Rubenerd

The International Investor had some updates on an article I should have expected:

Update (February 2016): To avoid any doubt, opening a bank account in Singapore as a non-resident was fairly easy when this article was first written, but has since become much harder and perhaps effectively impossible in many cases.

Update (June 2014): There’s no doubt that opening a non-resident bank account in Singapore has become much harder since this article was originally written. Some readers are still reporting that they have been able to open an account with relatively little trouble, but others have been turned away. This is largely due to the ongoing global crackdown on money laundering and tax evasion, which has resulted in Singaporean banks being more concerned about opening accounts for non-residents.

I opened and had POSB/DBS accounts for years while I lived over there. It made going back there for holidays much easier and cheaper, I could just transfer funds to it, and use with NETS.

I guess it’s back to using my Australian Citibank Plus account for it.

Hey, money launderes and tax evaders? This is why we can’t have nice things. Ch**ai.

I found this random snippet of text in a 2011 archive folder, of all places. I think it was for one of my earliest university assignments.

Part of the appeal of storage of plaintext data for cloud providers is its relative simplicity, and the advantages it offers for additional services. Data can be uploaded by clients through simple interfaces, manipulated by the cloud provider directly for the purposes of searching and other value-added services, and in certain cases can even be used to reduce storage redundancy (Soghoian 2011).

As with any additional service, introducing encryption during any part of the storage or transmission process introduces new costs for the cloud provider, which they may or may not be able to justify. If a majority of their customer install base don’t demand it (refer to section 3.5), it makes little business sense to implement encryption. Economies of scale then dictate that those services not offering encryption will be cheaper than those that do, which further entrenches customers in less expensive, less private systems.

Additionally, if the services a cloud provider wishes to offer (such as full text email search) requires access to unencrypted data, the cloud provider may perceive their business needs as being in direct conflict with a minority of their customers wanting encryption to render their data more private (Soghoian 2011).

Encryption introduces overhead during the transmission process, and additional server database stores for the encryption keys and additional authentication must be provisioned and secured. Encryption can be a memory and CPU intensive process (Schneier 2003), which could potentially lead to greater cooling costs and reduced life spans for servers.

For those who require absolute data privacy, this can be a significant issue when choosing a cloud provider.

The last line aside, most of this is no longer true.

Encrypted traffic is but a tiny fraction of a server’s overall load in 2016. Even if it was though, HTTPS is all but mandated today. For those who want privacy on public cloud services like Dropbox, you can use a sparse bundle or other encrypted container.

I got this email from Megaport this morning:

Hi, and welcome to the very first edition of The Interconnect.

2016 has been an outstanding year for Megaport. We’ve solidified our position as the world’s leading elastic interconnection provider and taken giant steps in [..]

As I said a decade ago:

Crap, more email junk that I didn’t register for.

I feel like I’m shouting into the void at this stage, but please, please do not abuse your user lists to send newsletters we didn’t opt-in to.

I like to clear some of the debris in my drafts folder at the end of the year. This was written in December 2015, a full year ago. And there are still hundreds more where this came from, yikes.

Some sad news according to Slashdot this morning:

Back in February, Sony unloaded the part of its business that built PCs. Now, a year later, competitor Fujitsu is doing the same. The company announced it would be spinning off its PC and mobile business, effective 1 February 2016. Your first reaction was probably, “Fujitsu had a PC and mobile business?”

It wasn’t. Fujitsu and Toshiba made the laptops to own in the 1990s. I almost got a Lifebook, or one of the above units when my old man went to Japan, before getting a Vaio PCG-C1VM in high school. Big mistake, that machine was awful.

You’re not alone, and this is likely why the split is happening. In their press release, they say, “With the ongoing commoditization of ubiquitous products, mainly of PCs and smart phones, it has become increasingly difficult to achieve differentiation, and competition with emerging global vendors has intensified.”

Apple manages to do it. You don’t have to be a Wintel box, selling the latest failed UI experiment from Microsoft. [Edit in December 2016: ouch!]

More simply: they couldn’t make a competitive product. Hopefully, this is the start of a trend; the race to zero in the Windows laptop market is finally killing off some of the participants.

Commodity hardware is great for consumers for compatibility in the short term, but cutting corners and quality control eventually bites. Something always has to give. [Edit in December 2016: See Samsung phone battery enclosures].

I got an awesome sandwich for lunch today. I also got this email from Symantec:

Create Better Website Security. Go Beyond Encryption.

With an upcoming release of the Chrome browser, Google is providing you with a business-critical reason to secure your website and online applications.

In January 2017, Google will begin flagging non-secure sites that accept passwords or payments with a security alert in the browser—informing people that their data is not protected. Other browsers are expected to follow.

Ultimately, all unencrypted websites will include a ‘Not Secure’ alert in the browser that will:

• Erode user satisfaction and trust
• Reduce search engine ranking value
• Undermine website performance and ROI

Sometimes it pays to get outside my fluffy devops bubble and see what others think about security. For business types, their concern is the impact security warnings will have on users trusting the reputability of their site. Check out the three points at the end, none directly mention privacy or security at all.

It’s easy to dismiss such stuff, as I felt I was going to when starting to write this, but it’s one way to get people to care. If they don’t have a vested stake in it (perceived or otherwise), it’s hard to call them to action.

Now that I think about it, that could apply to many endeavours.

The freebsd-update binary tool prints the files it will change after downloading. Of all the new goodies, I’m always most fascinated by the timezone changes:

The following files will be removed as part of updating to 11.0-RELEASE-p5:
/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Santa_Isabel
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Rangoon
The following files will be added as part of updating to 11.0-RELEASE-p5:
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Barnaul
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Famagusta
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Tomsk
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Yangon
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Astrakhan
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Kirov
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Ulyanovsk

So it looks like “Rangoon” was changed to “Yangon”, a good thing I’d say based on the history:

Yangon (ရန်ကုန်) is a combination of the two words yan (ရန်) and koun (ကုန်), which mean “enemies” and “run out of”, respectively. It is also translated as “End of Strife”. “Rangoon” most likely comes from the British imitation of the pronunciation of “Yangon” in the Arakanese language, which is [rɔ̀ɴɡʊ́ɴ].

The only other city I recognise is Barnaul, in south-central Russia. It has a pretty distinctive skyline, as shown by Andrew White on Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve seen a lot of podcasts and blogs being sponsored by this new WiFi equipment manufacturer. They’re seemingly unaware of the slang term and its common abbreviation.

In their defence, I suppose one could download ero with Eero.

(Update: They also don’t seem to have PPPoE or IPv6 support).

Speaking of the housing affordability crisis in Australia, Senator Scott Ludlam said this in February:

Against that systematic, malign neglect of these 100,000 Australians who have nowhere to go, we have, over the forward estimates, Parliamentary Budget Office estimates of $22 billion worth of incentives for property speculators-people buying their first, second and third investment properties.

It’s incredibly rich for the current coalition to trumpet “budget repair” when they’re throwing money away like this. There must be something blinding them to it.

These are people like Senator Cormann, who has two residences and two investment properties; the foreign minister, Ms Bishop-two residences, three investment properties-good on her; Senator Brandis, quite frugal-one residence, one investment property; Senator Fifield, one residence, two investment properties; Mr Turnbull, the Prime Minister of Australia, three residences and five investment properties. Good for you!

This was originally drafted in August 2015, and discovered in my drafts folder yesterday. I suspect I wanted to include ZFS examples, but never did.

Case-sensitive file systems are a thorny issue. *nix servers of all stripes defualt to case-sensitive file systems, but desktop OSs have long preferred case-insensitive to make life easier for end users.

When I’m building one of my over-engineered FreeBSD ZFS NAS boxes for Mac clients, I employ case-insensitivity. It avoids a lot of pain, such as end-users getting confused when the OS asks if you want to overwrite sukumizu.txt and SUKUMIZU.txt. Some desktop applications also don’t handle case-sensitive file systems gracefully.

Unfortunately, rendering life easier in userspace shifts the complexity to the sysadmin. Like always!

While case-sensitivty is straight forward (relatively), case-insensitivty can mean different things depending on the file system, OS, shell, or other interface. Worse still, there seems to be little consistency to the nomenclature.

• Files can be stored in any case, but can’t be referenced or auto-completed in any case. This is what usually happens on Linux file systems formatted with case-insensitivity, because year of the Linux desktop.

• Files can be stored in any case, and can be referenced and auto-completed in any case. This is how Mac OS X and Windows deal with files.

• Files are limited to one case. This is like DOS, CP/M and GEOS running on your Commodore 128. They came out one year before I was born, and I still feel old knowing about these systems.

The other issue is normalisation. How does the target file system map two characters as being the same? Unicode stores similar (or even identical characters) in multiple places. Others, like latin characters with accents, can be constructed in multiple ways.

It reminds me of what my first IT boss said, don’t ever ask an engineer a yes/no question.

Australia has among the least-affordable housing in the world. What used to cost two to three times the average wage in capital cities now takes up to eleven times. And that’s not accounting for the six figures even needed for most house deposits. Facts.

That’s not to say there aren’t champions of the status quo. Domain.com.au naturally has a vested interest in the market, and routinely report on how wonderful inflated prices are. This post explores one such article, published earlier this month.

How a 20-year-old bought three investment properties

At an age when most Australians are thinking about their next Friday night out, Robert Marsden Petty is thinking about his next investment property.

Translation: Any money not put towards housing is frivolous. I call this smashed avo economics. But how did he get started?

One of his major advantages over other 20-somethings is his mentor: his mother, a seasoned investor.

I get the feeling that’s not quite it. There must have been something else, something to get him onto that bottom rung somehow…

She gave him $60,000 to start investing with.

BINGO! Have rich parents, and she’ll be right.

Robert’s seven steps to get started

Family assistance. A helping hand can be a simple way to jump-start a property portfolio from a young age.

I kid you not, this was the first step. Rich parents.

A “savings” attitude. Work hard and save as much as you can to fund your property aspirations.

Smashed avo economics.

Not being scared of Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI). LMI can allow you to buy sooner and is often tax-deductible on investment properties.

Tax deductions (ala, negative gearing) are what artificially manipulated the market into investing in this non-productive asset in the first place.

Seeking out trusted advice. Find a seasoned investor to give you guidance, but don’t be scared to trust your own research.

My research reveals housing unaffordability and high rents are rendering a generation of young people permanent renters, reducing their changes of a secure retirement, and creating a new underclass of people served by a family-inherited plutocracy. Again, not hyperbole, facts.

Consider markets outside your backyard. Australia is more than just a few capital cities. Explore the real estate options across the whole country.

And if you can’t find work in the remote desert where you can afford a house, pull a Bronwyn Bishop and get a taxpayer-funded helicopter!

Look at the “worst-case scenarios” In every aspect of your portfolio, plan and insure yourself for what could go wrong.

With the government and family cash behind you, this isn’t likely. Unless the bubble bursts, I suppose.

Get creative to push your portfolio further Rent properties out by the room, think about development possibilities and look where others don’t.

Remember, houses aren’t to live in, they’re an investment.

Conclusion

Despite my tone above, I don’t blame Robert or the writer of the Domain article, or anyone else who buys an investment property and inadvertently creates another renter. Truly.

In an economy manipulated to favour property over productive investments, it’s economically rational and perfectly reasonable to put your money there. Especially if you have a family or other dependents, you owe to them as much as yourself to get the maximum return on investments paid for with your hard-earned money.

The fault lies squarely with the Government. This artificial market manipulation started, shamelessly, with the “free market” Peter Costello and John Howard in the 1990s, and has continued with the the current Government who’ve been more than happy to turn blind eyes, make half-arsed excuses, and blame low income earners for being fiscally irresponsible.

If you care about this issue, next election, vote them out.