Credit Cards, VPNs and Fraud Detection

Posted on August 25, 2010 by mythokia

I rely a lot on VPN services, primary to masquerade myself as being located in another country, specifically, pretending to be from US and Europe to bypass content filters, allowing myself to access the likes of  Hulu. Another use is for picking optimal network routes to reduce latency when connecting to game servers outside my region. I tend to leave my VPN connected even when I’m done, since there’s no reason to disconnect.

The trouble arises when I start doing online purchases with my credit card while on these VPNs. It must look pretty suspicious to someone over at VISA, seeing as to how purchases originating from Germany, Sweden, and the United States are all using the same card, and hence, tripped their fraud detection mechanism and shutting down my card. I wish there was some way I could explain the above to the customer service agent when I called my bank up this morning, but I don’t think I could have put it in way that would make myself be understood and encourage them to lift the fraud protection.

So here I am, waiting to be issued a new card, and wanting to blame the fraud detection algorithm for placing too much weight on IP geolocation. Then again, who could have thought?

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Institutionalized?

Posted on August 11, 2010 by mythokia

“These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

– Red, from the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

Suddenly, it seems that there’s a white and empty boulevard ahead of me, and every tick of the clock resonates loudly.

I’ll be disrupting from my national service the week after, and starting school another week past that. From now until next Thursday, I’m clearing what leave and off I have accumulated over the course of this year.

It’s a strange feeling having so much free time all of a sudden. There’s no one to yell at you about where you’re supposed to be, what is it you’re supposed to do, and what is it you’ve supposedly done wrong. It is as if I’ve been kept in cold store for the past two years, and now I’ve been violently ejected out of it.

I’ve made myself adequately clear in the past how I disliked my period of military service, and the negativity of the experiences I had. Now that I’m outside, or almost outside of the system, I miss it. It is a routine that I’ve initially hated, but gradually grown accustomized to it, to the point where it becomes the norm.

It’s a strange world, isn’t it?

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Wrath of the Lich King trial level cap

Posted on July 14, 2010 by mythokia

I had this bright idea of flagging my World of Warcraft account for Wrath of the Lich King expansion trial, thinking that I could get 80 in the 10 days provided by the trial period. Unfortunately, the trial caps the experience gain at 99% into level 70, preventing one from reaching 71. Drats!

Also, two years ago I made a post lamenting WoW’s billing system, and I had the exact error upgrading to WotLK and had to once again, apply the zip code trick. It is perturbing that an error like this could go unsolved for two years. Then again, it took Microsoft 17 years to discover a bug in their software. When it comes to mammoth software companies, never underestimate what they are incapable of.

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By Dawn’s Early Light

Posted on July 12, 2010 by mythokia

Dawn’s Early Light is a suspenseful and almost melancholic movie in which an accidental nuclear war is started between the United States and the Soviet Union, the cause of which is unknown, and remains rightfully so until the conclusion, although the synopsis on the back of the DVD case would spoil it.

The movie portrays an archetypal US-Soviet relation, in which one misunderstanding after another escalates the crisis and intensity of war between the two.

Although the militaristic theme is present (it would be hard pressed to such a movie without), the movie focuses more on the individual and personal reactions, centering around the crew of a B-52 bomber and the commanding General of a C&C E-4 craft as they come to grips with what transpired and evaluate their morality and conscience of what they are about to do. Also featured is some power struggle between members of the US cabinet and military as parties ponder the classic question of whether there could ever a victor in such a war, or that one should cut their losses and accept a compromise.

In other words, it has all one could possibly want in a cold war apocalyptic movie and has made it’s way the list of my all time favorite movies.

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Conscription

Posted on July 4, 2010 by mythokia

In the past year, three countries have done away with conscription, or announced their intentions to. Taiwan will be reducing their intake of conscripts until 2014, when it will be completely abolished. Poland ceased their conscription early this year, and Sweden just a couple days ago.

No such luck for the country I live in. On the contrary, our conscript army is getting larger simply because of more foreign nationalities who come here seeking citizenship. Even after two years being in the service, one is still eligible to be called up for reservist duties. This is the only country under no imminent threat of war that has such a long period of military service.

How can I be patriotic towards a country which does not honour articles 4, 20, and 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, which respectively states that one should not be held in slavery or servitude, that no one maybe compelled to belong to an association and that everyone has the right to free choice of employment?

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What have I been up to?

Posted on July 1, 2010 by mythokia

I had gone all quiet for a while, and that ‘a while’ is better defined as ‘a few months’. What the heck have I been doing all these while? A lot of nothing is precisely what.

Every now and then, I hit a lull in life. There isn’t much to write about when everyday feels as if I were re-living the previous. Having to serve time in the army has been rather draining, and it leaves me with not wanting to do very much else. It kills my mind and makes me lethargic. Other than the odd games here and then, and occasional forays into the external world, I feel as if I have been out of touch with the many on-goings of the world. The military has a way of doing that to you.

The military is a very unique organization. It is a self-contained entity where the physical laws of our world as we know it are suspended and no longer make any sense, much like at the event horizon of a black hole. Madness governs this other world, not logic.

In two months time, that’s all going to change. I’m starting college, and hopefully, returning to the life that all young adults are suppose to have, which come to think of it, I don’t know what that is.

Change is scary.

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Singapore rolls out FTTH

Posted on April 17, 2010 by mythokia

It looks like Singapore is beginning to roll out Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks, upgrading the current Hybrid-Fibre-Coaxial (HFC) network, which currently constitutes a large part of Singapore’s broadband delivery medium.

In FTTH networks, fibre cables are run all the way down from the service provider and terminated directly into the consumer’s home. In HFC networks, although the backhaul comprises of fibre cables, they’re terminated further away from homes, and coaxial cables take over this last mile instead.

I first noticed the new cable installations nearly a week ago. Closer inspection of the markings revealed that they were indeed fibre cables, and the huge rolls of them lying around on the lobby suggested large scale deployment. Conversing with the technicians who were responsible for them confirmed that.

FTTH-1

A few days later, these units begin to appear on the landing of every pair of home, which I can only surmise to be FTTH termination equipment.

FTTH-2

Although these cables do not seem to be carrying any form of data at this point in time, they are perhaps the most important groundwork ever done for Singapore’s next generation broadband network. Last mile equipment is usually the hardest and most expensive problem to tackle, but it seems to me that we have solved that already.

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Nexus One

Posted on April 2, 2010 by mythokia

My Nexus One arrived in the morning yesterday. From placing the order to receiving the product, it took about 3.5 days. I’m impressed.

Why did I not get an iPhone like everyone else?

Although rumored to arrive in the next major OS version, iPhone has no multitasking capabilities (and neither does Windows Mobile 7). It’s a shame that when PDA-phone hybrids were first introduced in the early 2000s, they were being touted for their multitasking capabilities compared to their cousins, the unitasking conventional phone. Ten years down the road, with all the advances in both hardware and software, we suddenly lost that capability. It is now too user unfriendly and draining on hardware to implement multitasking. Have we been advancing backwards? Perhaps we have, because in 1969, we could land on the moon, but after almost 40 years of R&D, we lost that capability too. Soon, we’ll forget how electricity works.

Also, I dislike the closed ecosystem on the iPhone. This area stems out of a philosophical disagree that I have with Steve Jobs. To release an application for the iPhone, you have to do it through the Apple marketplace. However, it is a lengthy and frustrating process to seek Steve Job’s personal blessing for a program and this detrimental for developers. On the Android, you can choose to distribute an application through any medium. The official Android Marketplace, which requires a registration of US$25 before apps can be submitted, and accepted on a good faith basis, is not the only distribution channel.

I’m a geek. Testing out and choosing between various versions of file managers amuse and excites me. I can’t do the same on the iPhone. It just ain’t for me.

Arguments asides, I’m enjoying the Nexus One. Having a QWERTY keyboard is a pleasurable experience as there is none of that wrist and thumb hurting experience ever present when wrangling with the standard 12 key layout on conventional phones. In a way, it makes me feel more socialable as I’m actually inclined to provide an adequate reply to my text messages. Previously, my replies resemble nothing more a text version of a nod and grunt.

I’ve only owned my Nexus One for 12 hours, and used it for even less. If there are any annoyances (as with any product, there are sure to be), I’ve not come across then yet.

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