networks, location based services, mobile technologies. The list goes on and on and on, and it’s always refreshing to discover them:

Biotech is another one that really fascinates me, especially the rapid advancements of genetic science and engineering. The concept that we are now studying how living being work at its most fundamental level, and discovering how to manipulate and harness its powers is just mind blowing. This will have really big impact in the future on how we view nutrition, as well as how we live our lives.

Finally we come to clean alternative energy. Several factors affecting the growth in this area are: Awareness of global environmental destruction, increasing awareness of people about our own responsibility to our planet, as well as the increasing cost of fuel. There are breakthroughs left and right here. There is the research into nanotechnology for solar panels, which increases the efficiency of solar panels by multiple factors, there is also research being done to use/turn water into fuel, as well as the recent news about Tata’s automobile using compressed air.

Fascinating…!

It was about noon time on a Monday, several days ago. We had just finished watching our kids perform at school and wanted to grab some lunch. After strolling Cilandak Town Square (Citos) for a while, we decided to have lunch at Mango. We were seated inside, near the drinks counter. We completed our orders and soon after the waiter brought us our drinks.

All of a sudden, two people who were sitting right next to my kids started lighting up their cigarettes. Concern about my kids, I called the waiter and asked to be moved somewhere else that’s a non smoking area. The waiter replied “This is a smoking restaurant. In fact the whole ground level of Citos is designated a smoking area. The only non-smoking area is on the upper floor.“

The whole ground level of Citos is designated as smoking area ? Since when ? Not wanting to prolong the arguments, I got up to the cashier’s area and told them that we’re leaving and paid for the drinks that have been served. (To their credit, they also didn’t make a big fuss about us canceling the orders we have placed). As I was paying, I asked the lady at the cash register about when Mango turned into a smoking restaurant. “We used to have a smoking section and a non smoking section, but we decided to make them all smoking now” was her reply. She didn’t elaborate further and I just wanted to get out of that place as soon as possible.

We left the place and went to the second floor and finally had our lunch there.

Have I missed something ? Is there really a special license for certain public areas to be designated smoking and not considered a violation of Peraturan Daerah Provinsi Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, Nomor 2 tahun 2005, pasal 13 which says the following:

Pasal 13
(1) Tempat umum, sarana kesehatan, tempat kerja dan tempat yang secara spesifik sebagai tempat proses belajar mengajar, arena kegiatan anak, tempat ibadah dan
angkutan umum dinyatakan sebagai kawasan dilarang merokok.
(2) Pimpinan atau penanggungjawab tempat umum dan tempat kerja harus menyediakan tempat khusus untuk merokok serta menyediakan alat penghisap
udara sehingga tidak mengganggu kesehatan bagi yang tidak merokok.
(3) Dalam angkutan umum dapat disediakan tempat khusus untuk merokok dengan
ketentuan:
a. lokasi tempat khusus untuk merokok terpisah secara fisik/tidak bercampur
dengan kawasan tanpa rokok pada angkutan umum yang sama;
b. dalam tempat khusus untuk merokok harus dilengkapi alat penghisap udara atau memiliki sistem sirkulasi udara yang memenuhi persyaratan yang ditetapkan Peraturan Perundang-undangan yang berlaku.

Discipline and the will to enforce laws are lacking badly in this country and I suppose it’s not going to be fixed soon. Smoking in public areas is not that big of an issue compared to other more serious violation of the law, but it is nevertheless another indication of laws being broken and nobody doing anything about it.

By the way, if you look at the whole Peraturan Daerah, it contains other laws that are basically unenforceable. They are all good laws and if we were to follow through with it we will have much cleaner air. Perhaps in 20 to 30 years it will become a reality ?

There are several factors that come into consideration when he says they are qualified, including, among other things:

1. Technical Competencies
2. Passion for the job
3. Work ethics and attitude.

After grueling screenings, about 99% of the applicants fail and only about 1 % “diamonds” are found. Most of them fail in the passion and work ethics area.

This is a very sad statistic. Just when other countries are gearing up for information economy, we are only producing a measly 1% qualified IT professionals.

How is your experience in this area ? Is it just as bad ?

On several occasions, my driver has asked other drivers about how long on average their travel times are to and from the office. On average for people going into the sudirman area it takes about 2 hours one way. If they start going at 9 o’clock i n the morning, they’ll arrive at the office at 11. With that long of a travel time, they could already be in Bandung.

If say you consider that you spend 2 hours going into the city and about 1.5 hours going back, that’s 3.5 hours per day. Say you work 5 days a week, in one month you’d already be spending 17.5 hours in traffic. In a year you’d end up wasting around 210 hours. That’s roughly equal to 26 days of work days, or about one month worth of work time.

Imagine that ! Out of the 12 months that you go to work, you actually spend one month sitting in traffic. Can you think of other more useful ways of spending one month worth of your time ?

I used to think it’s a good thing since I don’t have to shell out huge sums of money and I can get all these nifty services. That is until you try to build a business on the web. Guess what ? Whatever you are offering is expected to be free as well… Where do you get your revenue from ? Is advertising the only source of revenue that is available for services offered on the web ?

I suppose this can be good if you view it from the perspective that it forces you, as the provider of service, to tap into your creative brains and come up with breakthrough business models.

What types of breakthrough business models do you think is available for services on the web ?

Comments welcome !

Who\’s The Leader Of China

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