Week in Review: GE13 hits the ecosystem … hard

By Karamjit Singh May 3, 2013

Websites with political content suspect they are being attacked, claim to have proof
Industry regulator MCMC warns against spreading false messages electronically, urges calm

Week in Review: GE13 hits the ecosystem … hard DID you read our story about how National Instruments (NI) made Malaysia its pilot site for a combo R&D and manufacturing centre?

The US multinational had never tried that before and one factor that gave it the confidence that it could pull it off here was the maturity of the E&E (electronic and electrical) ecosystem and the quality of engineers in Penang.

That was in 2009. In February this year, when I spoke to Scott Rust, NI’s vice president of R&D Engineering, he was happy to share that the co-location strategy has proven to work well and that NI will likely replicate this approach hereafter.

But while this reaffirmation that we have a deep pool of world-class engineers in Penang was great news to me, the news that really grabbed our readers’ attention this week has revolved around the 13^th General Election (GE13).

Specifically, it was news that certain websites are being targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Even more insidious, suspicions that they are being targeted by certain Internet service providers (ISPs) that are throttling the heavy traffic these sites are getting.

Digital News Asia had Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran on our Tech Talk segment on BFM Radio yesterday (May 2) to get his viewpoints on this issue. We also had a leading expert, Goh Su Gim, security advisor for Asia at cybersecurity company F-Secure.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide the link to the podcast here as even BFM is having issues with its site! But I urge you to check out its podcast section over the weekend and listen to the various views expressed.

Even industry regulator the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) had a busy week, first issuing a release to warn Malaysians against spreading false text messages via mobile, and following this up within 24 hours with another release saying it had called in 15 individuals to give statements about the spreading of alleged false messages.

And late last night, it released another statement in relation to our story on websites with political content being attacked.

Things are certainly heating up on the election front. Hopefully next week, we can all calm down and respect the decision of the Malaysian people.

But somehow, I feel next week is going to be a hot week too. Definitely in technology circles – DNA is going to feature JobStreet’s Mark Chang and his thoughts on the company finally crossing RM1-billion market cap mark.

That’s a milestone for the tech ecosystem in Malaysia. Watch out for that story, and vote wisely this Sunday!

Previous Instalments:

Week in Review: Are our public schools failing?