Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Malaysian household monthly income distribution 2007

Today, there is a report in the Chinapress newspaper which provides us a set of figures about the Malaysian household monthly income distribution based on Household Income Survey (HIS) done in year 2007 by the Department of Statistics Malaysia. Here are the figures:



With the data above, we can derive the constituent of household by ethnic which has participated in the HIS 2007, as shown below. The percentage is pretty much in line with the ethnic group percentage of population of Malaysia.


And we can interprete the data in the table with a bar graph like this:

You can compare this graph with the one in my earlier article posted on 18 September 2008, which is based on data from a different source. With no surprise, they look very alike. The graph above is able to show more information. What can you see from it?

Remember there is another pie chart in my earlier article posted on 18 September 2008? You can compare it with this one which is based on our new set of data. They are pretty much the same, aren't they?

Now look at another graph to reveal more information. What can you see from it?

If you see each of the income group vertically, you can actually rank how each ethnic group performs for each of the income group. The Kadazan and Orang Asli have a big population in the lower income group, and very low percentage in the higher income group. Majority of the Chinese are in the 5k-10k income group.

You can also clearly see the "M shape" in the Chinese and Indian lines, and the formation of "M" in other ethnic groups can also be sensed.

What else can you see from the graphs above?


Satyam acquires Motorola software development center (SDC) in Cyberjaya

India's Satyam Computer Services Ltd, which is the 4th largest IT solutions and service provider and has its own building block in Cyberjaya Malaysia, has just initiated an acquisition to its Cyberjaya neighbour - the software development center (SDC) of Motorola in Malaysia.

On the recent Monday, the 128 staff in Motorola SDC were briefed about the acquisition, that all of them, together with the SDC’s assets, will be diverted from Motorola to Satyam by the end of the year. Anyhow, they are assured by the management that their contractual bonus for the year will not be affected.

The SDC is part of Motorola's Home and Network Mobility business and focuses on network management system development. After the acquisition, Motorola will outsource the business to Satyam and get the same level of service as before.

Both Satyam and Motorola are listed in New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). To date, Satyam has a staff strength of over 500 in Malaysia.

Monday, November 10, 2008

WPA Wi-Fi encryption cracked!

If you are using a wireless network, especially in office environment, you should be well awared that running Wi-Fi without any encryption is a big no-no, and that the depreciated Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption is extremely weak and can be cracked within seconds. As such, you probably are using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption to protect your Wi-Fi from unauthorized access and/or information stealing/leaking.

But now, bad news is that 2 German researchers - Martin Beck and Erik Tews - have found a way to crack the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP, which was supposed to fix all problems with WEP) of WPA encryption within minutes, and they are going to share their cracking tools to the public during the PacSec Conference in Tokyo this 12-13 November 2008. In fact, some of the code used in the attack was already quietly added into the Aircrack-ng Wi-Fi encryption hacking tool about two weeks ago.

In short: WPA is no longer secured!

So what can you do to safeguard the security of your wireless network? Ensure that your wireless access points and equipments support WPA2, and switch over to it. WPA2
implements the mandatory elements of IEEE 802.11i standard, and is still uncracked by now, if it doesn't make use of the TKIP, and is instead set to use Advanced Encryption System (AES) with its Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol (CCMP).

Click here to read more about this new crack on WPA Wi-Fi encryption.

Hint: Click on the "Older Posts" link to continue reading, or click here for a listing of all my past 3 months articles.