When piracy becomes a major economic activity with a stock market

Somalia, a country located at the "Horn of Africa", is strategically controlling the vessel traffic in Gulf of Aden which joins the Red Sea (with the famous Suez Canal at the other end) which forms the important water transportation between Europe and Asia. (map below)

Somali people have been suffering from civil war since the last decade, and now, the warriors, fishermen, and perhaps farmers have found a new "lucrative business" to take advantage of their geographical location. They become pirates and hijack merchant ships, then making multi million dollars of big bucks from ransom.

The Somali pirates are heavily armed. And to maintain their "operation cost" and supplies, they have even opened a 24x7 "stock market", which started with 15 "maritime companies" and grown to 72 in just 4 months time.

The stock market is opened to everyone, and they accept "investment" in the kind of cash, weapons or useful materials.

The following "testimony" is very real, from a 22 years old young Somali lady: "I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation. I am really happy to have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined."

It would be more shocking to hear the Haradheere town's deputy security officer spoken to reporter: "Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output."

Somali pirates have no doubt become today's marine version of Robin Hood in the eyes of their local people. They are even a very modernize version, equipped with AK-47 and rockets (rather than bows and arrows), and operating a stock exchange.

What do you think about this?

I feel that if the rich-poor divide around the globe become worse and worse, more and more such "Robin Hood story" will come into reality, and that might also be a cause for World War III.

Using Google Public DNS to speed up web access

Google has just introduced their Public DNS service as part of their ongoing effort to make the web faster.

Since Google's search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, they wanted to leverage their technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security.

Google Public DNS is offered freely to the general public to:

• Provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service. 
• Help reduce the load on ISPs' DNS servers by taking advantage of their global data-center and caching infrastructure.
• Help make the web faster and more secure.

By making use of Google Public DNS, the benefits and enhancements are:

• Performance: In addition to load-balancing user traffic to ensure shared caching, Google Public DNS implements "smart" caching to increase the speed of responses.Click here for more technical detail on how Google Public DNS can improve web browsing performance.
• Security: DNS is vulnerable to various kinds of spoofing attacks that can "poison" a nameserver's cache and route its users to malicious sites. Google has implemented several security measures in their DNS servers. Click here for more technical detail on how Google Public DNS is protected from security threats and mitigations.
• Correct results: Google Public DNS never blocks, filters, or redirects users, unlike some open resolvers and ISPs. 

The Google Public DNS IP addresses are as follows:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

Click here for detail information about how to configure your computer to make use of Google Public DNS.

My Aurora AS424C cross-cut paper shredder

I found this round of PIKOM PC Fair does not have much difference from last round in August 2009. In fact, the RAM module price has risen quite a lot. Things which have price drop are portable harddisk, GPS navigator, etc.

Anyhow, managed to bought myself an Aurora AS424C cross-cut paper shredder at the price of RM99. It looks small and cute, very portable and easy to carry. It is not so heavy too, weights only 2.3kg.

Its main purpose in my household will be to shred old statements of credit cards, bank slips, phone bills, etc. before disposal to dustbin.

It is able to feed in up to 4 pieces of A4 paper, folded. In fact, the papers need to be folded because the inlet length is shorter than A4 width.

Equipped with strong steel cutters, it shreds pretty fast and can even feed in small paper staples without problem. It is also able to awesomely shred credit card. But it is not designed to shred CD/DVD, and there are other higher end models (with higher price) which are able to do so.

This is the result after shredding. The stripes are actually not too fine, so if you shred vertically, can still read some words on the stripes. It is more advisible to shred the papers horizontally, so that the sentences will be cut into multiple stripes and rendered to be unreadable.

This shredder comes with some safety features, such as:

• It will not start-up if the unit head is not placed properly in its translucent wastebasket.
• It will auto switch off when its motor detected to be overheated due to long operation.
• It has a REV switch to reverse the feeding and roll out the paper. You can still save the unshredded part.

At the cost of RM99 with 1 year warranty, I find this paper shredder good to have for lightweight usage at home.