http://www.temasekreview.com/2011/01/09/schedul…
Scheduled vital security upgrade for Temasek Review
January 9th, 2011 | Author: Editorial
Dear readers,
With GE looming around the corner and over-zealous “some agency”
monitoring, 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, which has been
sold to a chinese business woman.
In any case, when we decided to play 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.
Surprisingly, why would the police want to waste precious time
“asking around” and “fishing” when they could have easilly
contacted us through our online web form with their request and we
would have gladly provided the information of the domain and site
owner information, 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 and moved servers 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 persecutions.
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.
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
(non-Singaporean from hong Kong) to modify our existing
installation as follows:
Sample Comment (before)
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/contributors / member logins to the
wordpress backend will also be removed and all existing IPs stored
deleted from the database.
3. All existing IP addresses stored in the wordpress database
for all posts and comments prior to this “upgrade” will be
completely deleted.
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 and can be remotely controlled by our in-house
technical.
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’s
content.
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 and then synced.
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 servers 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.
Readers intending to use the word “burn”, “kill”, “remember what
happened to”, etc are reminded to use it “metaphorically” to avoid
unnecessary haressment by local authorities.
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
and Germany.
Upon the successful “upgrading”, we then cannot be accused of
withholding information or refusing to cooperate with the relevant
authorities since we have no such information to cooperate
with.
If you are still reading this by now, the “upgrading” will be
performed over the 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 our readers 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
(刘嘉仪)
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