Rural Urban News

Some keyloggers are not even visible in the program folders. They’re so perfectly made to hide it from the other users except the one who installed it or the administrator. So with various remote access applications that have cracked wide open the private fetish activities of the pitiful UM-Tagum coed.

As of now, we are still waiting to hear of the veracity of the report that Baby has tried or committed suicide. Wag lang sana. But we’re hoping Mayor Rey Uy, who is now investigating which among the internet cafés in the city has condemned the life and future of Baby, can catch and pin down the culprit.

Whoever had recorded the Tagum sex video scandal must be pursued. He can run but he can never hide. As they say, way makumkom nga aso. If not this immediate, later he or she would be uncovered and captured by the long arms of the law. Only the truth can set us free.

The other news is that the Internet Café Advisory Board (ICAB), an interagency advisory body created by the enactment of the city’s ordinance regulating operations of internet café owners met the other day upon the directive the mayor, and the co-chair Vice Mayor Allan Rellon relayed to us their recommendation of requiring internet café watchers or attendants to undergo an ICAB seminar and secure occupational permit from the City Hall.Certainly, the measure is good as it now documents who are the internet attendants who could have a bad egg who stain their lot. Pity on them- they are mostly working students and informal workers receiving below the standard wages. But unscrupulous IC owners too are also suspects to this sorry affair.

The city’s IT people may have failed to advise the ICAB based on their expertise on the deeper issues on remote access espying made from an owner’s server computer to the ones used by the paying chatters, gamers and users. Forget first now the issue on semi-closed cubicles inside internet cafes and the one about the adjoining or neighboring internet café and girlie videoke bars in the city.

In Davao City, the webcams are placed fixed atop the monitor or CPU. It’s bawal to place it near or so that it could be focused to sensitive parts of the body. That the semi-enclosed cubicle fixture- although it gives privacy- is also being used a little hiding place among the horny money-makers like the Western Union girls who do sudden bra-flipping for money. When we abolish that fixture we are giving meat and not the flesh to the campaign on No to Pornography!

The use of keylogger and remote access applications is a violation to the provision against hacking. Baby was evidently hacked, although webwhoring is also a violation. But I still don’t condemn Baby’s act. All of the horny foreigner chatters, I repeat the horny ones, are online manipulators, deceivers and cheats wanting to pull a fast one from among our chatting women for pleasure. Maybe Baby was just cajoled, sweet-talked by her foreigner chat boyfriend with promise of sending her so much money. Look, the usual horny foreigners are playing around again with our vulnerability out from our usual poverty. And now the irresponsible brown techies - those who know about the high-tech nitty-gritty operations and programs of the computer- are also horseying around their skills by hacking Baby’s various acts.

There are more IT-innocent Babys in our midst. We pray there would be no more Babys from Tagum City and elsewhere who would be victimized by the unscrupulous techies inside the internet cafes.

The best lesson learned from this Tagum sex video scandal is to never bare at all.

But to the stoppable chatting ladies around wanting to have a new lease of their poor, battered lives by chatting in search for foreigner husbands, they better get a Smartbro (sorry I’m no Smart rep) and chat all the way inside their closed private rooms.

The infidel wives might have already killed their still living husbands, or declared they’ve been separated for so many times while the truth is it is not. But if they don’t want a Smartbro inside their master bedrooms for fear of being caught by their husbands, and they may chat outside, but for heaven’s sake they should not bare inside internet cafes as they might end up as hot mamas involved in another sex scandal. Forgive the sexist pun though as it has been really real these Internet days.(For online edition, visit my blog at: http://cha4t.wordpress.com

sept 5

BLOGISTA

By Cha Monforte

Well, Barack Obama was a community organizer (CO) you know. Before he went to excel in Harvard law school and after graduating from Columbia University in 1983 with a major in political science, Obama worked as a financial consultant in New York City . But he was bored—and drawn to work as a CO for three years in Chicago . There he organized African blacks, the grassroots and average people like those living in the ghettos, the urban poor in US, for many causes including public housing.

Today’s “biggest celebrity in the world”, to borrow a counter-spin of Republican nominee John McCain, has admitted that his exposure as a CO has most impact on him as politician. Analysts say that’s the reason why Obama became an effective legislator and an audacious public speaker. I have much confidence that Obama could win for the US presidency by November.

Now if Obama could be given a say on the proposed ordinance of the Tagum City Councilor Nicandro Suaybaguio Jr who wants to stop urban poor housing for five years in the city, I bet, the front-running Democratic presidential nominee would easily say, “Yes, the urban poor can”. He will thumb down Nickel’s wayward measure that he would submit for readings at the city council by Monday.

Vice President Noli de Castro, the country’s housing czar, should he come across with Suaybaguio’s measure, would also probably say, “hindi naman dapat ganon… OK, tingnan natin yan”. Tingni!

Let’s see how wayward really is Suaybaguio’s measure. He says that he will craft yet the city’s housing code (or is he referring this to comprehensive shelter plan which took about seven years for the Davao City Council to fully refine, complete and approve?). So there, even without the housing code, which will show the acute housing backlog in the city, which is about 28,000 families requiring at least 280 hectares, Suaybaguio is already making a shortcut by stopping the urban poor to make contribution in addressing the housing problem in the city.

If Suaybaguio’s wayward measure isn’t stopped in independent nominal voting in the way the nematicide-banning measure of Councilor Joedel Caasi was killed by the majority last Monday, then it would pass without extensive study and research, to borrow the reasons of Councilors Rey Salve and SK prexy Cyril Muring in frustrating Caasi.

The city councilors, whom I believe could still independently rise to occasion of erroneous and insufficient measure, wherever it came from, should be appraised that Suaybaguio’s measure is grossly insufficient in substance for taking wrong assumptions. It’s not the form as there’s always easy template for it.

When it defers the issuance of the approval of all documents relating urban poor subdivision, it right away closes the city’s door to access national socialized housing funds such as CMP of the strengthened Social Housing Finance Corp, MMP of NHA, GLAD of Pag-ibig Fund, congressional funds and the like. It also automatically bars other alternative social housing schemes for the poor espoused by Churches such as the Habitat and Gawad Kalinga and by the civil society and cooperatives.

In our series, we’ve always emphasized the need for counterparting, convergence and partnership among stakeholders and the combination of various shelter modes and strategies in addressing the city’s acute housing backlog. The city government could not just do it alone, which is otherwise misplaced as an assumption underlying in Suaybaguio’s measure.

Housing developers could not also do it alone even as they cater only to the middle and high-end markets, and not to the informal sector. But if developers could have the heyday in buying lands within the 5-year deferment period, expect more price speculations among landowners in the city, assuming that they could seize good market from the middle-and-up sectors. This could potentially trigger rise of the selling prices of even agricultural lands for which after the five-year prohibition period it can further bar the urban poor from owning affordable offsite lands via CMP.

Suaybaguio’s measure would also mean the stoppage of onsite CMP projects in the city. For putting no exemption on this, urban poor already occupying lands in city centers will have no chance at all to buy the lands they occupy via the CMP during the deferment period. (For online edition, visit my blog at: http://cha4t.wordpress.com)