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> “The big, big elephant in the room is protection of privacy and ensuring security,” says Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore’s foreign affairs minister and ministe

• hackerboos 11y ago
  It baffles me that media-tech companies such as Ghost want to relocate there: https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/ https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/
  • philliphaydon 11y ago
    What is wrong with Singapore? It's a start up heven.
    • philliphaydon 11y ago
      Lol such typical HN users, lets not provide a valid argument, lets just downvote because we have no argument.
      • hackerboos 11y ago
        You made a point on your own Twitter account of what is wrong with Singapore https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/720811398025109504 https://twitter.com/philliphaydon/status/720811398025109504
        • philliphaydon 11y ago
          I point out a positive in Singapore and you say its whats wrong with Singapore?
          • bobwaycott 11y ago
            Banning people's ability to protest is a positive social and cultural trait for you? Fuck that. That just made me think twice about ever bothering visiting.
          • philliphaydon 11y ago
            With what's going on in America right now, restricting peoples abilities to protest is a blessing. So many people protesting against things they don't understand, people becoming violent. Blah. I love Singapore.
            • ghostDancer 11y ago
              Really? And who determines what can you protest against/about? , do you have to pass an exam to protest certain things or a college degree is valid? Restricting peoples abilities to protest is one of the first things that dictatorships do.
              • mark_l_watson 11y ago
                Did you forget about the violent responses to the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protests? Tightly controlled "Free Speech Zones"? That is what we have in the USA, coupled with propaganda ridden corporate news. I don't think that we are in a position to criticize other countries too much since we have our own problems. I just got back from a business trip to Singapore, and considering how that area was devastated by the occupation during WW2, it is amazing how fast they have built a very good place to live.
                • nickpsecurity 11y ago
                  Experiencing specific forms of tyranny puts us in a perfect position to call out the same patterns in other countries and warn them so they can counter it before it's too late. Apathy by the majority is what screws America up. That Singaporeans actually care collectively about theirs and invest in their country's future is one of their most enviable traits. If Americans had that in mass, then our freedoms, votes, and capital would give us control of the country and vast improvements in one election cycle.
      • Ma8ee 11y ago
        Because the comment you replied to contained enough valid arguments.
      • CyberDildonics 11y ago
        You didn't provide any argument for your statement. Singapore is also an extraordinarily expensive place to live, which doesn't seem like startup heaven to me.
        • philliphaydon 11y ago
          Rubbish. I spent 5 years living in Sydney, Australia, before moving to Singapore. Unless you want to live a high roller expat life-style in a condo and own a car, Singapore is NOT expensive. And please don't refer to that terrible study that puts Singapore as the most expensive place to live, it's designed for companies to create packages for people for recruitment. It includes things like owning a car (something that is definitely not needed in Singapore), the price of alcohol (not a requirement to live), and living in an expensive condo (HDB's are excluded from the study) Sydney on the other hand, costs more for an apartment in the city, public transport is more expensive, especially taxis, food and drink is more expensive (exception is Alcohol and Beef), utilities (power/gas/internet) is all more expensive. My last tax bill in Sydney was about 22k when I left. My first full year in Singapore was like ~3k, and the government gave $1000 back. And the best part about it is you see all your money going back into the country, rather than lining the pockets of individuals to pass the blame on the failing like they do in Australia/New Zealand.
          • CyberDildonics 11y ago
            HDBs are still expensive. 2k SG for a small 2 bedroom HDB and very expensive electricity are not a good mix and there are very few studio or 1 bedroom HDBs. In most non coastal cities in the US you can get a studio for $600 USD.
            • nickpsecurity 11y ago
              In U.S. South near big cities, you can easily get a whole house with 3 bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, kitchen, back/front yard, electricity, and high-speed Internet all for about $1,300 a month. Cheaper if you are about 10 minutes out into rural areas. Either people make serious money in Singapore or their poor are pretty crunched in terms of living space. I don't have data to answer that.
  • nkoren 11y ago
    Not a fan of authoritarian governments, but I have to say that from the perspective of a UK-based SaaS company trying to cope with VATMOSS, their reasons are more than a little compelling. Sometimes pragmatism really does need to win the day.
    • nickpsecurity 11y ago
      They can open a Nevada or Delaware corporation in the U.S. that hires from the tech scene. They'll have speech/press freedom, almost no taxes, plenty IT people to draw on a low-wages, Stripe support, no VATMOSS, and easy business dealings with any country. Wonder why that wasn't on the list given we're the start-a-business-and-get-rich capital of the world.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Did you get the irony of a platform for personal expression and sometimes dissent moving into a country that suppresses dissent and narrows personal expression? Unreal. They've clearly bought into the propaganda with the list they posted. It's half right but counterexamples show transparency and corruption should be off it entirely with trust in politicians and education having qualifiers. It is a good place to do business with people capable of it, low risks, and so on. In general. Yet, I wouldn't bring in anything that's about personal expression or privacy. That's just incredibly stupid given long-term risks.
• dragonbonheur 11y ago
  >The ruling party uses power to eliminate opposition That article is from 1990. More than 20 years ago. If you had looked a little further you would have found that Singapore increased the number of people in parliament who represent the opposition.[1] It is slow progress, but it's still progress. Please don't be too quick to judge other countries regarding the subjects of privacy, representation and human rights. The reason for that is that if Asian countries have specks in their eyes regarding those issues, Western countries have telephone poles stuck in theirs for their breaches of privacy, representation, racism and human rights. [1] http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/more-ncmps-in-parliament/2462160.html http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/more-ncmps-in-...
  • hackerboos 11y ago
    The newsoutlet linked to above is owned by Mediacorp which is in-turn owned by Temasek Holdings, an investment arm of the Singaporean government. Almost all media in Singapore is owned/part-owned by the government. They exert editorial influence on all their holdings.
    • dragonbonheur 11y ago
      Doesn't detract from the FACT that their government is INCREASING opposition seats instead of repressing opposition.
      • CyberDildonics 11y ago
        People have voted for the opposition in the face of incredibly unfair elections where the opponent is given just a few weeks where they can campaign and the media is controlled by the government. Don't buy into their propaganda, their lies are pretty blatant if you take 60 seconds to do a search.
    • hellofunk 11y ago
      One of Singapore's prominent politicians in the late 90's wrote an essay about why Singapore does not have free speech. He said that the U.S. requires free speech because the press acts as a check on a corrupt government. In Singapore, he claimed, the government must instead act as a check on a corrupt press. How's that for logic? You can find this article in a book of many similar essays available right up front in most major bookstores of Singapore.
• toni 11y ago
  Also a recent must-see documentary about Singapore repressive ruling party is Jason Soo's "1987: Untracing the Conspiracy"[1] [1] http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2016/04/interview-jason-soo-director-1987-untracing-conspiracy/ http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2016/04/interview-jason-soo-... "In 1987, 22 people were arrested under Singapore’s Internal Security Act (ISA) in a security exercise known as Operation Spectrum. Accused of being involved in a Marxist conspiracy to establish a communist state, many detainees were tortured and then coerced into implicating themselves and their friends on public television."
  • marcosdumay 11y ago
    > Accused of being involved in a Marxist conspiracy to establish a communist state, many detainees were tortured and then coerced into implicating themselves and their friends on public television. Wow! Stalinist tactics against Marxism.
    • eudox 11y ago
      And Singapore shows how much you can accomplish when Marxists are removed from society.
      • creamyhorror 11y ago
        The pendulum has already swung back somewhat: Since the '00s, the ruling party has been quietly ramping up the social safety net (various subsidy programs for the low-income), implemented universal healthcare to an extent (keeping health insurance costs low), and focused a lot on aiding older unemployed citizens (wage subsidies, retraining, upgrading). Government departments focus more on "customer service" and have a "no wrong door" policy. It's been a gradual moderation since the '90s and before, when things were more uptight and anti-welfare-state. I remember the "OB markers", stuff that was out-of-bounds for public discussion - much of those have been eroded by blogs, forums & social media. So, not Marxism, just a shift away from pure capitalism and authoritarianism.
        • 11y ago
• altern8tif 11y ago
  Bottom line is: Singapore is not for everyone. If you're willing to give up some civil liberties for an efficiently-run nation where you can generally walk around without fear of getting stabbed or robbed, then it's the perfect place for you.
  • throwanem 11y ago
    > Bottom line is: Singapore is not for everyone. This seems an oddly difficult proposition to grasp for a lot of people who have never lived in, visited, or been anywhere near Singapore, nor have any plans to do so.
    • joe_the_user 11y ago
      Yeah, "Singapore is not for everyone" seems an extremely odd argument to me, given that unlike a health club or a gated community, the majority of Singapore's residents don't have any easy way to leave. The headline of this article is: "More than half of S'poreans would migrate if given a choice: Survey" http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20121007-376116.html http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/Singapore/Story/A1S...
      • throwanem 11y ago
        "More than half of a tiny and almost certainly unrepresentative fraction of Singaporeans" would be a more accurate description. Arguing from headlines seems like it must be an uncomfortable place to be. The CIA World Factbook estimates a 1.5% net immigration rate for Singapore in 2015. They don't seem to break out immigration vs. emigration, so I'm not sure how frequently people leave, but a quick glance at Google results for "singapore emigration" suggests people leave frequently enough for some pundits to consider it a problem, which makes it seem improbable that doing so is all that difficult.
        • joe_the_user 11y ago
          That people describe emigration as a problem says something. Most citizens of any given nation won't leave, and generally feel like they can't leave, because emigration requires either resources and skills or extreme desperation. Virtually all nations of the world put a fairly high bar to immigration. For this reason, a nation's willingness to allow immigration at all tends to determine it's immigration rate since there are numerous areas of the world whose citizens are in extreme desperation. You observe this from this chart of world immigration rates. Sweden is a pleasant destination for immigrants, Jordon and Libya less so but both have high immigrations rates. The original argument was "Singapore is not for everyone" and my point that Singapore pretty much is for everyone who's a citizen without a whole lot of resources. It's not a matter of taste akin to an exclusive club. http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=sn&v=27 http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=sn&v=27
• visakanv 11y ago
  That last two examples both talk about the same thing, which is that it's illegal for a religious organization to explicitly comment on public policy matters. Of course, it doesn't at ALL stop them from organizing and spreading their perspectives – it's an open secret that gay sex is still technically illegal in Singapore because of the conservative Christians lobbying for it to remain. It just forces the religious groups to be more subtle about their agendas, which I think is about as good as it gets, really.
  • cookiecaper 11y ago
    I think that's dangerous. Religion is a valid player on the field of public policy and they should be free to comment. In a government by the people, if the people choose to put weight on religious advice or concerns, that's completely valid. They don't need to reason by an arbitrary governmental standard that excludes something they believe in. Even the restrictions on political speech for religious organizations in the US are worrisome (they lose their tax exemption if they explicitly endorse a specific candidate or party in an election).
• bosslee 11y ago
  Hi there My name is Bryan and I'm one of the co-founders of a local company Intraix. Our company has been selected to be one of the vendors and is involved in the HDB Smart Home Trials with a local Telco - M1. I am pretty sure I would be able to paint out perspectives from different spectrums of this conversation. In term of data protection and ensuring security, The agencies involved in the smart home trial did put in a lot of effort to ensure that all companies in the program complies to the [Personal Data Protection Act] (https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/legislation-and-guidelines/overview https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/legislation-and-guidelines/overview) with very stringent criteria to data handling passed down to all the vendors. As a matter of fact, our system had to face penetration tests conducted by Ernst and Young, a big 4 Auditing Firm before we can even get past the initial gates of entrance. I’m not saying that these measures are perfect but I believe the agencies, especially the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is really serious about data privacy.
  • bkor 11y ago
    > As a matter of fact, our system had to face penetration tests conducted by Ernst and Young, a big 4 Auditing Firm Auditing is not about security. It's about checking if proper procedures are in place, separation of duties, there's "access control", etc. One thing it'll miss out on is the security of the system. You say that they performed penetration tests, but IMO saying that E&Y performed it makes me doubt the security. FWIW, company I work for also has the big auditing firms (all of them) come along and perform audits.
  • 77pt77 11y ago
    >As a matter of fact, our system had to face penetration tests conducted by Ernst and Young, a big 4 Auditing Firm I really can't tell whether this is serious or just Poe's law in action.