Not credible hosting

After the events where companies like EveryDNS, Amazon and other companies got subjugated and coerced into removing Wikileaks from US and other countries servers including France. Can these nations and servers who are easily coerced, be trustworthy hosting for any website or company or organisational infrastructure ?

Can you guarantee a safeguard that your materials would be removed the next day ? Aren't the USA servers being prided as a platform for free speech ? Look at the mess of USA. How can we trust USA, France, Sweden ... these countries as hosting nations for our contents whom they pride themselves for freedom but in the end, they gave in to pressure ?

How can we trust EveryDNS, Paypal, Amazon, Wikipedia (Removing Wikileaks Mirror article), Twitter (block Wikileaks topics from trending), Mastercard and Visa ... ?

How can we trust the infamous Swiss banks from being neutral to our money (Read: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/7bg5kc) ?

The UN is very concerned with these extreme ways of prosecution and attacking of Wikileaks and Julian Assange (Read: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6B81RO20101209).

So who do you trust your hosting to and your technology ? Now cloud computing seems rather more unreliable as someone (if you hosted in the wrong hosting companies or countries) could shut you down.

SG Immigration failed to detect overstaying party

Read: 

• http://news.xin.msn.com/en/singapore/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4410225
• http://news.xin.msn.com/en/singapore/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4412501

From these two articles, you can see the failure of the Singapore (SG) government in carrying out it's duties. Why isn't the Immigration and Customs Authority (ICA) able to detect people who overstay in Singapore ? Singapore has been hailed as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the Asian regions, besides Japan and South Korea but a simple immigration issue threw Singapore into the limelights and the attention of the US Government again.

Simply, the government could have a tracking system that automatically monitors the stay of non-residents and send an sms or call him them whenever the system noticed that they overstayed without renewal of their stay or anything of the sorts. And if the person doesn't leave SG within certain amount of days, the Singapore Police would be activated to find the person and remind them.

This is such a technological implementation but the SG government doesn't seem to have any in place. Kamari Kenyada Charlton, the American who overstayed, had to attempt to leave Singapore before being caught.

What is this kind of system where you need to wait for something to happen before taking actions ? I thought the Singapore Government is rated as those 'on the ball' type that doesn't sit there and wait for shit like these to happen ?

The worse thing is, Kamari Kenyada Charlton is a wanted man by the Interpol. How the hell could he enter when he is wanted by Interpol. What is the ICA and SG government doing ? They are all sleeping on their jobs I bet. If they had a system that actively synchronize the Interpol databases and their database of immigrants, they would have picked it out and bar him from entry, turning him away from SG and non of such 'hoo-haa' would have happened. Even though he may have entered SG before Interpol wanted him, when he become a wanted man, the continously updating system should be able to ferret him out immediately and inform authorities to handle him.

How efficient is SG government ? Not as effective as people imagine. SG government, you really need the buck up. Elections' coming soon.

The worse thing (and not related to technology) is that just for overstaying, he would be caned ? Isn't it for serious offenses only ? How serious is overstaying and why wasn't he alerted and warned for overstaying ?

Seriously, how competent is the Singapore Government at their jobs ? It's very questionable.

UAE and Saudi attempts to ban RIM

It has been going on for a while where some governments (for now is the UAE and Saudi Arabia) attempts to block the use of RIM. I wouldn't bother to list some sample sites for reading as I usual do since these news are all over the place and widely available.

Well, that's too bad for Obama's use of his personal Blackberry if he visits UAE and the Saudis.

Many people can claim that this and that are done in the name of security but how much can you justify your claims if you make such a claim ? How effective is it to prevent terror if someone (some government) manages to get RIM to release all it's data to them in plain and they (whoever these governments are) gets them ? 

There's just too much information out there and sad to say, most data-mining programs are very prone to false positives.

Besides false positives, anyone could encrypt their messages before hand without relying on RIM's 'secure' channels and servers and there is nothing RIM could do ?

So how do you get good intelligence ? Rely more on good on the ground intelligence training in combination with technology rather than allow technology to dominate your intelligence gathering and getting too engrossed with technology than practical on the ground intelligence.

Oh... and do you know that banning stuff is classified as breaching of human rights ? If you do it, you might find it even harder to obtain FTAs and enter the WTO or maybe getting scrutinized by other nations.