Taiwan innovative handmade edible paper

For the 1st post in 2010, I would like to share with you an interesting and good news from Taiwan.

Taiwanese couple Huang Huan-chang (黄焕彰) and Wu Shu-li (吴淑丽) who own the Kuanghsing Paper Factory (广兴纸寮) in Puli (埔里) started to make new environmentally friendly and edible paper products from an incredible variety of plants since 2007.

The ingredients of their creative handmade edible papers include water bamboo, bittervine, okra, pineapple, coffee grounds, sugar cane dross, paddy waste, peppers, onions, carrots, moss, grass, etc.

They have just showcased over 100 types of edible paper varieties at the "Paper Loves Taiwan – Top 100" (纸爱台湾 - 荣耀 100) exhibition on 23 December 2009.

Huang says the bittervine (薇甘菊) has severely damaged Taiwan landscape like a "green cancer", a name by which it is known in Chinese. They have successfully transform it into lovely art paper suitable for handicrafts or wrapping gifts, and can also be used for making decorations, CD covers and other projects, turning the "green cancer" into "green gold".

The couple also turns okra, peppers, tangerines and even radishes into natural, edible wrappings, without adding any traditional paper pulp at all. This type of edible paper can be used to wrap food for deep-frying, yielding a product that is both safe and delicious.

GSM telephony communication hacked and shown insecured

GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is the most widely used mobile communication standard nowadays, making up about 80% of the mobile market with about 4 billion users from 200+ countires worldwide.

GSM uses cryptographic algorithms for security and over-the-air privacy. Beside protecting the phone conversation privacy, GSM security is very important nowadays as services such as phone banking, mobile-commerce, SMS transaction, etc. are becoming more and more popular.

The bad news is, German computer security researchers Karsten Nohl has just shown to us in his talk at the 26th Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin that GSM encryption can be easily hacked with simple tools, and its telephone conversation or SMS text message can be intercepted by hackers.

Nohl presented 2 flavours of attack devices, which is able to do active intercept or passive key cracking.

Before this, security experts believe that decrypting the GSM signals will need at least hundreds of thousands of dollars and complicated technology. However, Nohl has shown the much cheaper and simpler way of hacking it, using hardware that cost as low as several thousand dollar and open source application such as OpenBTS.

This has definitely bring concerns to the whole world, especially those service providers and users of phone banking, mobile-commerce, SMS transaction, etc.

Click here to look at the slides of Karsten Nohl presented at the 26th Chaos Communication Conference.

KLSE laggards against global and regional bourses in 2009

Despite a worldwide fear of recession in 2009, in fact many stock markets perform pretty well in the year, and several even achieved more than 100% gain!

World's top 10 best performing stock markets (from 30 Dec 2008 - 21 Dec 2009):

• Brazil Bovespa Stock Index (+132%)
• Russian RTS Index (+125%)
• Peru Lima General Index (+116%)
• Jakarta Composite Index (+114%)
• Micex Index - Moscow (+113%)
• Sri Langka Colombo All Share Index (+113%)
• OBX Stock Index - Norway (+101%)
• PFTS Index - Ukraine (+94%)
• ISE National 100 Index - Istanbul (+90%)
• Chile Stock Market Select (+87%)

Asia-Pacific's top 10 best performing stock markets (from 30 Dec 2008 - 21 Dec 2009):

• Jakarta Composite Index (+114%)
• Sri Langka Colombo All Share Index (+113%)
• Taiwan TAIEX Index (+72%)
• Shanghai SE Composite Index (+70%)
• Stock Exchange of Thailand Index (+66%)
• Phillipine SE Index (+64%)
• Straits Times Index - Singapore (+61%)
• Kospi Index - South Korea (+56%)
• Hang Seng Index - Hong Kong (+47%)
• NZX 50 Index - New Zealand (+44%)

Meanwhile, Malaysia FBM KLCI Index only gained by 42.42% at the same period of time, falling behind its neighouring Indonesia, Thailand, Phillipine and Singapore markets!

This is definitely not a good sign to Malaysia, especially when the KLSE a.k.a. Bursa Malaysia daily trading value and trading volume are both fallen below the billion level now!

Has KLSE become an abandoned market from investors? Will Malaysia be left over behind the global economic rebound wave? Does the government has any plan and measure to regain investors' confidence?

* Source of the above data are from the "2009 in Numbers" report in The Edge weekly.