Should Singapore still mourn the loss of The Projector?

It has been exactly a month since the sudden closure of indie and second-run cinema operator The Projector. The closure may have provoked widespread despair and outrage online, however performative or overwrought, but for the sake of public education this discussion must now move beyond narratives marked by self-regarding romanticism, naive sentimentality, and uninformed anti-capitalism.

What different things can we learn if, for example, we took a production of culture perspective? What if we treat watching an indie or foreign film in a shabby chic cinema as an end result of the interplay between organisational structure, industry culture, market forces, audience preferences, and contractual agreements and unwritten norms within the wider movie industry? That is: What does it really take to screen a movie in a cinema? And if a cinema operator like The Projector fails, whose fault is it really?

Woud've been appropriate and poetic, but
The Projector didn't end its run with a screening of Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Can we live together with TraceTogether?

Why is trust in TraceTogether at an all-time low?

Singaporeans should be celebrating. After nearly a year of lockdown, Singapore has entered the elusive "Phase 3" despite the inter-ministerial covid task force tripping itself over and over again with poor communication skills and crisis management and a tendency to allow PR agendas to trump medical-scientific expertise and set policy. By refusing to hold daily televised coronavirus briefings during the initial darkest months, this team failed to reassure, educate, guide, and rally the public and to shore up the government credibility and authority during the pandemic. Yes, it's time to talk about TraceTogether fiasco, where this credibility and authority is finally found wanting by the public.

The realities of Singapore's online landscape

Bertha Henson and Daniel Yap have announced the impending closure of The Middle Ground (TMG), revealing that the news website had failed to meet the challenges of sustainability. Earlier last month, the trio of Dr Thum Pin Tjin, Kirsten Han, and Sonny Liew announced the setting up of "New Naratif" and rolled out their vision, accountability, and subscription model.

Bertha Henson has done a great job with TMG and will be back with Bertha Harian

These developments may fit the establishment's Wild West model of Singapore's online news media, where newcomers can rise out of nowhere to carve an empire of their own, then fall just as fast or settle into also-ran status. On a less simplistic level, the online media landscape is dominated and controlled by Singapore's regulatory framework to such an extent that no full-fledged news site can be economically viable. Where the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act empowers the government to shutter presses as it pleases and more insidiously and demand presses award shares to entities it chooses, recent Media Development Authority regulations empower the government to demand any news site it chooses to cough up hefty monetary guarantees, and to demand forfeiture of that guarantee at its discretion.

Singapore's regulatory framework is a deterrence against the setting up of online news sites, and indirectly incentivises bloggers to stay small and stay within the government's OB markers.

Architectures of Control

From the introduction to Architectures of Control:

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

I usually add to my blogroll without much fanfare, but here's a site that I would make some noise about. And I'm sure Singaporean readers would find this fascinating - architectures of control exist everywhere in the world, and it's time we start recognising in our own landscape, geography, and urban design as well.

Need proof of this blog's mandatory reading status? You might want to begin with:

Casino design and slot machine winning chances
Why your third-party battery lasts shorter on a Nokia
The default choice in OSes, programmes, and Starbucks
How airports keep people moving

The Great Firewall of Singapore, episode 2

Duly noted: Singnet users have problems displaying their blogs.

Explanation
Affected blogger users, all logging in from Singnet accounts, experience decreased functionality with blogger.

1. Missing Blogger bar on front page of all blogs


Singnet users get this page. Note the cropped Blogger 404 banner where the blogger bar should be.


Hello, blogger bar!

2. Logging into blogger, the Dashboard looks funny...


Singnet users get this page. Note the dashboard table just seems... broken.


Ah, this is the real deal! Note how uncluttered this dashboard appears.

3. Singnet users may no longer edit their templates.


Note that Singnet claims the entire page does not exist, leading users to think the problem lies with blogger.


Of course, that's just a bloody lie.

4. If you just want to blog... things still look funny.


I'm told that in actual fact, clicking on the buttons produce nothing. No bold text, italics, etc.


It seems that the wonky appearance of the create posts page just drives affected users cranky.

Solution

Under the internet settings for your browser of choice (Firefox/Mozilla/Seamonkey, IE6/7, Safari/Camino), switch from Direct connection to Internet to force a manual proxy of your choice, either the standard proxy.singnet.com.sg:8080 or anything on this page or that one.

Analysis

Transparent Singnet proxy has hiccuped once more. Strangely enough, instead of transparently sending to the user what the server is sending, the transparent proxy implementation of Singnet is doing some sort of interpretation AND rearrangement of what the server is sending, instead of being transparent.

This isn't the first time, though, that Singnet's transparent proxy has created problems for its users on blogger, livejournal, and other services.

More Notes from a Very Small Island and Its Funny Proxy Technology

Few days ago, I described a workaround to Singnet's fluctuating proxy servers.

But how and why does it work?

Singapore's leaders decided early on that the nation had to be protected from undesirable content on the internets such as pr0n, www.playboy.com, pr0n, politically-sensitive (i.e. critical of Singapore's policies and leaders) writings, pr0n, viagra ads, pr0n, email spams, pr0n, William Safire, pr0n with eggs and ham, pr-n, pr_n and prawn.

The OTHER problem Singapore's leaders tried to solve at that time (and are still trying) is the nation's plummeting birth rates. And I blame Singapore's net nanny for censoring normal pr0n sites and not censoring something as dangerous as www.gay.com or www.sgboy.com. Hello, people!??

There were several censoring/proxy solutions:

1. Vet through every website in existence and create a blacklist. Rejected as the growth of webpages is exponential. What we do now is to create a blacklist of prominent sites.

2. Vet through what every Singaporean surfs online. Rejected. You'd require an ever-expanding bureacracy that would mestasize to include the entire population of Singapore, in order to keep tabs on what Singaporeans read online...

3. Have an intelligent program, in essense a True Proxy, that intercepts every url request your browser sends to the ISP. Your request will be blocked if matched with a site on the blacklist. Rejected as this will greatly slow down traffic on the internets. The degradation in surfing will be a warning sign to investors in the knowledge-based economy.

This is what Singapore now does: every ISP here has a program that checks if your browser is configured to have a proxy. It doesn't actually check which proxy you use: you can surf the internets as long as you have one configured. For them to do any more layers of censorship would severely degrade surfing.

If your IE/netscape has no proxy set, the new transparent proxy system (phased in about 4-5 years ago. Before that, you really had to configure your proxy settings) assigns the ISP's proxy server to you.

Hassle-free surfing: the people don't know their internet is being censored.

Now, what happens when you follow my guide and configure a foreign proxy server (such as the ones in Malaysia)? Singnet, Pacnet and Starhub's sniffing programs don't care. And you can now surf the entire internet, censorship-free.

The implications? Tremendous.

Websites that track your IP can only detect the proxy server you're using. That means I appear to be a Malaysian whenever I log into the Straitened Times Online. I can finally register, provide all the fake information, and search their articles without worrying about my privacy. Of course, the ST's search engine is still as craptastic as ever - searching for articles more than 3 days old does not work. With the free subscription-only searching, this means even google can't find the articles on ST that I know exist, and want to retrieve.

Google, the search engine that uses IP tracking to find out what country you're from (Gee, thanks!), frightens the hell out of my privacy-concerned friends. Let me just say that since I changed my proxy server, google now thinks I'm from Malaysia. Whoopie, privacy-enhanced surfing once again.

I'll let you know what more practical goodies can come out of this proxy substition in the future.

Singnet Service Outtage

or, More Funny Proxy Technology from Disneyland with the Speakers Corner

In plain English, Singapore Singnet's proxy servers to all foreign content went down around 5pm in the afternoon. BBC was inaccessible; so was wired.com, cnn.com, GOOGLE, all of blogspot (I pity Singaporean blogspot users, they get it every time our proxies go down!). Webmail is down, antivirus updates are down. HOWEVER, irc is up, Winmx is up, bittorrent has no problems connecting to US IP addresses.

In Singnet's English, "Please be informed there is a congestion in the Internet service to United States. We are currently investigating this and apologise for the inconvenience caused." (RIGHT. The BBC is located in the US, which is why it's also unavailable?)

Note to all: Singnet's communicade obfuscates.

"There is a congestion" suggests that it's NOT the fault of Singnet. It has nothing to do with Singnet's creaking, rusty, falling-apart proxy technology.

The typical English-hobbled Singaporean reader reads "to the United States" to suggest that the congestion is due to a failure in the United States. Not Singnet fault okay!

Well. I now come with great tidings for Singnet's users. The problem is with Singnet's proxy technology: it is their proxy servers that screwed up.

Ailing Singnet users, try this for size on your Mozilla/Firefox, IE or Opera. Under Internet proxy settings, change to one of the following:

202.157.192.130:3128
219.93.175.67:3128
219.93.181.3:3128
219.93.175.66:3128
219.93.174.195:3128 (fastest)

Tada. Internet surfing is now back to normal, thanks to free, alternate, proxy servers located in... Malaysia.

This is a list of fast, free, non-censoring, proxy servers available on the internet for Singaporean users wishing to cut their dependence on our silly ISPs' funny proxy technology.

ICQ will even work even with the new proxy settings. You just need to change the proxy stuff in ICQ manually...

The Great Internet Firewall of Singapore

Officially, Singapore had migrated to server-side automatic proxies (aka "transparent proxies") more than 2 years ago, and no one needs to set the manual proxies on their pc.

However, about 4 months ago, Singnet subscribers complained that they were redirected to some very odd webpage whenever they tried to access any blogspot page. Unless of course, they manually typed in their proxy settings to proxy.singnet.com.sg.

I guess Singapore's ISP must be experimenting with more advanced censorship and usage-snooping technologies, causing a few very visible hiccups.

Singnet users, this is yet another chance to experience censorship technology from the Lee dynasty's favourite ISP.

Try this:

1. Disable your browser's manual proxy settings and change them to automatic or none.

2. You should be able to surf most websites normally.

3. Now, direct your browser to google or gmail.

4. Observe: no loading.

5. Change your proxy settings to the singnet-approved one.

6. Reload your browser to google or gmail.

7. Switch and repeat if insufficiently convinced.

8. Take bets on how long the 'hiccups' will continue.

And maybe, just maybe... wonder how to beat this very weird system.

The War on Genetics

Your logic is faulty! edition

When politicians are convinced that genetics affect *everything*, and construct elaborate political, economic, and medical theories out of 'genetics', it will only lead to major embarrassments.

Following the directions suggested by our Great Leader Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore's Qin Shihuang), scientists in the Population Genetics Programme (I didn't come up with these Orwellian names, our Great Leader and his fake scientists did) of the Defense Science Organisation announced last month that millions of dollars, all taxpayers' money, will be squandered to further the Great Leader's intellectually bankrupt and faulty scientific theories.

In particular, given Singapore's huge short-sighted population, our scientists want to find the gene that causes myopia!

Well. Just this month the American Journal of Human Genetics (vol 75, p 294) publishes a metastudy that convincingly and overwhelmingly debunks the "genetic theory of myopia".

excerpts from the New Scientist:

The argument is about why the rate of myopia is so much higher in east Asia than elsewhere. The conventional view is that people from the region have genetic variations that make them more susceptible. But after reviewing over 40 studies, Morgan and Kathryn Rose of the University of Sydney argue that there is no evidence to support this.

Contrary to popular belief, people in east Asia are no more genetically susceptible to short-sightedness than any other population group. "The simplest explanation is that you have a massive environmental effect that is swamping out the genetic influence," says the authors of the paper. In other words, given the wrong lifestyle, everyone is susceptible to myopia

I do hope the DSO calls off their expensive, myopic genetic research programme soon.

On the next "Your logic is faulty!" edition of the War On Error, tune in to: The Race to the SARS Vaccine! Featuring Singaporean scientists trying to identify the genetic markers of SARS, vs. the American scientists developing the vaccine through traditional means!

Someone should tell them the Americans have won this race as well.

Great Internet Firewall of Singapore (Singnet outtage edition)

I'm wondering how many of you using Singnet broadband (and whether users on Pacific or Starhub/SCV) have encountered this problem during the recent week while surfing: all webpages from Blogspot, for example:

http://moobie.blogspot.com/
http://the_bone.blogspot.com/

are redirected to http://new.blogger.com, which is the usual page you get, if the blogspot URL you entered doesn't exist.

Meaning, for the past week I haven't been able to read any blogs from blogspot.

Now, the weirdest thing is, you have to manually set your proxy settings to proxy.singnet.com.sg:8080 in IE/Netscape/Mozilla in order for the blogspot pages to load properly and not get redirected.

This is weird, since from 3 years ago, Singnet users didn't need to set their proxy servers; everything is automatically cached/filtered/blocked at the server end. Yet this week, something comes up to remind us all that proxy servers are not just for "speeding up internet access", as our ISPs call it, but to block/filter webpages.

Nowadays, it is considered impractical and heavy-handed to block entire websites, so our ISPs are experimenting with targetting and blocking specific pages from websites. Officially though, our ISPs do not have the technology to block specific pages, and are not acquiring the hard/software for this technology.

Jim Carey too, had this feeling in The Truman Show, when he discovers the stars in the sky to be huge stage lights. It's only the imperfect implementation of proxy blocking that reminds people of the existence of proxy servers behind our "Internet experience".

Latest Update:

I've been told that the blogspot problem has disappeared since yesterday noon, so you don't have to manually set the proxy server in your browser... Although, there might be longer loading times for singaporean pages on blogspot o_0

Don't ask me how that can happen, but a few friends told me the same thing. I'm sure in a day or two, the technology will be perfected, and everyone can have a wonderful internet experience without realising the amount of spying our ISPs do behind our backs