Rabu, 15 Jun 2011

The Malaysian Insider :: Sports

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The Malaysian Insider :: Sports

Venus Williams continues comeback with another win at Eastbourne

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 08:28 AM PDT

LONDON,June 15 — Venus Williams continued her winning return after a long injury layoff by beating former world No.1 Ana Ivanovic of Serbia 6-3 6-2 at the Eastbourne grass-court Wimbledon warm-up tournament today.

Venus took just over an hour to get past Ivanovic and reach the quarter-finals as she bids to regain her strength and fitness for Wimbledon which starts next week.

The American, a five-times Wimbledon champion, had been sidelined for five months with a stomach injury.

Asked how she felt about her second-round performance, she told reporters: "Obviously, it's great, no breaks of serve. That's ideal for me in the match.

"To get a double break at the end just feels awesome. I was really happy to have those clean service games and not a lot of errors.

"I was just hoping not to be injured, honestly. The first match was definitely kind of nerve wracking, hoping to come off the court on two legs.

"That was the first goal. Then to win a match is the ultimate goal. Just to have the opportunity to play another match is a great start."

Venus had been out of action since the Australian Open in January having suffered abdominal and hip injuries.

She marked her return with a creditable 7-5 5-7 6-3 victory over Germany's Andrea Petkovic on Monday and looked sharper on Wednesday, breaking her opponent's serve four times.

Earlier, third seed Victoria Azarenka of Belarus beat Briton Elena Baltacha 6-1 7-6, Czech fifth seed Petra Kvitova defeated holder Ekaterina Makarova 7-6 7-6 and Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland beat Italian fourth seed Francesca Schiavone 6-3 6-2. — Reuters

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Fabregas says he is happy at Arsenal

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 03:56 AM PDT

Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas attends a promotional event to launch a new perfume in Madrid on June 15, 2011. Arsenal captain Fabregas said today he was happy at the Premier League club. — Reuters pic

MADRID, June 15 — Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas said today he was happy at the Premier League club and no decision had been made about a possible move.

"I am an Arsenal player. I have been very happy for eight years and I am very happy," Fabregas said at a promotional event, when asked about the prospect of a return to Barcelona.

"I am not thinking about football right now, just about my holidays," the 24-year-old Spain midfielder said, adding that questions about his future should be directed to Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, to whom he had not spoken for six weeks.

"There have been no decisions. The truth is that it doesn't always depend on the player and at the moment I don't know anything," he added.

"I am very happy where I am. Anything else would be speculation that is untrue. You can never say never in this life as so many things happen that you can never predict."

Spanish media have reported that European champions Barca would have to pay around €40 million (RM174.8 million) to secure Fabregas's services for next season.

The player, who moved from Barcelona to London in 2003 at the age of 16, is seen as a natural replacement for playmaker Xavi, who turned 31 in January.

Fabregas admitted he was frustrated at Arsenal's repeated failure to win a trophy but said he believed the club had the resources to end their barren run.

"A player who is not frustrated at not winning titles is either lying to himself or lacks ambition," he said.

"There is a good team and a good manager and one of the most faithful fan bases in Europe. With those I believe we can make progress and one day win an important trophy."

Any decision on his future would be taken by Wenger, Fabregas added.

"He is the boss, the one who makes the decisions. You should ask him. I was injured at the end of the season and I haven't seen him for about six weeks." — Reuters

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The Malaysian Insider :: Features

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The Malaysian Insider :: Features

Too much TV can shorten your life

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:53 AM PDT

The habit of plunking oneself down in front of the television and watching for hours makes up about five hours of daily activity on average in the United States, but is also a prevalent practice around the world. – Photo by shutterstock.com

WASHINGTON, June 15 – A review of published studies in the past 40 years has shown a higher risk of diabetes, heart problems and early death among people who watch lots of television, US researchers said yesterday.

The results of the meta-analysis performed by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health are published in the June 15 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More than two hours per day of TV-watching boosted risk of type two diabetes and heart disease, while more than three hours a day increased a person's risk of dying prematurely.

Each two-hour increment in viewing per day was linked to a 20 per cent higher risk for type two diabetes; a 15 per cent increased risk for fatal or nonfatal cardiovascular disease; and a 13 per cent higher risk for all-cause mortality.

"While the associations between time spent viewing TV and risk of type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease were linear, the risk of all-cause mortality appeared to increase with TV viewing duration of greater than three hours per day," the study said.

In Europe, people spend about 40 per cent of their daily free time – or three hours – in front of the tube, and in Australia the average is 50 per cent of daily free time or four hours, the study said.

"The message is simple. Cutting back on TV watching can significantly reduce risk of type two diabetes, heart disease, and premature mortality," said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard.

"We should not only promote increasing physical activity levels but also reduce sedentary behaviours, especially prolonged TV watching." – AFP

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Japan theme park to launch record-breaking ride

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 02:39 AM PDT

The Fuji-Q Highland Amusement Park is to launch the Takabisha, a world-record roller coaster. – Photo courtesy of the Fuji-Q Highland Amusement Park

TOKYO, June 15 – A Japanese theme park is about to launch a roller coaster with the world's steepest vertical drop.

The Takabisha ride is scheduled to open at the Fuji-Q Highland Amusement Park near the base of Mount Fuji in Yamanashi prefecture on July 16.

It will feature seven major twists over its 1,000-metre length, a sharp rise to a peak of 43 metres – which triggers a moment of weightlessness before riders take what the operator of the ride describes as "a nosedive" – and sections that plunge riders into complete darkness.

The part of the ride that is ground-breaking, however, is the breakneck freefall at 121 degrees. The park has applied to the Guinness Book of World Records to have the ride certified as the steepest in the world.

Thanks to the assistance of linear motors on the cars – as well as the effects of gravity – riders on the Y3 billion (RM112.94 million) attraction will reach a speed of 100kph and the ride will last for just 112 seconds.

Once the ride has been certified, it will be the 14th Guinness World Record set by Fuji-Q. The park is already home to the Fujiyama ride, Dodompa and Eejanaika, putting the park among the leading venues in the world for thrill-seekers.

The Kingda Ka ride at the Six Flags Great Adventure park in New Jersey is the present holder of the title of the tallest steel roller coaster in the world, at 139 metres, with a maximum vertical drop of 127 metres.

The prize for the fastest coaster goes to the Formula Rossa at Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi, which only opened last November and reaches an impressive speed of 240 kph.

The record that Takabisha is looking to overhaul has been held by the Mumbo Jumbo ride at Flamingoland in Yorkshire, northern England since July 2009. With an incline of only 112 degrees, Takabisha will be fully 9 degrees steeper for the riders. – AFP

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The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz

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The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz

British actress Elizabeth Hurley divorces

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:24 AM PDT

LONDON, June 15 — British actress and model Elizabeth Hurley's four-year marriage to Indian businessman Arun Nayar ended in divorce today.

The couple was granted the divorce by a district judge at the High Court's Family Division in London, according to the Press Association.

Hurley, 46, married the textile heir at Sudeley Castle in western England in 2007 and had a traditional Hindu wedding in Jodhpur, India.

Hurley dated British actor Hugh Grant for more than a decade and has a child from a relationship with film producer Steve Bing. — Reuters

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UK police detain two near home of singer Joss Stone

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 02:39 AM PDT

Singer Joss Stone poses on the red carpet before the MTV Europe Awards ceremony in Berlin on November 5, 2009. — Reuters pic

LONDON, June 15 — Police in southwest England have arrested and detained two men on suspicion of conspiracy to rob and murder near the home of chart-topping soul singer Joss Stone, they said in a statement today.

Devon and Cornwall Police were alerted by suspicious locals and arrested the pair in the town of Cullompton, in the county of Devon, on Monday morning.

The men, aged 30 and 33, were initially held for possessing an offensive weapon and being equipped for burglary and theft.

"As a result of enquiries the two men are now being detained for the further offences of conspiracy to rob and conspiracy to murder," the police statement said.

"Major crime detectives are continuing to investigate."

The Sun newspaper reported that the men were involved in a suspected plot to kidnap Stone, 24, who has sold around 11 million albums and has a personal fortune estimated at nine million pounds.

Police did not name Stone in the statement.

But Detective Inspector Steve Parker, who is leading the investigation, said: "The two men in custody had in their possession information relating to an individual in the Cullompton area and items which lead us to suspect that they may have intended to commit a criminal offence.

"Police enquiries continue and the men remain in custody. We're unable to say anymore at this time but I would like to thank the local residents for reporting the suspicious car.

"Our officers are currently carrying out reassurance patrols and it's important to stress that no properties have been burgled and no individuals have been harmed."

A spokesman for the singer said she was aware of the arrests and was being kept informed of developments. It was not immediately clear whether she was at her home in the Cullompton area on Monday.

Stone, who attended the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April, is due to go on tour next month. — Reuters

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The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion

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The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion

Where is the accountability factor?

Posted: 14 Jun 2011 04:55 PM PDT

JUNE 15 — I had been away on a break but being the news junkie I am, I had been following various interesting news even while on vacation.

One that certainly caught my eye was the item reported in The Malaysian Insider, as well as other online news sites, about how a recently set up government price check website had been hacked into, the act of which has resulted in the loss of over 2,000 registered users' details.

The 1 Malaysia Pengguna Bijak's (1MPB) website launched on June 7 allows the public to check and compare the prices of consumer products sold at 1,255 retail outlets nationwide by clicking on the portal (1pengguna.com).

The initial idea of setting up such a portal is a good one. The bid to make government services more accessible to the public should be encouraged.

But setting up such a website is not merely about making the information available in a database, registering a domain name, dolling up a web server and publicising it via advertisements, so that the public can start to use it.

Perhaps 10 years ago, doing so would be enough. But in today's increasingly cyber-dependent and consequently, cyber-vulnerable world, it isn't just enough.

The fact is that in today's web-enabled world, anyone wanting to set up a web presence and offer services, especially one that would require that users surrender precious private and personal information, must not only have a secured server and service in place but must also ensure that security is at the core of its design.

Granted, we don't know the exact details of the kind of security the vendors employed in the design of the 1MPB or indeed how the hacking incident took place.

IT community portal Lowyat.net, one of the first websites that reported this breach, did, however, note on June 11 that there were "several vulnerabilities in the RM1.4 million 1MPB site that allowed hackers to pull signup details, usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords (encrypted)."

Lowyat.net founder and chief executive Vijandren Ramadass told The Malaysian Insider there was "a severe lack of security on the site" when it was launched and that he tried contacting the website administrator but received no response.

"Obviously, this is not an RM1.4 million job. Security and user privacy is a very important issue, especially on a site backed by the government," he said.

Other security experts I spoke with concurred with Vijandren, noting the breach should not even have happened in the first place.

One of them, Dhiillon Kannabhiran, founder of security organisation Hack In The Box, noted that this breach shouldn't have happened at all. "It's an SQL Injection issue, a security vulnerability caused by poor input validation on the web application," he explained.

"In short, the application was poorly written and it allowed an attacker to copy/steal information from the backend database via nothing more than a web browser, meaning no specialised tools were needed."

Dhillon went on to say that proper input validation and having secure programming practices would have been sufficient in preventing this attack.

"The vulnerability would also most likely have been discovered had the application/portal undergone a proper vulnerability assessment prior to being launched. The main entry point into the database was via the web application itself."

But what really got me riled up were two other stories that appeared following the incident.

In its Saturday report, the Star online quoted Domestic Trade, Co-operatives and Consumerism Ministry deputy secretary-general Mahani Tan Abdullah admitting to the breach of security but she downplayed the matter, saying that only the "the first layer" of the website's security was penetrated.

Yesterday, in a bid to further defend its position and defuse the severity of last week's breach, The Malaysian Insider reported that Tan said what hackers got was only "test data," which ominously still contain the e-mail addresses of staff from the ministry.

She reiterated that no sensitive information was in jeopardy, arguing that the "hackers only went into the first layer where they could just read data which contained the names and the email addresses of the staff, which, by the way, is in the public domain."

What seemed like innocuous and innocent comments are anything but. A breach in a public sector website's security and the theft of information — regardless whether it was test information comprising internal staff e-mail address — no matter how seemingly harmless is still a breach and should not be downplayed as such.

And what makes it worse is that instead of acknowledging the weaknesses in how this web service has been introduced — one that is fraught with errors and vulnerabilities — a senior spokesperson tried to pass it off by saying the Ministry is "not unduly worried" about the whole episode.

In a manner reflecting a lot of the country's politicians and bureaucrats, the habit of sweeping accountability under the carpet is just one of the many systemic problems Malaysia is facing.

Fact is, the breach did happen, and while not a legal expert, it wouldn't be a stretch of any imagination that such breaches would have contravened several laws the country has enacted, namely the Computer Crimes Act 1997 and the Personal Data Protection Act 2010, to combat such crimes.

But even as the government claims to want to be more transparent and accountable, typical answers and actions like the one made only serve to act as an Achilles' heel to its efforts to do so.

Plainly put, to dismiss and wave-off the information breach are not only irresponsible, careless but also wrong and should not, and must not be tolerated.

And what of the vendor — Sands Consulting Sdn Bhd — the firm the Star Online said was appointed to carry out the project? What has it said in regard to this matter? What is its justification for allowing this vulnerability to be exploited in the first place?

Unbeknownst to many, worse things could have happened, and will happen, if we do not demand higher accountability for our personal data protection.

One of which, as Dhillon noted, is that while 2,000 or so stolen accounts might not seem like a very large number, personal information leakages of any kind is a serious issue considering the data could be used for far more serious crimes.

This can't be truer as renowned IT security multinationals such as Microsoft and Symantec, as well as local security agencies like Cybersecurity, have warned that the most insidious threats the cyber world faces today are the ones that use stolen information to perpetrate other cybercrimes.

The breach of information security in the 1MPB website serves to remind us that this is certainly no trivial matter and until and unless the government personnel responsible for setting up such websites and those they appoint to implement them are held accountable, our information, our very lives are at the mercy of those who are waiting to dupe and manipulate us.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

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Why are dinosaurs championing the arts?

Posted: 14 Jun 2011 04:49 PM PDT

JUNE 15 — As anyone in the arts will tell you, the government has consistently failed both the arts and its practitioners.

Take the recent debacle involving Artistes Day 2011, where Bernama reported Information, Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim bemoaning the lacklustre response of arts practitioners.

Bernama had initially reported the celebration cost RM100 million, when in actual fact it had only cost RM97,800. DAP was only too happy to use the issue for political traction when, frankly, the party couldn't give a toss about the arts either. Posturing on both sides and who benefits? It definitely isn't the arts.

Now, some of you would probably start the usual hue-and-cry about where the money could have been better spent on non-arts related expenditure. Schools, roads, healthcare and the like. I respectfully disagree.

The arts have, in recent years, become but the poor cousin to science and technology. We push our children ever forward on the march to some "knowledge economy", hoping they'll end up in high-paying jobs we can boast to our neighbours about.

Sadly, in this country, the people we elect to promote and preserve the arts clearly do not understand what they are doing. With all due respect to Information, Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim, Artistes Day is a sheer waste of money.

What about funding bodies like Aswara that provide the much needed training for artistes?

The finest actors in Britain and the United Kingdom are trained actors, who went to university to study the nuances of their craft. Unfortunately in Malaysia, most actors in television and film are trained on-the-job and not very well, at that.

Besides the blatant misuse of funds clearly earmarked to improve the industry, government interference in creative expression is also a problem.

Stop telling artists what they can and cannot be creative about. The very nature of creativity requires freedom and what theatre practitioners call a "safe space." Malaysia is certainly not a safe space.

Before a play can even be put on stage, the script has to be vetted by, of all people, the local council. If it were up to the government it seems, theatre would be filled with nothing but inoffensive, politically correct tripe.

We are not allowed to create anything offensive, too sensitive, potentially harmful to Islamic religious beliefs, anti-government... we might as well live in fish bowls.

Whether song, dance, film, documentaries, theatre, visual arts, the creative field and the arts deserve respect and acknowledgement. The people who preserve our legacies and history through various mediums are doing us a service and those who have talent in those fields are no less vital in the workforce.

Without the arts, life would not be worth living. The arts celebrate beauty and the higher instincts of mankind. Do we really want to live in a world filled only with accountants, engineers and doctors?

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

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The Malaysian Insider :: Bahasa

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Kes Khir: Saksi utama akui bohong kepada SPRM

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 02:20 AM PDT

SHAH ALAM, 15 Jun – Saksi utama kes rasuah Dr Mohd Khir Toyo mengakui di Mahkamah Tinggi Shah Alam hari ini bahawa dia telah berbohong kepada Suruhanjaya Pencegahan Rasuah Malaysia (SPRM) dua tahun lalu.

Pengarah Ditamas Sdn Bhd Shamsuddin Hayroni berkata dia telah diminta berkata demikian kepada SPRM bahawa memutuskan untuk menjual rumah agamnya dan dua bidang tanah di Seksyen 7 di sini kepada bekas menteri besar Selangor (gambar) untuk mengatasi kerugiannya.

MENYUSUL LAGI

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Elaf Bank Bahrain dapat lesen perbankan Islam Malaysia

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 01:16 AM PDT

KUALA LUMPUR, 15 Jun – Elaf Bank dari Bahrain memperoleh lesen perbankan Islam antarabangsa daripada kerajaan Malaysia, demikian menurut bank pusat hari ini.

Lesen itu akan membolehkan Elaf Bank mengadakan bisnes perbankan Islam dalam mata wang antarabangsa selain ringgit Malaysia, kata Bank Negara dalam satu kenyataan dikeluarkan hari ini.

"Kehadiran Elaf Bank akan memperkukuh hubungan kewangan dan ekonomi antara Malaysia dan Bahrain, dan menyumbang kepada pembangunan sistem kewangan Islam di Malaysia," katanya. – Reuters

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Rabu, 15 Jun 2011