WeiZhong’s Blog

My Personal Reflection

After reading this article for almost the fourth time, including the headlines of The Straits Times and Today papers, my mind was on all my friends in Indonesia and whether there would be another huge tsunami disaster like the last time which would crush the economy of the world all over again in the year 2004.

I am really glad that all the countries in the world have learnt from the horrible incident which occurred 3 years ago. Merely thinking of the incident back then can cause shivers to go up the spines of many people.

I heard on a radio station a few days ago about a DJ and a professor discussing the matter of the earthquake. They were focusing on the issue of the earthquakes being felt closer and closer to the equator of the earth and wondering whether Singapore would be safe in the future. There was also a person who called in and said he lived at woodlands but he still felt the tremors from the earthquake which measured 8.4 on the Richter Scale. Surprisingly, neither my friends and family nor myself had felt a single tremor from the main quake or any of its aftershocks at all.

I was really very worried because one of my good friends who lived in Indonesia had not gone online on MSN Messenger ever since the disaster struck, but my wait paid off as he signed on this morning. However, it turned out that I was worrying for nothing because he lived in Batam and he didn’t even feel any tremors. Anyway, it’s the thoughts that count.

I feel that us people living in Singapore should feel grateful because there have already been two such catastrohpic disasters striking on the side of Indonesia opposite that of Singapore, thus the possibility of a tsunami hitting the coasts of Singapore would be very low. Nevertheless, I feel that the Singapore government should come up with a plan to protect Singapore from any tsunamis should there be any. Singapore is only that big, a single tsunami of a decent size should more or less destroy at least half of Singapore, judging from what a tsunami managed to do 3 years back.

Prevention is better than cure; We should be ready at all times.

Powerful quake shakes Indonesia

Some buildings collapsed in West Sumatra after the quake hit

A powerful earthquake and several aftershocks have struck off the western Indonesian island of Sumatra, sparking fears of a tsunami.

Tsunami alerts were issued for several nations in the Indian Ocean, though some have now been lifted.

Buildings collapsed on the west coast of Sumatra. Hospitals are on alert in case there are significant casualties.

A massive undersea earthquake sparked a tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people in December 2004.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued an alert for the entire Indian Ocean region following Wednesday’s main quake, which the US Geological Survey said measured 8.4.

Danger eases

Besides Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and a number of small islands were put on alert. Kenya, on the western rim of the ocean, also raised the alarm.

There were unconfirmed reports of a small tsunami – estimated at 1-3m (3-10ft) hitting the Sumatran coast – but not causing major damage.

But about two hours after the quake, Indonesia’s meteorology agency said the danger of a serious tsunami had passed, and Sri Lanka and India also dropped their alerts.

Wednesday’s main earthquake struck at 1810 (1110 GMT), about 30km (18 miles) under the sea, some 130km (80 miles) south-west of the city of Bengkulu, the US Geological Survey said.

Local media said buildings had collapsed in Padang, the capital of the province of West Sumatra, and in the town of Mukomuko.

There were also reports of inhabitants fleeing swaying buildings in the capital Jakarta, 600km (370 miles) away, and in Singapore.

“You could see the road as if it was waving, people could hardly walk so they just lay flat on the road. I could also feel the earth I was standing on was like the sea,” Zulkifli Lubis, a local journalist in Bengkulu, told the BBC.

Damage

Officials said it was very difficult to get clear communications with the area to make damage assessments.

Animated guide: Earthquakes
Deadly history of quakes

They are sending disaster teams from the capital Jakarta, fearing that there may be significant casualties, says the BBC’s Lucy Williamson in Jakarta.

Officials said at least two people had died and dozens were injured.

But as it is dark, and many of the stricken areas are be remote, it may take some time to find out how bad the situation is.

“At least one person died when he was hit by a falling tree when they were evacuating after the quake,” Salamun Haris, an official from North Bengkulu district, told ElShinta radio.

“Dozens of people were injured in damaged buildings” across the district, he said, and hospitals were clearing wards in anticipation of receiving casualties.

Fearful memories

This was one of the most powerful earthquakes in Indonesia since the one which caused the Asian tsunami in 2004.

That measured 8.9 and struck under the sea near the northern Sumatran province of Aceh, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people around the rim of the Indian Ocean.

Our correspondent says quakes on this scale are rare and memories of 2004 have made the country terrified of a repeat.

Indonesia, part of the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire”, is frequently shaken by earth tremors.

Access this article here.

My Personal Reflection

There are two main issues in this article. The first issue is regarding the illegal exploitation of Torrent technology. The second issue is regarding the excessive usage of bandwidth which Torrent technology consumes from Internet Service Providers(ISPs).

First of all, I would like to express my thoughts on BitTorrent. I feel that Torrent technology was not made for the purpose of illegal exploitations. The peer-to-peer technology was meant to make sharing of files more convenient for all the people in the world. However, there is always a group of baddies who want to exploit anything they can get their hands on to their advantage.

Personally, I feel that Torrent technology should not have been released as a freeware. Because of this, Torrent technology became popular and widely used in an extremely short span of time, thus attracting the group of baddies very quickly.

The way a Torrent website works is quite simple. Every Torrent website has a Torrent Tracker, which acts similarly to the human brain. This Torrent Tracker checks and approves any torrent submitted by users around the world and manages the peer-to-peer transferring of all the files submitted to the Tracker.

Now I will explain in detail the second problem which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) face due to Torrent technology. First of all, we will go down to the very basics of the World-Wide-Web(WWW). When you are downloading a file, for example you are downloading a game client engine from a gaming website, it is definitely not a one way transfer of the file. When you are downloading the file, the file is being uploaded to you by the server where the file is located. There are two main factors affecting the download speed of your file. They are your broadband and the server you are downloading from. Your broadband may be a very good one but the server may have a very lousy upstream speed, so your download cannot go over the limit of the server even though your broadband has higher limits.

So, when the server is uploading data to you, who is downloading it, the server uses up bandwidth. Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data that can be sent over a network connection in a given period of time. Thus, offering illegal downloads of movies which are extremely big in filesize would not be feasible at all because bandwidth is very costly. Thus, BitTorrent rose to fame very quickly. This is because Torrent technology allowed files of huge size to be transferred easily by making use of the bandwidth provided by the ISPs of the users who are downloading the files, so the Torrent technology will consume very little bandwidth but it will allow users to obtain huge files!

One very famous Torrent tracker on the web is www.thepiratebay.org. This organization is practically a company already. They managed to obtain copyright protection through a proposal to the swedish government and is now internationally recognized as the most notorious legal distributor of illegal files, which is absolutely ironic because the copyright protection is internationally recognized and no country or organization can do anything against it.

I feel that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Torrent technology used, but the ones who should be pursued by the copyright act are those who are downloading the illegal files and the ones who are uploading them. The ISPs are simply not acting on the right stand by restricting the bandwidth of their users, thus they do not have my support at all.

BitTorrent battles over bandwidth

In the last few years users have started to share that content with each other across the net, whether legal or not. This is something that has plagued the music industry for several years. And now, mainly thanks to a system called BitTorrent, the movie industry could face the same struggle. But BitTorrent could also be the solution. Hollywood is definitely interested in distributing its movies over the net. King Kong is the first major film in the UK to be released as a download at the same time as on DVD. Users on the web will visit a download site and pull the data onto their computers. Many users can be served at once but, if demand is huge, users will effectively have to queue up and wait their turn. But there is another way to get hold of content and it has caused a nightmare for the music industry of late, with users sharing content amongst themselves, their peers. Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program and a decent internet connection, a user can make all his files available to anyone else who is using the same program. If you wanted to get hold of a particular song, your file-sharing program would hunt for that file on other people’s hard drives. When it finds it, it downloads a copy to your own computer. The more users who download the file, the more places there are for other users to get it. This reduces the likelihood of bottlenecks, and is a very efficient way of distributing files across the net. Of course, it is illegal to share copyrighted material like that. But this has not stopped people doing it. Larger files More recent developments include being able to download different parts of the same file from different users. But video files are much larger than music files and have slower upload times. This is where BitTorrent comes in. It is an incredibly efficient way of distributing large files, like video, across the net, even when there is a high demand, and even when only one person has the complete file. The key is that a user’s computer does not need to wait until it has downloaded the entire file.