It is not an accident that politicians and other stakeholders have been deliberately excluded from the NLA and the NRC. They have been portrayed as evil and corrupt — part of the problem, not the solution. How can any politician from any party cooperate with the current regime knowing that their victory at elections does not count and they could be thrown out of parliament at any time?
First, the NCPO shows them the exit and then summons them for attitude adjustments. Will this tactic lead to reforms? Is there an example or any case study where coups and attitude adjustments have ushered a nation onto the path to democracy?
Reform means that those who have been on the underside of conflicts must see there is a genuine effort to bring about reconciliation. Merely tinkering with institutional machinery will not lead to any tangible reform.
The Democrat Party has lost many elections; hence it has no qualms about accepting whatever comes its way. The PDRC leaders have realised they can gain from cooperating with the regime. Pheu Thai and UDD leaders have genuine distrust of the current regime, and for good reason.
Thaksin or no Thaksin, the conflicts will continue. The ousted party and its leaders will shun the coup-makers and the losers at the ballot boxes will have no shame in accepting favours from the new regime.
The current attitude is captured in a quotation from American activist Jim Hightower: “The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.”
Kuldeep Nagi
Head in the clouds
The potential and experienced damage to systems and data theft described in “Future in the cloud” (Business, Feb 2) is clearly evident.
Users of the cloud have almost zero influence on where and how data is stored and protected, they just have to sign up and trust the provider! As Mr Derek Manky says "… the internet of things has now become internet of threats".
Attackers now have only to attack a single target to gain access to data belonging to many organisations. This is happening as you surely must know from reading the news!
Convergence of multiple services may initially offer a greater ROI but increases the risk by orders of magnitude. While the internet of things (IoT) will also dramatically increase the number of network-connected entities, attackers will be increasingly be able to focus on a single entry point.
Solution: disconnect as much as you can from the internet to foil hackers − maintain your own internal systems − unconnected to the WAN. Putting all your eggs in the internet basket (cloud) is obviously a folly; remember you are connected by a thread! The more individual targets there are the less likely you are to be one of them, since the amount of effort to attack you may prove disproportionate to the attacker (his ROI!)
Install severe firewalls, ruthless antivirus/malware systems and back up your data to at least two offsite locations (hard drives are cheap!) Limit reliance on cloud-based software and storage to a minimum and thereby reduce your risk.
The current promotion of the cloud has serious pitfalls and the biggest one is that once adopted there is great difficulty getting back out of it. Remember, you have the freedom to choose but you do not have the freedom not to choose!
Mike Blackburn
Rubber meddling
Re: "Dead rubber bounce", (PostBag, Feb 2).
Why should the Thai government interfere in the rubber market, an international commodity?
Haven’t we learned from the rice scheme?
Scott M
What martial law?
I’ve asked many friends living in Thailand, and many of my neighbours about their views on martial law. To the letter, the answers were, “What martial law?” or, “If there is martial law, it certainly is not bothering me any”.
So what’s the fuss over the continuing imposition of martial law? How is it affecting you personally? I bet that unless it is brought up, most people aren’t aware that it even exists.
Jack Gilead
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