JANUARY 3 — My experience with this government is much like a child shouting at a Santa Claus that has his fingers in his ears.
What I’d like: Covid jabs
What the government tells me: We have them, somewhere. We can’t tell you if or when we’re getting new ones or if we will even bother. Anyway, masking would be nice.
In the last 24 hours, two people I know have come down with Covid, which brings up the number of people I know with it to double-digits.
While it’s nice to know they (probably) won’t be hospitalised it’s still aggravating that I can only cross my fingers there’s still Paxlovid left if I do get it as supplies are now running out and again, the government has kept silent on the matter of getting more stock.
What it hasn’t been quiet about is the new Pangkalan Data Utama (Padu) system that is a fancy name for a database meant for means testing because heavens forbid someone who can afford to pay a little more for petrol benefits from subsidies.
DAP’s Ong Kian Ming has helpfully (or not so helpfully who knows in this country) pointed out that if someone has your IC number and IC address postcode they could register themselves easily, making Padu a wonderful tool for... identity theft.
Having already received two emails on Tuesday from people trying to hack my Facebook accounts, I thought I would save myself some aggravation by signing up for Padu as it doesn’t seem to be optional.
Alas, the authentication QR code isn’t working for me. Instead the service is convinced my multiple failed attempts means I am some sort of DDOS bot.
I prayed to the guardians of my blood pressure to not give me an aneurysm.
You would think that someone in the Economy Ministry would have done their due diligence to make sure someone wasn’t already using the Padu acronym.
No, of course they didn’t. This is Malaysia.
The very first search result when you look for “Padu” on Google is a website for another endeavour by the Education Ministry which has been around longer.
I think the Education Ministry needs to send over some thesauruses to the Economy Ministry post-haste.
The implementation of Padu seems to be rushed with no thought to privacy, security and possible pitfalls and that shortcoming pointed out by DAP’s Ong should have spurred the government to put the website on ice until the kinks are sorted out.
No, the website is still here and no one has addressed the website vulnerability perhaps thinking it would go away like Covid supposedly would.
Much like Covid, too many administrations think we should just learn to live with the utter lack of regard towards the security of government websites and the safeguarding of citizens’ personal data.
Anyone with actual skill and experience in IT project implementations could see that Padu was rushed — why did no one even test it for how it would handle user load?
When the average shopping website is better equipped to handle sudden website visitor load, perhaps the government might need to talk to people who understand that you can’t give something a fancy name and expect it to work.
There is more at stake here and it’s a damn shame that no matter which administration it is, too little forethought is put into making websites that work the way they should.
We can’t keep blaming hackers or “malicious actors” when in reality it’s just the “tidak apa” (it’s fine) attitude that will forever be the curse of this country at least until we finally learn to fix it.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
