Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

Maybank Improves HTTPS security, joins top ranks while BSN, Affin and Muamalat remain at Grade F

Posted: 03 Nov 2013 10:58 AM PST

It's been 3 days since we first posted our tests on Malaysian banks which gained quite a lot of publicity. Thanks to everyone who shared and spread the word. Let's see who has taken it to heart and upgraded their security? We are only retesting those sites that scored an F rating which were:

Maybank2u/Maybank2e
Affin Bank
Bank Muamalat
Bank Simpanan Nasional

and also those who scored a B rating which were

AmBank
Bank Rakyat

Maybank2U: Grade A

Maybank now becomes one of the top ranking banking websites in Malaysia and in some cases in case of RC4 support and Session resumption, is even better than CIMBClicks. It is reassuring to see the speed in which this was resolved. It even supports TLS1.1 and 1.2 now!

There were quite a few people who complained that we were paid to do a smear campaign on Maybank but this is far from the truth. Others expressed that Maybank2U required the SSL2.0 support for people who could not upgrade from IE6. We responded to say that IE6.0 with service packs installed did indeed have SSL3.0 support and that insecure protocols should not be tolerated lest it give the false sense of security to users. We have been validated by Maybank fixing these issues on their site within 2 days.

Re-imagining a truly Malaysian school

Posted: 03 Nov 2013 10:30 AM PST

Imagine the children, in weekly language word-study circles, explaining to each other the meaning of the word in their own language.

Imagine the children learning Language Arts and Social Studies exploring the interdisciplinary theme of the language they use at home.

Imagine them translating proverbs from their native language into English, and next illustrating them and next doing class presentations.

Imagine at the end of the year, the children and their parents proudly dressed up in their cultural outfits, singing songs in their native language without being laughed at, sharing food - in a cultural celebration night.

Imagine secondary school students doing their final school project on the meaning of their cultural practices and the relationship to their ethical belief system and how each may teach them to profess universal values of peace and social justice among different races.

Imagine all of them doing a project that analyses the themes of famous cross-cultural movies and using this vehicle to learn the concepts of cultural preservation and continuity.

Imagine, at the community college and university level, when they have had enough exposure and appreciation to linguistic and cultural diversity, Malaysians forming cross-cultural dialogue clubs, engaging in multiple literacies and multiple voices forum, interfaith circles of learning, transcultural network of friends and other innovations in multi-cultural social imaginations - so that we may not need communalism anymore as a basis for our national political design.

Imagine, we then have graduate students forming something called 'Malaysian Transcultural Social Democratic Futuristics' political study groups to dismantle all existing parties that have served their time.

What an exploration in a newer human design we may embark upon to create a society based on a transcultural radical-multiculturalist utopianism. It would be a good experiment we may embark upon for the next 50 years so that we may redefine the meaning of 'progress and development', rethink the solution to corruption, and reconfigure the existing and incoming newer Malaysians.

But let us go back to the present Malaysian classroom.

Kredit: www.malaysia-today.net

Isnin, 4 November 2013