A Hong Kong police constable shot dead an unarmed homeless Nepali man.

A life was lost unnecessarily.

Why?

Because a policeman couldn’t subdue a single suspect with pepper spray and baton, then gave him warning in Cantonese (possibly the suspect didn’t understand) and decided to shoot him twice (one in the head) from a very close range.

Investigation is underway, but looking at the mobile phone video footage, shooting was absolutely unnecessary. If the officer was so unfit to subdue a single suspect he should have left him alone and waited for a backup support instead of shooting in the head, after-all he wasn’t a fugitive or a terrorist.

Shame on you Hong Kong Police!

Update: Latest News about the incident from HKNepal.com

The concert hall was huge and fully packed, there was a grand screen at the back of the stage and two smaller ones on both sides. The performance was just mind blowing, with 3D visual effects and surround sound. It all started with “In The Flesh” together with The Walls marching hammers on screen, and cracking fire flames blindingly lightening the stage. Waters performed most of the Pink Floyd’s classics including “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”, “The Cigar”, “Sheep”, “Speak To Me”, “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse”.

Waters performed a new song called “Leaving Beirut” based on what happened to him when he was a teenager traveling to Lebanon. When his car broke and had no money, an Arab family gave him food and shelter and treated him very well. The performance had a comic screen background, with lyrics. This was an anti-war, anti-bush and anti-blair song. You can find the full lyrics of “Leaving Beirut” here. The crowd went crazy cheering when Waters sang following lines.

Are these the people that we should bomb
Are we so sure they mean us harm
Is this our pleasure, punishment or crime
Is this a mountain that we really want to climb
The road is hard, hard and long
Put down that two by four
This man would never turn you from his door
Oh George! Oh George!
That Texas education must have fucked you up when you were very small

During the performance of “Sheep”, a giant pig was flown over the audience. The flying pig had messages all over, some of which read, “Kafka Rules OK! “, “Fear builds walls”, “Don’t be led to the slaughter, Vote Democratic Nov. 2 “, and “Impeach Bush Now”(across the pig’s ass).

The band bowed and said bye to the crowds near the end. The stage went dark, then all the audience rose, cheered, clapped and shouted “once more”. There was an explosive comeback, with the classic from The Wall “Bring the Boys Home”. “Another Brick in the Wall” was accompanied with the images of West Bank walls created by Israel. The concert perfectly ended with “Comfortably Numb”. I’ve been to concerts like David Coverdale, Nazareth, Smokie, Iron Maiden and many more…, but undoubtedly this is the best concert of my life so far.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2007!

When I went to office this morning, after 3 days Christmas holiday, the phone was constantly ringing, with customers query about Internet and Email service. Our servers were inaccessible from Overseas and we couldn’t reach sites outside of Hong Kong.

Yesterday, I’d noticed an upsurge in traffic to my blog after the news of Buddha Boy’s reappearance, but unfortunately today most of the visitors from US cannot access my site. Hopefully the the damaged cables will be repaired soon and we’ll have an access to the wider world.

This is the notice from my ISP (looks like it’ll take several days to fix):

News: Quake disrupt Asia communication

I took this photo on our way to ferry pier, usually it’s hazy in Hong Kong but I was struck by the clarity yesterday.

Click for large photo

One problem however is that the site is in Chinese and you’ll have to download and install the player (which is also only in Chinese). I’ve downloaded the player and installed in my Windows XP machine and enjoying the matches from yesterday (the commentary is in Chinese. So, I watch the game and listen to music ). If you want to give it a shot; here’s how I did it.

Note: I don’t understand Chinese so, I’m just guessing some of the stuffs here . Don’t blame me if your computer CRASHES or if you have other problems. It works for me and hopefully it’ll work for you too. GOOD LUCK

Requires: Windows Media Player 9 or 10

Browse www.ppstream.com and click on the download player PPStream V 1.0.4.520

Click on the red circle to download the PPSteram player

Start the installation and click on Next [N]>

Choose the Installation Directory and press Next [N]>

Choose to create a Desktop Shortcut and press Next [N]>

Ok, you’re done installing now launch the ppStream player

It will ask you to get some updates (I guess). Press Yes.

Conrifm to install the update

The list on the left hand side are the available channels. CCTV-5 should be on the top. When you put the mouse on the channel you’ll see the details. You should see cctv-5 at the end of the descriptions. If you see this double click to view the channel. Wait for a while… it’ll show the progress bar.. buffering and…

Enjoy!

A dragon boat

Crowd at Stanley beach

More crowd watching the race

A foreign team getting ready for the race

A local Chinese team getting ready for the race

Rowing fast to the finish

Oops.. a boat drowned with all it’s crew

Close to finish

Opening speech was given by the Senior Inspector WONG Hung-Fu of Technology Crime Division, Crime Prevention Unit, Commercial Crime Bureau, Hong Kong Police Force. Unfortunately he choose to speak in Cantonese (which I don’t understand) but from his slides and later explained to me by other participant he was showing figures of increasing cyber crimes in Hong Kong specially Phishing, Spyware and P2P related crimes.

Sonicwall

They talked about the new generation of UTM (Unified Threat Management) Firewalls they’re offering. The UTM Firewalls includes following security solutions in one box:

• Real-time Gateway Anti-Virus Scanning
• VPN/Firewall
• Intrusion Prevention Service
• Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware
• Wireless Security

The new sonicwalls also include DPI (Deep Packet Inspection). From my experience sonicwalls are very cheap compared to other products in the market but are worth their cost.

They also talked about their SSL-VPN about which I’d written earlier. They mainly focused on technology side of SSL-VPN instead of their product and admitted their target is SME and cannot compete with Netscreen or Aventail on features. But price-wise they made it clear that they’re the only ones affordable by small companies.

Barracuda

The guy from Barracuda explained how Spams and Viruses are becoming a daily headache to everyone. He also introduced several of their products. Barracuda Spam Firewall, which is a powerful enterprise-class anti-spam and anti-virus solution for email servers. They’ve sold 30,000 devices and are actively supporting them. The main features of Barracuda Spam Firewall are:

• Anti-spam
• Anti-virus
• Anti-spoofing
• Anti-phishing
• Anti-spyware (Attachments)
• Denial of Service

Other products from Barracuda are: Spyware firewall and IM Firewall

Encentuate

Existing security access solutions e.g. passwords, tokens, digital certificates etc.. as they grow stronger, they make it more inconvenient for end users and enterprises to manage them. So Encentuate was founded to address the need of enterprises to simplify, strengthen and track access across their digital assets and physical infrastructure. They provide Single sign-on and sign-off automation, authentication management and user-centric access auditing and reporting.

TippingPoint

They claimed that TippingPoint is the most powerful Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) in the world and it’s performance is unparalleled. TippingPoint security team is providing the vulnerability analysis for SANS Newsletter every week. One more interesting thing in TippingPoint solution is the Digital Vaccine Service that delivers new filters on a weekly or even daily basis for protection against the latest vulnerabilities, exploits, viruses and rogue applications. This means the TippingPoint with Digital Vaccine can protect from many unpatched but known vulnerabilities.

Riverbed

They make your WAN perform like a LAN. The steelhead appliances provide wide-area data service (WDS). Basically, by deploying this product in different branch offices you can access the resources in other branches much more efficiently. They achieve this by acceleration of all TCP applications, packet caching and compression. They demonstrated us a file transfer with and without the steelhead. In a 1Mbps line it took 53 sec to transfer a 10MB file and it took 2.5 sec with steelhead. Quite impressive.

radware

Radware provides a wide range of products for managed service solutions, application access solutions, application security solutions and application front end solutions. Today they mainly presented the APSolute Application Front-End (AFE) Solutions with AppDirector and AppXcel. The combination of these two products enable application availability and continuity, accelerated application performance, guaranteed service levels, application security, IT server infrastructure scalability and consolidation, all in one integrated solution.

Allot

They had the most interesting products and demo. NetEnforcer and NetXplorer can thoroughly inspect, monitor and control traffic and bandwidth usage on broadband networks, with very detailed reporting and analysis. This is a traffic management solutions for carriers and service providers with total visibility and robust control of both traffic and subscribers:

Traffic Control:

• Control P2P applications
• Achieve intelligent network visibility
• Guarantee unsurpassed Quality of Experience
• Mitigate Security threats

Subscriber Control:

• Deploy new application-based services
• Track behavior and trends
• Deliver innovative billing models
• Enable self-provisioning capabilities