TR: IP logging and coopertaing with 'authorities'

[WayangPartyClub]

hahah... TR cares about your privacy? Only if you are a supporter of them!

I can tell you all that Tr is monitoring all IPs of commenters in TR and will gladly cooperate with authorities as long as you are not their friend.

I too have a lovely wordpress blog and i know that the logging of commetner IP is by default. So who is he trying to kid?

And what you all think about "Molina Liu J Y"? He can say he is Prince William for all i care.:oIo:

Scheduled vital security upgrade for Temasek Review
January 9th, 2011 | Author: Editorial

Dear readers,

With GE looming around the corner, we will be beefing up the security for our servers and site to offer better privacy protection for our readers and team.

This is a necessary precaution given that Temasek Review has all along been under the radar of “some agency”.

We are also aware through our reliable insider informant that the police have been “asking around” about the ownership of the site and its administrators which comes as no surprise to us.

Infact, “someone” or “some agency” has even gone to the extent of sending a “Kent Yap” on a “fishing trip” to Temasek Review offering to buy our domain name for US$19,000 which of course we cannot sell since we no longer own the domain name.

When we played along with “Kent Yap” and countered proposed US$26,000, he disappeared from the face of the earth but we managed to trace him back to a LAN located at Singapore Fairex International Financial Systems Pte Ltd.

What is surprising however is why would the police want to waste precious time “asking around” and “fishing” when they could easilly have contacted us with our online web form and we would gladly provide the information of the domain owner and site owner to them, which incidentally is on public record and legally registered with the relevant agencies?

Agencies who have worked with us in the past can attest that we have most of the time cooperated resonably with them when a formal and justifiable request is made to us.

Lawyers from Singapore have written to us reqesting for an offending article to be taken down and we have complied, subjects in certain articles have also written to us requesting that we amend misinformation and we have also complied, even when the chinese authorities wrote to us asking us to remove articles on FaLun Gong we have also complied when our servers were in China. We could have ignored all these but we did not.

The editorial team of Temasek Review is not advocating our readers to break any applicable laws in their own country. In fact, we firmly believe that we should respect the laws in the respective country and this has all along been our guideline in running the site.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with us cooperating with the relevant authorities if a law has indeed been broken and the culprit should be prosecuted but we are against frivalous claims and persecution by the authorities.

For example, if one of our readers is inciting racial discord and the relevant authority (with jurisdiction) contact us requesting for information, we will certainly obliged if a former request is made and the allegations can be substantiated and verified by our editorial board. The same applies for members of our editorial team if he/she is found to have committed any offence which in the view of our editorial team is so.

Of course we will not entertain request for information from the authorities if the request is “we believe some offence may have been committed by someone but we need access to the server’s log to determine what offence and who” or requesting for the information of our editorial team without informing / adequately justifying what the information will be used for.

In a nutshell, if any agency wants information from us, please be specific and justify your request with proper details, facts and we will cooperate fully (if you have jurisdiction). Basically, we will not entertain “fishing expedition” nor request from say Singapore Police for information pertaining to a Malaysian readers posting comments inciting a racial riot in Hong Kong (again, jurisdiction).

Having said that, it is also our main concern and commitment that the privacy of our readers and team be protected to the fullest extent allowed by applicable laws.

It is very difficult thus for our editorial team to balance this commitment to abide by applicable laws and the right to privacy of our readers that we have decided to put the privacy of our readers and editorial team above all others.

We do not want to be caught in a catch-22 situation whereby we may be forced to decide on whether we should “sell out” one of our own (readers/contributors/editors) considering that most of our editorial team are chinese and being framed as “25er” is taboo.

With that in mind, we have engaged the services of the same programmer who heavilly customised our wordpress theme to modify our existing installation as follows:

1. The ability to log IP addresses of the readers commenting on our blog will be completely removed.

In the past, readers commenting on our site will have their IP addresses logged against their comments which can be seen by the editors and moderators. With the modification in place, all comments posted by readers will not show their IP addresses nor will the true IP addresses be logged in the database.

2. The ability to log IP addresses of administrative/editorial/member logins to the wordpress backend will also be removed.

3. All existing IP addresses stored in the wordpress database for all posts and comments prior to this “upgrade” will be completely removed.

Removal of the IP address tracking ability will not impact our ability to protect our site against malicious users as our servers are equipped with hardware firewall which will do the job more effectively.

Additionally, our host has also been instructed to make the following implementation to our servers:

1. Server roll to be performed randomly once a week as opposed to once a month.

Our site is hosted on 2 servers technically and both servers are always available for serving our contents through a network load balancer.

During a server roll, one of the active server is taken offline and reinstalled with a completely new operating system while the remaining active server will continue to serve our site.

Once the reinstallation is completed, the contents and database of the site is ported over from the active server to the reinstalled server and the process is repeated for the second server.

Effectively, the server roll will ensure that all server logs, ie: apache, ftp, email, etc will be completely removed and written over thus safe-guarding the information (or lack-of) of our readers and team.

A third server (not available to the public) which is connected to the two active servers via an internal secured LAN will be used solely for backing up the site.

2. We are consulting our host on the possibility of stationing our server behind a TOR network to further tighten security to our site.

Administrative-wise, our team have been instructed to heavilly scrutinise each and every post to ensure that no frivalous, malicious, unlawful and unacceptable posts or comments are allowed on our site.

All contributions and information sent to us via our online form will be deleted immediately from our IMAPI mail server once it has been dealt with. Secured POP3 access will be implemented on our mail server for our team to correspond with our readers if necessary, through a VPN setup in China, USA or Germany.

If you are still reading this by now, the “upgrading” will be performed anytime within this week and there should be no expected downtime. However, given the number of accesses to our site daily, the download speed may be affected during the server roll when only one server will be available.

We would like to thank all of you for your continued support and seek your understanding during our “upgrading” period.

All suggestion and feedback on how we can do better is of course welcome.

.

Molina Han

for Temasek Review

P/S: My real name is Molina Liu J Y

 

[WayangPartyClub]

Dogfood:
January 9, 2011 at 8:13 pm Dogfood(Quote)

I fail to understand. If you claim the privacy of your readers is paramount. Then can you please explain to all of us in blogosphere why not so long ago when Darkness asked a few inconvenient questions about your so called DDos attacks, your team published his IP here.

Most readers only have this one thing in their mind. I hope you can furnish us all with a reply. Thanks.

Mod’s note: An IP address without time and date stamp is as good as telling someone that someone is from Singapore or Africa, whats the harm?

Besides, he was a pest and an irritant who constantly haress our team and threatened us who also abused the name and authority of the Brotherhood and therefore we had to “expose” him. The Brotherhood was made known of his doing and he was “expelled” if I remember correctly.

Similarly, if one of our readers come to our site to incite racial hatred or violence, we will likewise do the same in accordance with our policy on cooperating with the authorities.

Of course this is only possible prior to the planned system modification.

 

[TNP(Tua Neh Pau)]

If this is true then TR must be scared shit out of their pants to do this.

They published an article that police is looking for TRwatch. So if TRwatch comment on their website, they cannot log his IP? Then how to help the police?

 

[WayangPartyClub]

If this is true then TR must be scared shit out of their pants to do this.

They published an article that police is looking for TRwatch. So if TRwatch comment on their website, they cannot log his IP? Then how to help the police?

You sound confused my friend. Let me explain it to you.

TR will continue to log IPs and cooperate with any authority in the background but in the foreground they will claim not to.

They also claim to be the alternative news source but they remove articles (e.g. falun gong) when chinese authorities come knocking. They will also not hesitate to pass your IP to these authorities because they fear reprisal.

If you choose to leak confidential or exclusive information to TR, they will publish it but take no responsibility for it. Once authorities come knocking, they will divulge all your personal info to them.

In summary, they will publish anything and divulge anything as long as it is to save their own arse.

And i use "They" very sparingly because there are only 2 warm bodies behind TR: Joseph Ong Chor Teck and Andrew from RTGasia (web administrator). The rest are just fly-by-night contributors like kojakbt who will eventually be sold off to the authorities.

 

[TNP(Tua Neh Pau)]

Then maybe kojakbt has already been fed to the dog without him even knowing. We should warn him to be wary.

You sound confused my friend. Let me explain it to you.

TR will continue to log IPs and cooperate with any authority in the background but in the foreground they will claim not to.

They also claim to be the alternative news source but they remove articles (e.g. falun gong) when chinese authorities come knocking. They will also not hesitate to pass your IP to these authorities because they fear reprisal.

If you choose to leak confidential or exclusive information to TR, they will publish it but take no responsibility for it. Once authorities come knocking, they will divulge all your personal info to them.

In summary, they will publish anything and divulge anything as long as it is to save their own arse.

And i use "They" very sparingly because there are only 2 warm bodies behind TR: Joseph Ong Chor Teck and Andrew from RTGasia (web administrator). The rest are just fly-by-night contributors like kojakbt who will eventually be sold off to the authorities.

 

[WayangPartyClub]

Then maybe kojakbt has already been fed to the dog without him even knowing. We should warn him to be wary.

Kojakbt's IP has been given tot he police long ago. This 3in1 kopitiam is a haven for seditious material.

Unfortunately, kojakbt is too naive to know this. He is like GMS that way. Joseph Ong is like CSJ. Cunning and full of plots.

 

[Leongsam]

TR is very naive. Articles of this sort simply stir up a hornets nest and do nothing to improve the level of trust between the site and its visitors. All it does is heighten suspicions with surfers wondering why the issue has to be raised in the first place.

Sinkies trust sammyboy simply because it has a long track record of never spilling the beans on anyone.

 

[BuiKia]

If you read their article, I suspect that the 1st few comments are from within themselves. Those comments are always positive and claiming how good a job that TR had done.

TR is very naive. Articles of this sort simply stir up a hornets nest and do nothing to improve the level of trust between the site and its visitors. All it does is heighten suspicions with surfers wondering why the issue has to be raised in the first place.

Sinkies trust sammyboy simply because it has a long track record of never spilling the beans on anyone.