memanjangkan gesaan tersebut kepada pihak berkaitan bagi memastikan demokrasi di Malaysia kekal subur. Hak bersuara dan kebebasan rakyat kita wajib dipelihara dan dipertahankan. Janganlah disebabkan perbezaan pandangan, hendak dimusnahkan kesuburan demokrasi, katanya. Turut hadir Timbalan Pengerusi BN Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan, Timbalan Presiden MCA Datuk Dr Mah Hang Soon dan Timbalan Presiden MIC Datuk Seri M Saravanan. Wee juga berkata MCA akan menyokong apa jua rang undang-undang yang baik dan dibawa ke Parlimen untuk diluluskan. Beliau berkata Rang Undang-Undang Mufti (Wilayah Persekutuan) 2024, yang akan dibentang untuk bacaan kali kedua dan ketiga dalam sidang Parlimen kali ini, perlu mengambil kira pandangan pelbagai pihak termasuk MCA sebagai parti komponen kerajaan walaupun ia tiada wakil dalam Kabinet. Terserah kepada Jemaah Menteri dan kerajaan hari ini, berlandaskan kepada nilai-nilai yang kita dukung selama ini, untuk memastikan apa jua rang undang-undang yang akan menjadi akta pada masa akan datang tidak memberi kesan kepada masyarakat, katanya. Wee juga berharap Ahmad Zahid dapat meyakinkan Perdana Menteri Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim untuk memberikan status pengecualian cukai kekal kepada Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) serta Yayasan Pendidikan UTAR (UTAREF) mengikut Seksyen 44(6) dan Seksyen 127(3A) Akta Cukai Pendapatan 1967. Beliau berkata meskipun Anwar, yang juga Menteri Kewangan, telah memberikan pengecualian cukai kepada UTAR dan membatalkan cukai serta denda RM83 juta yang dituntut oleh Lembaga Hasil Dalam Negeri namun isu pokoknya masih perlu diselesaikan. ... kita di pihak MCA dan UTAR akan berjumpa dengan Perdana Menteri untuk mencari penyelesaian mutlak, katanya. Pada Ahad lepas, Anwar berkata kelewatan kelulusan pengecualian cukai kepada UTAR adalah berikutan universiti itu masih berada di bawah Yayasan Tunku Abdul Rahman yang belum dipisahkan strukturnya antara urusan syarikat perniagaan komersial dan pendidikan.

to ensure that democracy in the country remains vibrant. Even in this hall, many have had their videos removed from social media, such as MCA secretary-general Datuk Chong Sin Woon. Many MCA youth leaders have also faced the same issue. The rights to free speech and freedom of the people must be preserved and defended. We must not allow differences in views to destroy the flourishing of democracy, he said. Also present were BN deputy chairman Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan, MCA deputy president Datuk Dr Mah Hang Soon and MIC deputy president Datuk Seri M Saravanan. Meanwhile, Wee said MCA would support any bill that serves the best interest of the country and is brought to Parliament for approval. However, he cautioned that the Mufti Bill (Federal Territories) 2024, set to be tabled for the second reading in the ongoing Dewan Rakyat session, must consider the views of all communities, including MCA, even though the party has no representation in the Cabinet. ...we must ensure that the perspectives of all ethnic groups are heard. This includes political parties and non-Muslim communities, such as the Chinese. MCA has recently made its stance clear, and we hope these concerns will be taken into account before the bill is tabled and passed. It is now up to the Cabinet and the government to uphold the values we have long cherished, ensuring that any bill that becomes law in the future does not harm our communities, he added. As such, Wee urged the government to thoroughly review any provisions in the bill before it is tabled in the Dewan Rakyat. On a separate issue, Wee appealed to Ahmad Zahid to persuade Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to grant permanent tax-exempt status to Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) and the UTAR Education Foundation (UTAREF) under sections 44(6) and 127(3A) of the Income Tax Act 1967. He said although Anwar, who is also Finance Minister, had previously granted a tax exemption to UTAR and waived RM83 million in taxes and penalties, the core issue remains unresolved. ...MCA and UTAR will meet with the prime minister to find a permanent solution once and for all, he said. Last Sunday, Anwar was reported to have announced the RM83 million tax exemption for UTAR, citing that the university needed time to separate its commercial business ventures from its educational operations.

itu, memanjangkan gesaan tersebut kepada pihak berkaitan bagi memastikan demokrasi di Malaysia kekal subur. "Hak bersuara dan kebebasan rakyat kita wajib dipelihara dan dipertahankan. Janganlah disebabkan perbezaan pandangan, hendak dimusnahkan kesuburan demokrasi,??? katanya. Turut hadir Timbalan Pengerusi BN, Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan, Timbalan Presiden MCA, Datuk Dr Mah Hang Soon dan Timbalan Presiden MIC, Datuk Seri M Saravanan. Ka Siong juga berkata, MCA akan menyokong apa jua rang undang-undang yang baik dan dibawa ke Parlimen untuk diluluskan. Beliau berkata Rang Undang-Undang Mufti (Wilayah Persekutuan) 2024, yang akan dibentang untuk bacaan kali kedua dan ketiga dalam sidang Parlimen kali ini, perlu mengambil kira pandangan pelbagai pihak termasuk MCA sebagai parti komponen kerajaan walaupun ia tiada wakil dalam Kabinet. "Terserah kepada Jemaah Menteri dan kerajaan hari ini, berlandaskan kepada nilai-nilai yang kita dukung selama ini, untuk memastikan apa jua rang undang-undang yang akan menjadi akta pada masa akan datang tidak memberi kesan kepada masyarakat,??? katanya. Ka Siong juga berharap Ahmad Zahid dapat meyakinkan Perdana Menteri Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim untuk memberikan status pengecualian cukai kekal kepada Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) serta Yayasan Pendidikan UTAR (UTAREF) mengikut Seksyen 44(6) dan Seksyen 127(3A) Akta Cukai Pendapatan 1967. Beliau berkata meskipun Anwar, yang juga Menteri Kewangan, telah memberikan pengecualian cukai kepada UTAR dan membatalkan cukai serta denda RM83 juta yang dituntut oleh Lembaga Hasil Dalam Negeri namun isu pokoknya masih perlu diselesaikan. "... kita di pihak MCA dan UTAR akan berjumpa dengan Perdana Menteri untuk mencari penyelesaian mutlak,??? katanya. Pada Ahad lepas, Anwar berkata kelewatan kelulusan pengecualian cukai kepada UTAR adalah berikutan universiti itu masih berada di bawah Yayasan Tunku Abdul Rahman yang belum dipisahkan strukturnya antara urusan syarikat perniagaan komersial dan pendidikan. - Bernama

dan jika kita mengenepikan permasalahan kita sesama sendiri, walaupun di negeri pembangkang, BN masih boleh menang dengan cemerlang kalau ini dapat kita pertahankan. Kalau kita mengetepikan perkara titik bengik, petty issues, kembali kepada landasan BN yang sebenar dengan memperkukuh semangat BN dan pada masa sama pemimpin utama parti komponen mengenepikan perbezaan pandangan, saya hampir pasti bahawa BN akan mendapat kerusi yang lebih di dalam PRU akan datang, katanya. Beliau berkata demikian dalam ucapan perasmian Perhimpunan Agung Tahunan MCA ke-71 di sini, hari ini. Turut hadir Presiden MCA Datuk Seri Wee Ka Siong, Timbalan Pengerusi BN Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan, Timbalan Presiden MCA Datuk Seri Mah Hang Soon dan Timbalan Presiden MIC Datuk Seri M Saravanan. Bagaimanapun, Ahmad Zahid berkata seperti parti lain, BN juga mempunyai permasalahan sendiri, namun gabungan itu perlu bijak menyembunyikan masalah yang timbul sesama mereka, serta berusaha menyelesaikannya di peringkat dalaman. ... kita harus menyantuni perbezaan pendapat kita di dalam bilik tidur kita, jangan pernah bawa masalah bilik tidur di depan halaman rumah kita ataupun kita membawa di luar pagar rumah kita. Apabila kenderaan lalu lalang dan orang ramai melihat kita membawa permasalahan itu, maka permasalahan itu akan jadi lebih besar. Oleh itu, menyantuni perbezaan pendapat (sesama) kita ini amat penting, katanya yang juga presiden UMNO. Sementara itu, Ahmad Zahid turut mengumumkan pelantikan Wee sebagai Penasihat Pelaburan Masyarakat Cina di bawah Timbalan Perdana Menteri, yang berperanan sebagai penasihat beliau khususnya dalam pelaburan melibatkan masyarakat tersebut di negara ini. Beliau berkata sebagai langkah awal, pelaburan RM5 bilion dalam industri halal semasa di China juga adalah hasil usaha beliau bersama presiden MCA itu. ... Ini memperlihatkan bahawa kerjasama ini adalah terjemahan yang terbaik yang bukan ada agenda tersendiri. Kita sentiasa berterus terang antara adik-beradik di dalam parti komponen, katanya.

baik dan jika kita mengenepikan permasalahan kita sesama sendiri, walaupun di negeri pembangkang, BN masih boleh menang dengan cemerlang kalau ini dapat kita pertahankan. "Kalau kita mengetepikan perkara titik bengik, petty issues, kembali kepada landasan BN yang sebenar dengan memperkukuh semangat BN dan pada masa sama pemimpin utama parti komponen mengenepikan perbezaan pandangan, saya hampir pasti bahawa BN akan mendapat kerusi yang lebih di dalam PRU akan datang,??? katanya. Beliau berkata demikian dalam ucapan perasmian Perhimpunan Agung Tahunan MCA ke-71 di sini, pada Ahad. Turut hadir Presiden MCA, Datuk Seri Wee Ka Siong; Timbalan Pengerusi BN, Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan; Timbalan Presiden MCA, Datuk Seri Mah Hang Soon dan Timbalan Presiden MIC, Datuk Seri M Saravanan. Bagaimanapun, Ahmad Zahid berkata, seperti parti lain, BN juga mempunyai permasalahan sendiri, namun gabungan itu perlu bijak menyembunyikan masalah yang timbul sesama mereka, serta berusaha menyelesaikannya di peringkat dalaman. "... kita harus menyantuni perbezaan pendapat kita di dalam ???bilik tidur??? kita, jangan pernah bawa masalah bilik tidur di depan halaman rumah kita ataupun kita membawa di luar pagar rumah kita. "Apabila kenderaan lalu lalang dan orang ramai melihat kita membawa permasalahan itu, maka permasalahan itu akan jadi lebih besar. Oleh itu, menyantuni perbezaan pendapat (sesama) kita ini amat penting,??? katanya yang juga presiden UMNO. Sementara itu, Ahmad Zahid turut mengumumkan pelantikan Ka Siong sebagai Penasihat Pelaburan Masyarakat Cina di bawah Timbalan Perdana Menteri, yang berperanan sebagai penasihat beliau khususnya dalam pelaburan melibatkan masyarakat tersebut di negara ini. Beliau berkata, sebagai langkah awal, pelaburan RM5 bilion dalam industri halal semasa di China juga adalah hasil usaha beliau bersama presiden MCA itu. "... Ini memperlihatkan bahawa kerjasama ini adalah terjemahan yang terbaik yang bukan ada agenda tersendiri. Kita sentiasa berterus terang antara adik-beradik di dalam parti komponen,??? katanya. - Bernama

Cricket fraternity, our players, and the Executive Committee, I extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, and the MADANI government for this invaluable support, he said in a statement. Malaysia is set to host the second edition of the International Cricket Councils (ICC) Under-19 womens T20 World Cup from Jan 18 to Feb 2 next year. Malaysia were drawn in Group A with giant cricketing nations India, Sri Lanka and the West Indies. Anwar announced that the government will continue to intensify the development of sports in the country with an allocation of over RM230 million through Budget 2025 yesterday.

prompted the victim to copy to clipboard a piece of PowerShell code that would fix the issues by running it in Windows Command Prompt. Victims would thus infect systems with various malware such as DarkGate, Matanbuchus, NetSupport, Amadey Loader, XMRig, a clipboard hijacker, and Lumma Stealer. In July, McAfee reported that the ClickFix campaigns were becoming mode frequent, especially in the United States and Japan. A new report from Sekoia, a SaaS cybersecurity provider, notes that ClickFix campaigns have evolved significantly and now use a Google Meet lure, phishing emails targeting transport and logistics firms, fake Facebook pages, and deceptive GitHub issues. According to the French cybersecurity company, some of the more recent campaigns are conducted by two threat groups, the Slavic Nation Empire (SNE) and Scamquerteo, considered to be sub-teams of the cryptocurrency scam gangs Marko Polo and CryptoLove. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

of McAlpins arrest on 19 August outside a Circle K convenience store in Phoenix, Arizona. Continue reading...

enough under Ten Hag at Old Trafford. Theyll miss Mazraoui during his time on the sidelines . Continue reading...

berlaku sebelum 2018 di mana rakan-rakan seperjuangan saya dalam MCA dan BN teruk dikecam dengan pelbagai tuduhan tidak berasas serta dipanah dengan fitnah bertalu-talu tanpa belas kasihan. ???Kini mereka (PH) yang dahulunya fitnah dan caci kami pula dah buat pusingan U, setuju pula dengan apa yang kami lakukan dulu. Maka adakah hari ini mereka sanggup memohon maaf secara terbuka dan ikhlas???? soalnya menerusi satu rakaman video yang dimuat naik di Facebook. Menerusi video terbabit, Ka Siong yang juga Ahli Parlimen Ayer Hitam membuat ulasannya mengenai podcast Yang Bakar Menteri antara Menteri Ekonomi, Rafizi Ramli dengan pengkritik Rafizi dikenali sebagai Lim Sian See atau nama sebenarnya Datuk Eric See-To yang disiarkan minggu lalu. Ka Siong mendakwa, jawapan yang diberikan dalam podcast memberi gambaran kerajaan PH membuat pusingan U dalam isu Lyns dengan dengan satu perkembangan terbaharu iaitu sisa-sisa buangan nadir bumi akan dihantar keluar dari Malaysia. ???Eh kejap, bukan ke dulu lain ceritanya? Dulu langsung tak boleh terima kewujudan kilang Lynas. Kata loji nuklearlah, ramai yang akan matilah, kena radiasilah...yang paling dahsyat siap nak bakar kilang Lynas lagi. ???Saya dah semak pada masa itu tidak ada pula saya nampak cadangan-cadangan daripada pemimpin politik sebelah sana yang menyatakan sokongan untuk kekalkan Lynas sekiranya sisa-sisa buangan nadir bumi dihantar ke luar Malaysia. ???Ada siapa-siapa pernah nampak, dengar atau terbaca kenyataan mereka sebelum 2018 lalu? Ada tak mereka kata okay kami sokong usaha BN rancakan ekonomi negara menerusi Lynas sekiranya sisa-sisa buangan nadir bumi dihantar ke luar dari Malaysia???? soalnya lagi. Menurutnya, kerajaan PH 1.0 telah melanjutkan lesen kepada Lynas pada 2019 dan memberikan syarat kepada Lynas supaya mengemukakan pelan perancangan pembinaan atau tapak pembuangan sisa kekal. Kata beliau, maksudnya kerajaan PH 1.0 telah membenarkan Lynas untuk terus beroperasi tanpa perlu menghantar sisa buangan ke luar Malaysia. ???Nampaknya hari ini mereka terpaksa menjilat semula ludah sendiri, menelan segala kata-kata cacian yang mereka lemparkan kepada BN dulu. ???Suka tak suka hari ini mereka terpaksa mengakui bahawa dulu mereka salah, BN betul. Saya tahu ia kebenaran yang pahit untuk ditelan oleh Rafizi dan rakan-rakan,??? dakwa beliau.

majoriti yang lebih besar diperoleh calon BN melalui keluarnya lebih ramai pengundi Cina yang kesemuanya berjumlah 22,447 orang di DUN Mahkota. ???Pengerusi DAP Johor, Liew Chin Tong silap jika beliau menganggap kesemua 49 peratus undi Cina itu datang daripada usaha DAP kerana BN juga mempunyai komponen daripada kaum Cina iaitu MCA yang ternyata lebih ikhlas daripada segi kesetiakawanan. ???Pengerusi Institut Strategik dan Analisis Dasar (INSAP), Datuk Dr Pamela Yong melalui kenyataan akhbar pada 28 September menyatakan kira-kira 4,000 ahli MCA di Mahkota dan melalui agen ???Get Out The Voters??? (GOTV) mereka. ???MCA telah berjaya mengeluarkan hampir 70 peratus daripada jumlah ahli mereka yang jika dikira secara mudah ialah seramai 2,900 orang. Ini adalah satu jumlah yang signifikan yang telah disumbangkan oleh MCA,??? katanya dalam satu kenyataan pada Selasa. Tambah beliau, ini bermakna undi Cina yang diperolehi calon BN, Syed Hussien Syed Abdullah tidak boleh diberikan kredit hanya semata-mata kepada DAP tetapi juga perlu diberikan kepada MCA. Malah katanya, DAP sebenarnya tetap gagal dalam mengurus dan membawa pengundi Cina yang pasti majoritinya sewaktu Pilihan Raya Negeri 2022 dahulu mengundi Pakatan Harapan (PH) seramai 11,445 untuk keluar mengundi BN sebagaimana yang sepatutnya. ???Di manakah kegagalan DAP dalam menguruskan pengundi Cina mereka berbanding dengan rakan Cina BN iaitu MCA? DAP perlu belajar bagaimana penggabungan politik yang sebenar boleh menjadi satu perkara yang penting dalam menentukan perubahan landskap politik negara. ???Contohnya sewaktu kemenangan BN iaitu Datuk Seri Wee Jack Seng dari MCA pada PRK di Tanjung Piai dahulu. Daripada majoriti PH 524 undi kepada BN sebanyak 15,086 undi. Pada masa itu semua parti utama seperti BN dan Pas, bergabung dengan seikhlasnya untuk melawan PH yang terdiri daripada Bersatu, PKR, Dap dan Amanah yang merupakan ???the government of the day???. ???PRK DUN Mahkota ini adalah merupakan ???acid test??? sebenar kepada tahap keikhlasan, ketulusan dan kejituan politik antara parti-parti besar di dalam Kerajaan Perpaduan,??? jelasnya. Ahmad Masrizal menambah, ujian dalam PRK DUN Mahkota kali ini sebenarnya adalah atas perspektif ketulenan dan keikhlasan rumah Kerajaan Perpaduan yang berusia 23 bulan ini.

https://www.facebook.com/wksbmenglish dan Chinese: https://www.facebook.com/weekasiong," katanya. Media sebelum ini melaporkan, Timbalan Perdana Menteri, Datuk Seri Fadillah Yusof turut berdepan dengan isu akaun palsu menggunakan namanya. Menteri Kesihatan, Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad juga pernah berdepan dengan isu sama.

supaya ia diedarkan kepada umum. Mufti Pahang Prof Datuk Dr Asmadi Mohamed Naim berkata ia berdasarkan dua kepercayaan yang didakwa berlaku dalam kumpulan berkenaan iaitu meneruskan kepercayaan dan amalan dalam Aurad Muhammadiah dibawa oleh al-Arqam yang telah diwartakan sesat dan menyeleweng pada 1994. Beliau berkata pengikut GISBH juga mempercayai bahawa pengasas al-Arqam Ashaari Muhammad yang meninggal dunia pada 2010 tidak mati sebaliknya ghaib. Beliau berkata jawatankuasa itu juga memutuskan sistem ekonomi yang dibangunkan pengikut GISBH tidak diiktiraf sebagai ekonomi Islam dan tidak menepati syarak. Selain itu, Jawatankuasa Muzakarah Majlis Kebangsaan bagi Hal Ehwal Agama Islam Malaysia (Jawatankuasa Fatwa MKI) sudah membuat keputusan berkaitan pandangan hukum terhadap doktrin fahaman GISBH dalam mesyuarat pada 23 dan 24 Sept lepas. Menteri di Jabatan Perdana Menteri (Hal Ehwal Agama) Datuk Dr Mohd Naim Mokhtar berkata pandangan hukum berkenaan akan dibawa ke Majlis Raja-raja yang akan bersidang pada 23 dan 24 Okt ini bagi mendapatkan perkenan. Mohd Naim berkata setelah Majlis Raja-Raja memberikan perkenan kepada pandangan hukum berkenaan, negeri-negeri akan membawa kepada jawatankuasa fatwa negeri yang dipengerusikan oleh mufti masing-masing. Di SELANGOR, Pengarah JAIS Datuk Mohd Shahzihan Ahmad berkata sebanyak 108 individu dikaitkan dengan GISBH yang sebelum ini ditahan Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (JAIS) mungkin perlu menjalani proses pemulihan akidah sebagai sebahagian daripada hukuman. Beliau berkata tindakan terbabit selaras dengan keputusan Jawatankuasa Fatwa Negeri Selangor yang memutuskan GISBH serta rangkaiannya menyeleweng daripada ajaran Islam sebenar. Di SINGAPURA, Persatuan Mualaf Singapura (MCAS) menafikan sebarang kaitan dengan GISBH atau pergerakan Al-Arqam susulan terdapat beberapa hantaran media sosial yang mengaitkan mereka dengan pergerakan terbabit. Presidennya Muhammad Imran Kuna berkata MCAS yang juga dikenali sebagai Darul Arqam Singapura berkata pihaknya tidak teragak-agak untuk mengambil tindakan sewajarnya termasuk tindakan undang-undang. Sementara itu di KEDAH, Menteri Dalam Negeri Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail berkata siasatan polis terhadap kes GISBH dijalankan secara komprehensif dari pelbagai sudut peruntukan undang-undang, menyebabkan jumlah tangkapan individu yang dikaitkan dengan organisasi tersebut berubah mengikut keperluan siasatan. Saifuddin Nasution berkata pada peringkat awal siasatan, hanya empat peruntukan undang-undang melibatkan agensi di bawah Kementerian Dalam Negeri digunakan, namun kini siasatan sudah bertambah sehingga 10 peruntukan undang-undang di bawah pelbagai agensi kementerian itu. Beliau berkata antara undang-undang yang diguna pakai untuk siasatan termasuk Kanun Keseksaan, Akta Kanak-Kanak 2001, Akta Kesalahan Seksual Kanak-Kanak 2017, Akta Pertubuhan 1966, Akta Antipemerdagangan Orang dan Antipenyeludupan Migran 2007 serta Akta Pendaftaran Kelahiran dan Kematian 1957. Pada awal September lepas, Polis Diraja Malaysia melancarkan Op Global dan menyerbu rumah amal di seluruh Semenanjung Malaysia yang dikaitkan dengan GISBH kerana disyaki terlibat dalam kegiatan eksploitasi kanak-kanak serta agama. Serbuan itu menyaksikan sejumlah 572 mangsa berjaya diselamatkan dan membawa kepada penahanan 359 pengikut GISBH termasuk pihak pengurusan tertinggi.

podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News ! Subscribe! iTunes Spotify Pocket Casts Stitcher Google Podcasts Topics The new Windows 11 update goes all in on Copilot integration 1:25 Amazon announces Fire HD 8 tablet line along with a few (pretty boring) AI features 28:28 Tech debt led to Sonos disastrous app relaunch, will they be able to win users back? 37:48 Google is making Gmail summaries more useful and adding a happening soon tab to your inbox 41:11 Harvard students hack together facial recognition for Metas smart glasses that instantly doxes strangers 44:00 Reddit introduces a policy change that will make site wide protests harder 46:58 Around Engadget: Dan Coopers reMarkable Paper Pro review 51:31 Working on 55:53 Pop culture picks 57:08 Livestream Credits Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low Producer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien Transcript Devindra: What's up, everybody, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar. Cherlynn: I'm Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low. Devindra: This week it's all about Microsoft. I guess Techtober has officially begun, Cherlynn, even though it feels like We've been doing Techtober since August, thanks to Samsung and Google and everybody. yes. Cherlynn: Yeah, it Devindra: just never, it never freaking ends. But yeah the wave of tech news, which we used to call Techtober, which is now just TechFall, I guess, the fall of our lives and our productivity. Yeah. That is all happening. Microsoft announced that the Windows 11 2024 update is going out this week. But I honestly think Microsoft is way more interested in the AI capabilities that it's bringing to CoPilot and also CoPilot Plus systems. And I think that's kind of funny. I think Cherlynn, you and I as Windows nerds and PC geeks I think it's something worth exploring because more so than even last year, this feels like a major shift for Microsoft. So that's our first topic. We'll talk about a couple other things too, including HoloLens [00:01:00] 2 and basically the entire HoloLens family dying. As always, folks, if you're enjoying the show, subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, leave us a review on iTunes. That's always appreciated. Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. com and join us Thursday mornings, typically around 10 45 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel for our live stream. If we have gadgets, we'll do you know, sometimes we'll show them off. We'll do Q and A's. It's a fun time. Join us. Sherilyn, I'm sorry that I basically threw these giant stories at you ahead of ahead of the. Big news announcement this week. A lot of big stuff happening from Microsoft Windows 11 2024 update, but also new features coming to co pilot plus AI PCs including more information about privacy and recall new features for the co pilot AI assistant. How did you notice something odd? About these stories as I sent them to you, Cherlynn. Cherlynn: Beyond it seemed like Microsoft might have given you the information incredibly close to the deadline. Well, there's Devindra: that there's at least we got a heads up, but something that I don't know if you've noticed because I think you had [00:02:00]access to these docs too The news was essentially, Hey, this update is coming. Everybody get ready for it. We love windows. We love windows updates. And then my entire, the entire document was like, Oh, by the way, copilot plus AI PCs, that's all we care about. So I got this document that was just like all new features. And then one little paragraph at the end, Oh, by the way, when this 11 update, you get HDR backgrounds, you get all this stuff, like literally 10 sentences. But the entire like presentation for Microsoft is we love Copilot plus AI PC systems. Did that feel weird to you? Cherlynn: I mean, I know that there was this the main post that you filed was like at the end where you said, Oh, by the way, there are these Windows 11 updates as well coming. And I think it didn't feel weird to me, I guess, because I was like, yeah, of course they're all in on Copilot and everything is about AI. And maybe that's why, maybe I'm so over You're just so used to it. Right, the incremental cadence of every platform update being like little things, even though you know, before 10, we had a big significant jump to 10, and then 10 to 11 just felt kind of [00:03:00]minor because it was built for like better arm based improved performance, and then Now AI seems to be the mad rush here. So I agree with you. It is weird, but it took you pointing it out for me to realize or feel it. You know? Devindra: I mean, I totally agree with you. Like typically when we talk about windows updates, especially the annual cadences, like they're not huge things. And even windows 11 itself felt like a weird half step update where the most compelling thing was like, Hey, we put the task bar in the middle of your screen. Rather than the side of your, that was the only thing people were talking about. I think, yeah, Microsoft is aware that the thing that could be more exciting now to people is Copilot Plus, first of all, and I think that's also key. I think more so than the Copilot AI Assistant, which is going to be in, you know, pretty much most Windows 11 machines, the Copilot Plus stuff, that is for the newer systems basically released this year. So stuff like with the new snap track and processors, go ahead. Cherlynn: Yeah no, I mean, the thing you're pointing out is exactly the thing that, got me questioning while I was reading your pieces because it wasn't about the windows 11 updates. It was more [00:04:00] you clearly have a distinction between co pilot and co pilot plus, and I was like where? And then I had to like, I sussed it out for myself eventually, but I was like, Oh, so there is co pilot versus co pilot plus, and there's a bit of a difference here, right? There's, I mean, there's a total, Devindra: yeah. So when I covered, I went to Microsoft's campus in May, right. Head of WWDC and everything. That's when they announced the co pilot plus. PC initiative. And that was these custom, not custom, but these like systems that had a certain level of quality, right? So they launched with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X elite and X pro chips. But basically there was a minimum standard of 16 gigabytes of RAM, right? 40 tops NPU. So really powerful NPU for AI work. So it could do a lot of stuff locally rather than sending AI stuff to the cloud. You know, decent amount of hard drive space too. But that's the thing. It's like a certain level of computing quality. And that's the sort of thing Microsoft had to basically launch as an initiative with Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, everybody. Whereas when Apple did their big push for ARM [00:05:00] based and new chips and everything, they could just be like, well, here's our new thing. We did it all. We did all the work and developers just have to catch up with us. So the copilot plus features are things like recall, but also new things that they talked about. There's something called click to do, which if you hold down the windows button and right click, there will be contextual things you could be doing within that dropdown menu. So if you're in the photos app, I believe you can like, you can have it like just blur the background. Just remove this object if you click on an object. So that's kind of useful. We're kind of getting a sense of what Microsoft wants to do with these new NPU powered features in the photos app, you can also super resolution photos, which is something you could do in Adobe stuff and Lightroom and other apps Pixelmator does that on the Mac too, but. That's kind of cool. If you have a Lowr resolution photo and the AI basically interpolates a lot of stuff in that image to give you a bigger file that also looks pretty sharp. I've used that in Pixelmator. It's pretty good. Yeah, just a couple improvements down the way the recall stuff is interesting [00:06:00] too, because Microsoft also basically held a call last week to be like Hey, Recall privacy. This is actually very important to us. And we're going to be very clear about this. And this follows the whole debacle after the recall launch where the recall announcement where everybody was like, there are gaping security holes here. Security researchers found things like where if you were an administrator, or actually, no, if you were able to hack into a computer, even without admin access, you could get access to the recall database, which is the screenshot of everything it's recording that you're doing on your system. So Microsoft had to. Delay that feature by several months. Didn't even release it to testers to really lock that down. So the whole it sounds better now. It sounds like they're encrypting the entire database. Recall itself is running in what they're calling. Let me see here. A VBS enclave. So not even just like an encrypted thing, but like a virtual package of like where the program is too. So hackers can't like directly access it. Windows Hello biometrics is necessary by default. And [00:07:00]also, Oh, the feature is not turned on by default. You have to turn it on. And these all came from complaints from everybody. I also asked Microsoft specifically, so what did you learn from this whole mistake, like this whole situation, which is they announced recall and they were like, this is one of the coolest things you can ever do. You can remember anything you've ever done in your computer. Was completely mired in controversy. So, I talked with, or I sent a question to Pavan Devaluri, which is the head of windows. He's the head of windows. He knows we had an interview with him on this podcast months ago. He knows our complaints and our criticisms of surface and windows and everything. And he basically said that they realize now that users want to have. Extra confidence with anything involving like their sensitive data, or especially AI things that are recording all their data. And also AI involves a rethinking of how Microsoft and other companies think about security on a Windows system, right? Typically, if you have an administrator account on a Windows computer, The thinking is you could just go in and do anything, right? You could [00:08:00] do anything on any other accounts. You are an administrator of that PC. You have really like basically broad privileges, but now if you're using these AI features, which are sucking in a lot of data and a lot more data than windows PCs used to, maybe there's a good. excuse for not giving the administrator full access to that, you know, to whatever that database is. So there's just things that they're thinking of that they didn't think of before. And that's a shame, but they're saying like that basically this whole fiasco they're taking into consideration. I don't quite know if I trust them yet, but how do you feel about their turnaround I Cherlynn: think it took quite long. And I re I realize it's more than just allow people to opt in. There's the holes they had patched the access to admin versus like user. Encrypting everything is an encryption. It still felt like it took a little long, but I mean, It just goes to show how little Microsoft had any forethought, right, about this sort of [00:09:00] privacy concern. That it took public backlash to be like, Ah, crap. And that they had to, it felt like a ground up attempt to fix all these issues. And it doesn't bode well for me for any of their future sort of features based around your information. Like I think they are, I tend to think of Microsoft as the most engineer brain of the top three, like AI companies out there. They're very engineer brain. They're very like, Oh yeah, this is convenient. Oh, it works. Let's ship it. They don't think about what about all these other things? What about people who are using your product that are not engineer brain that are going to break it in some consumer way, right? So I think it took a while, but I'm glad they're at least considering, and I hope it's a lesson, to be considering these things ahead of time, you know? Devindra: Yeah, most definitely. They're also like, let me see here. I like the security things. Revamped copilot apps are getting some interesting features too. I think this is all kind of interconnected. So they basically announced this whole new [00:10:00] strategy called copilot labs, where they're going to talk about where they're going to let people play with new features ahead of time. Let me see here. Copilot vision is one of those, and this is a weird thing. This is like literally the thing we're worried about. That's. It's going to basically see everything you're doing in your web browser showing and be able to basically give you tips on it. It's basically involving constant eyes on what you're seeing. That's a lab feature. And also think deeper. Which is the ability to just give it a task and have it process a little longer to maybe get you some more helpful advice. These are all Copilot Labs features, these are like extra experimental if you think about the old Google Labs stuff. And right now only people paying for Copilot Pro subscriptions, so those are the 20 a month thing. Only those folks can test it for now. I think at the very least, Microsoft is being very careful about how it's rolling this stuff out. It is showing it to people, but also a very small audience and taking that feedback before it rolls out broadly. And the thing about recall, they were just like, Hey, here it is. Look, everybody, this is so [00:11:00]cool. We're capturing everything you're doing on your computer. And they were more excited about it than I think they realized. P other people would be because they didn't realize how little people trusted Microsoft, right? Cherlynn: Yeah, I think the conundrum of having to pay for access to some of these extra features ahead of time is Both like a joy and a risk that you're taking and I guess we talked about this early adopter mindset a lot on the podcast which is Yeah. You pay a premium to get to access things like prototypes, right? And these features in the labs are basically prototypes, but then you're also risking exposing yourself to a lot of potential, like, vulnerabilities. I guess. I don't think the word is exploits. I don't think the word is like bad. Like it's not bad. It's just you have to be aware. The vulnerabilities is Devindra: the world. Yeah. Is the word. Cherlynn: Yeah. And, you know, I guess, cool, pay for that but at the same time, these are people who are paying there for early adopters, probably already much more on top of their security and knowing the risks they take. It's just like Microsoft selling it to people [00:12:00] who are paying, meaning they're selling it to people who are fans, who are less likely to question is, you know, curious, in my opinion. Devindra: I think it makes sense just being careful and also not too long after the show when we both went to Apple's campus and they announced Apple intelligence and it seemed like even Apple intelligence was launched with, The awareness of everything that went wrong with recall, right? Like even Apple and other companies are kind of learning from all this. It's a learning experience for everybody, but the people going first usually take the first hit. So in this case, it was Microsoft. It's often open AI. We saw Google bar, you know, stumble right out of the gate too. And Apple at least is able to sit back and just watch and see how it can make things more useful. Speaking of So this is the CoPilot app itself. CoPilot on the web, CoPilot's mobile app. There are some new features coming there too. CoPilot voice, which gives it a more personable assistant like voice. So you can actually have a back and forth conversation with it. That's kind of cool. I think that's, that just makes it feel more more [00:13:00] useful to a lot of people. Copilot Vision, we talked about, they're going to do this thing called Copilot Daily, which that voice will also give you like a daily rundown of news and also things you may have scheduled or on your calendar. They want you to think of Copilot as like this thing that you can basically always turn to. It feels like Copilot is your new computing interface in a way. And that's also probably why they're a little more excited about it rather than A Windows update, even though the Windows update is pretty big according to Microsoft, it is a full OS reconstruction. So it is not just like a minor step up. It is like a full re installation and a full re architecture of Windows. Maybe following along the lines of what they did for the ARM stuff, back around the Copilot Plus launch, that version of Windows that went out with the ARM systems is very different. They had to rebuild Windows a lot. To deal with arms. So I feel like we're going to see more of that basically on the Intel and AMD side. Any questions for one? This is, I see the chat is talking about this too. [00:14:00]This is just kind of wild to me. Cause last year we went to the Microsoft event and ended up being a surprise event about AI and we were all very confused. How do you feel about like their standing now around AI and windows and everything? Cherlynn: Yeah, I think you're pointing to the fact that Simon B. in the chat asked who is leading in AI, Windows OpenAI or Google for the consumers. And I mean, the rest of this episode. Windows is OpenAI Devindra: at this point. Cherlynn: Yes. The rest of this episode I think talks sort of about that, right? We're getting to some Amazon news later in this episode that was announced this week as well. But what we're seeing, and to your point, Devindra, compared to this time last year or like last year in April or February, I forget. It was being AI. It was like the first time we had to contend with like consumer facing versions of these features. But now here we are a year and a half after the fact, and every company has pushed out their own version of writing tools, summaries, basically, Chad GPT. And then we've got other companies doing their own implementations, you know, co pilot, we've got Google stuffing AI [00:15:00] into literally anything it makes. We've got Apple with the redesigned Siri, which is still in classic Apple style, not actually here yet, right? Apple intelligence, slow to the party. And Amazon will see in a bit, gave us kind of, a teaser at what AI on it's going to look like. And it's much more of the same, but here's what you said got me to thinking, right? You say that it's a, their new, basically the new interaction mode is the new interface, right? Well, how people are going to interface. I think I saw this trend when Tik Tok started becoming more of a thing, like short form videos started becoming more of a thing and I was like skeptical of it ever really taking off. And yet you see. That generations for example, that, that story from the verge a while ago, where kids don't even use directories anymore, they just search in their file, explore for the file they're looking for. I was like, Oh crap, I guess. Yeah. You don't need to organize how Devindra: files work. Yeah, Cherlynn: I did. And I thought that was the way and these things are changing. I think we're at. The start of [00:16:00]maybe gen alpha, whenever they get their first laptop, whenever they start using these Google services are going to be so used to AI that they'll use it in a way that we never thought, you know, and I, it's disappointing to me because I think it's even more critical thinking or kind of offloading to a computer as opposed to having our own brain process. But I could also see human beings finding new, unique, creative ways to interact with AI. So I don't know, it's, Ooh it's Devindra: it's Cherlynn: weird, you know? Devindra: It is weird. I am, I'm still unsold on the idea of the AI stuff taking over everything. Like I think at the end of last year, I wrote like Microsoft is really all in on copilot AI, but doesn't really have a vision for what it is going to be. Now we're kind of seeing more of that, but also at the same time, like the basic copilot search is not super useful to me, I would rather search the internet and get actual results from, and go look at those results rather than have this. Machine feed information back to me and me not under, like it playing a game of telephone and us [00:17:00]not knowing if that information is actually accurate. And then I have to go back and check that. Meanwhile, the actual Bing search is still as useless as ever. Which is funny to me I use edge a lot because I use different browsers for work and personal stuff, so I sometimes stumble into Bing search and it's still man, I wrote, I literally know I wrote this article about this thing. It is at Engadget. com. And Bing just doesn't know it exists. I can put almost the full title of the whole thing there and Bing can't find it. And yeah, Cherlynn: Not to okay. So disclosure, our parent company is Yahoo, which is owned by Apollo. Right. And even on yahoo. com come on. Yeah. Yahoo. No I've used Yahoo because I was forced to because of my corporate machines to hold to Yahoo as a search engine. Sadly. Even Yahoo is I'll be like Engadget iPhone review or something. And the first result is not. Engadget, Yahoo, iPhone review, it's something else. And I'm like, what? Thankfully, because we know the people at Yahoo, we can be like, what is going on? This [00:18:00]search is bonked. And then they're like, oh, let's fix it. So they'll, they can fix it. To your point though, like Bing AI, Bing search is pretty useless still. I think we're going to get to this later in the episode too. But I think Google search, Is also getting worse and worse. I've seen this online for a very long time, right? Yeah. With the ads placements up top, with the shopping modules up top, with the top stories and the discover boxes up top, it used to be helpful. Now it's just getting the actual results further down the page, the things that I actually want to do. I don't care what Google wants to put in front of my eyes. I want to go and look into the results myself, maybe because I was born in the eighties, but Devindra: This is why I like, I'm not so chilling on this AI driven future because Google is forcing it at us. Microsoft is the Google search right now. You will see generative AI stuff at the top, usually then sponsored topics and other ads and stuff, maybe Google shopping. And then towards the bottom, you get to the results you want. So all these things are making our. Computing experience is worse. And I wonder like there it's high time [00:19:00]for some sort of user revolt on this stuff. Like we looked at one look at recall and we were like no, thank you. Not like this. And Microsoft had to scramble back into its cave and fix it. Society took one look at Google glass and was like, no, thank you. That's not going to fly right now. We are just not ready for this, but also there are so many problems with this tech. I do think we're going to get see a lot more pushback now, personally, Cherlynn: I will say to be contrary. And I will point out that in our chat, Lee Woods says they use Gemini advanced several times a day just to summarize articles. You're hoping that they figure out a way to integrate Gemini into the Chrome browser. Look, I think summarize is could be one of the easiest, like the best things that I can do if it's accurate and reliable. And I think For a lot of people who've been trying out the Apple intelligence stuff on betas, they found notification summaries to be quite accurate and super helpful. Yeah. There are tools that are going to be helpful. We're just going to figure out and weed out, you know, the bad from the good. Yeah. Devindra: Yeah. I mean, it's all about how we use this information. [00:20:00]Yeah, notifications. You know, what sucks right now in modern life and modern computing life is notifications. Too many notifications solve that problem for me. Thank you. Less of a problem. Is finding stuff on the internet, but also making it harder for me to find stuff on the internet because you want to sell me this service that you, Oh, I'm so glad you love Gemini Google. That's cool. Nice. Good for you, Google. I would just like to use Google. I would just like to use Google search. So yes. There is a point where it's getting in our way and these companies care more about it than we do. And then I think there are companies that are being, trying to be a little more thoughtful. Apple is doing some of that. Microsoft is getting there with some of the Copilot plus AI features, but we shall see. I don't want to sound like an old man shouting at the clouds, but sometimes when things are dumb and things are stupid, I think you have to be like, the emperor has no clothes here. You know, last year at that event, Trillian, I distinctly remember talking to Microsoft executives and being like, how can you have this thing, which you know, is not always accurate, is not [00:21:00] always correct. How can it be the basis of all these new interactions that are going to be a big part of windows and they're just like, this is a learning experience. I think people will understand if we make mistakes, that's not. It's not how computers should work, folks. Like I don't, you don't want to calculate or to have a learning experience as you're trying to, you don't calculate a critical figure for you. You want me to just do the specific task. And even Microsoft was unaware of that. We shall see how all this goes kind of related to this. We also saw the news that Microsoft is killing HoloLens too. And there's no plans for a followup device. It's going to be using I think I heard. That they may be going to Anduril's headsets. Like they're going to be doing software for that for military uses or something, but essentially HoloLens is dead, which is funny to see after literally last week, Facebook was just like, this is the future of augmented reality computing. Here are Orion glasses. [00:22:00]We saw Snaps glasses. We saw Vision Pro last year. It seems like finally this category is heating up and Microsoft's response is okay, no, thank you. No, once there's Cherlynn: competition, we're out. Sorry. Devindra: Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help. Remember the HoloLens guy, Alex Kipman, I believe was booted out of Microsoft for being kind of a dirt bag. Just like we, he was like a weird sexist horny guy who really liked his AR. Glasses. So that was the story going around. He just did not make that team a really good environment. So if you lose the guy who's like leading that technology, that's one thing, but also if you have Facebook, if you have meta, who's willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to really get ahead and Apple, who's clearly thought harder about vision pro than I think Microsoft has about HoloLens when it comes to making a consumer product. It just seems like Microsoft was here early, but it can't compete. This is such a pocket PC situation for Microsoft. They had some Hardaware, they had some ideas. This is a web TV moment, but. Ultimately, they just [00:23:00] couldn't make it work and that's a shame. I liked HoloLens too. Like they, if they were willing to, I think there is space for Microsoft to play here. I don't know. Did you ever try a HoloLens too? Or do you Cherlynn: have feelings Devindra: around this? I, Cherlynn: I can't remember if the one I tried was an old one or the two, the second, I believe it was the second gen and it was like an event in Times Square. It was one of those art events and they were really trying to steal it. So I'm going to be talking about how you can sell the potential of HoloLens outside of industrial and workplaces. I mean, I remember when the first few demos of HoloLens were just so interesting, where you could use these hand gestures, you could like, collaborate with teammates on this virtual diagram or whatever. And I got to say, like in the headset wars, right? I mean, everyone made their own. There was the Mirage, the Quest. I mean, the Quest obviously with Meta having bought them became kind of the front runner right now, in my opinion, for more consumer friendly devices but HoloLens did stick around for a while there as something that people used in like factories or like more industrial places and commercial uses, and it [00:24:00] definitely had. Felt to me for a while that Microsoft won in that category, even if it was very niche. And like you said, the defense category is somewhere where they can probably make a lot of money out of, but I, it's sad to see that just as it's getting, you know, to a point where the race seems to be properly heating up that like Microsoft's no, we're good. Thanks. Devindra: No, thank you. Yeah, we're it's a little, it seems like you guys are far ahead of us right now. So we're just tapping out. I did a demo. If you go back and read about I think it was called Microsoft mesh, which was their like virtual meeting software. And they sent me a HoloLens too. And I sat here in my office and I had a group Call with Microsoft executives and like 10 other journalists. And it felt like they were all just, we were all just sitting near each other, even though we were all at our own homes. It was like 2021 maybe. So pandemic was still like keeping people away from each other. And that's, it felt good. It felt like it worked. It wasn't super clunky, but the Hardaware was just too expensive and I [00:25:00]don't think they wanted to do the work to like really make that cheaper. They also had the whole like, you know, Windows mixed reality stuff for them to try to get into VR, but that felt like a little too late. Because Oculus was doing stuff before HTC Vive was doing stuff before. So Microsoft was too late to VR, too early for AR. And now everybody else is just like trekking ahead for maybe in 10 years, we'll get like the true AR glasses that everybody's dreaming of. And honestly, I also feel like we as a society are not ready for those either. But yeah, just kind of, kind of sad to see. So RIP HoloLens. Maybe the, They look so cool is the thing. I kind of do want one when they're like 50 bucks being thrown out in a couple of years, I would love a HoloLens just to put on my shelf, just like I have a Microsoft Kin. I have both Microsoft Kin phones in a drawer somewhere. Cherlynn: I continue to hold on to Engadget's Google glass. So I understand Devindra: the aliens are going to find our drawers full of like old tech and be like, [00:26:00] well, no other humans have these things. Why do these people like, what is the story here? What happened here? Anyway. Yeah. A shame for HoloLens, but yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Cherlynn: Maybe they'll come up with co pilot glass. You know what I mean? Devindra: They're going to do, they're going to work on integrations for everybody else. So that's the thing. Microsoft rather than. Being the platform being the Hardaware. They're gonna try to work with everybody else's stuff That's why we're seeing Xbox and quests and everything right now. So yeah, just a shame to see and Let us know what you folks think I mean I feel like maybe just because I'm a 90s PC kid who grew up on Windows like I have an affinity for old Windows I think about the way it works a lot If you have thoughts about Microsoft's new trajectory Drop us an email at podcastsandgadget. com. All right, let's move on to some other news. We got some stuff from Amazon and, oh boy, [00:27:00] is this, Sherilyn, we make fun of Amazon for being really boring when it comes to Hardaware, except for like their crazy random stuff, this is a nothing burger of a news hit. We got a new Fire HD 8 tablet, everybody. It's slightly faster. It has a better camera. It's still a fire HD eight. I guess the crazy thing is it is available for 55 on sale. If you go for the ads and everything. So that's not, that's pretty good for a tablet with just free to sit down and watch stuff and it's faster than before. So there's that, but also like they want to do AI stuff with it. Sure. Okay. Of course. Everybody wants to do AI summaries and whatnot. Is there anything special about these tablets, Rowan? Cherlynn: So to be clear, Amazon announced the Fire HD 8 and two variants, the HD 8 for kids and I think like Pro is the other version. Anyway Alongside the launch of the Fire HD 8, it also announced some AI features are coming with the HD 8, but we'll also be rolling out to compatible Kindle tablets that already have been in the market for a very long time. So [00:28:00] I was most intrigued by that. I want to do clarify that the HD 8 normally will retail at 99. 99, so 100. And right now it's on sale up until the end of Prime Day, which is from today. I, I don't know if you've opened your Amazon app, you'll see the big ad October 8th, October 9th, Prime Day. Yay. I guess we needed another one. And up until then, the HD eight will cost, I think closer to 50, I forget if it's 55, but like somewhere in that ballpark. Anyway, what did jump out at me when I saw the press release was A, this is not the Amazon Hardaware event we've been waiting to happen in October, right? This is just a drop ahead of Prime Day. And B, the AI tools. So, I was looking at it, I was like, first thing that came to my mind, I was like, Have we heard of AI? Amazon's AI features like this because it was like writing summer. It was summaries, writing tools and that sort of stuff. Yeah. I was like, Oh, this might be our first look at Amazon's own AI for devices. Right. We've heard about some of their chat [00:29:00] bots. We've heard about, you know, it's improvements coming to its voice based assistant, which I will not say the name of right now, but like this for devices is basically rehashing what we've seen before, except for with an Amazon spin. So the only thing that stood out at. To me was that you can get the AI to generate new wallpapers for the tablet, which cool. I guess the Alcatel idol four could do that. You know, it's just so many Android's material. You to quote a more recent example. So nothing super groundbreaking. But the fact that it's going to be available on a cheaper device, the fact that it's coming to a tablet. Just to recap, like last week Samsung had the its FE event where it said it was bringing Galaxy AI to all, right? Samsung hammered home the point that with its new Galaxy Tab S10 series, that now you've got Galaxy AI on a phone, a tablet, and a watch. It's, you know, Samsung. It's, quote, bringing its AI to all, I guess, form [00:30:00]factors. And Tab S10 starts at, I want to say, 650, maybe 700. So it's, yes, it's coming to a different form factor, but it's not necessarily super accessible. And so now, if you want to get a cheap little tablet for your kids for 50, you can. can get one that has AI, or if your existing fire tablet, I have a list of what's compatible. If you want to upgrade that software, you can also get access to Amazon's AI tools, which are basically like every other chat GPT clone we've seen in the last year and a half. And that just brings me back to the point we were making earlier in this episode that it's becoming more prevalent. We don't know how people are going to use it, but now that more people are going to be able to use it and kids. Ostensibly using a lot of fire HD tablets. We got it. We're gonna start seeing people Mass adopt these I guess I don't know. That's where I'm at with. Yeah. Devindra: Yeah I mean, it's compelling because these are such cheap tablets. I don't know about like base model You're giving up a [00:31:00] lot by staring at those Amazon ads folks, but it's hard to deny The usefulness of a 55, eight inch tablet. The kids stuff is cool because they keep saying first of all, there's ad free content, their parental controls. Amazon says that they are going to, they will still replace those tablets if they break, which is like the number one nightmare for a parent. It's that. Tablets are just screens, like giant screens with glass, and they will be destroyed by your kids. The kids version of the E Fire HD puts them in a nice protective case. They have this guarantee from Amazon, so you feel a little better about it. I still have not done this for my kids. Like we, I basically buy iPads on sale. I buy old iPads on sale and that's really what we've used as a family. So my son is using an iPad from like 2017 with a cracked screen, but that's what he uses, like in the car, if he needs to watch a video or something. My daughter has a 10 inch, one of the more recent 10 inch iPads. But we, she wants to play Minecraft. She wants to play like a games from Apple arcade. And you can't, you are very limited [00:32:00] in what you get in a Fire tablet. These are sLowr machines. They have a limited library of games. They can't access all the apps that Android tablets can too, because of the Google stuff is not included. So just be aware of what you're losing with a cheap tablet. That's all. Cherlynn: Yeah. And that's why they're good for, I guess, kids, but to Dpro9's point in the chat, this is e waste right out the gate. Yeah, Devindra: kind of, kind of. No, you're Cherlynn: not wrong. I don't, I can't argue. Devindra: It's a digital catalog. For buying stuff on Amazon, also for watching stuff on Amazon prime. That's really what they want you to be doing. And then, oh, by the way, it can also do Netflix. It can also do these other things, but they just, they care about their own stuff. I Cherlynn: see. I see the appeal of it being like a cheaper Kindle with a not great screen. And I can only imagine what a summary AI tool on a Kindle book might do. Like it's not, I think, going to work with Kindle titles, but one day, Final Evolution, don't read books. Just read these AI summaries. I mean, Devindra: the AIs can already summarize books. So I do. Yeah. [00:33:00]I don't know if you'll get it all within text, but it'll, they'll do it through the cloud or whatever. And then who needs to read who needs to really engage with content and wrestle with complex moral choices like just let's Smooth brain all the way AI brain means no tough choices for any of us And that's where we're going as a society. Love it. Love to see it Cherlynn: I will point out that a person in our chat. I think it was I've missed it, but you pointed out that you were you're doing your master's Tom Rogers or Someone that you're using the Kindle scribe and that's the like Tablet that Amazon makes you can write on which like this week, you know We are also gonna talk about a bit more about writing tablets. And I think For me, that's where Amazon's Hardaware is still intriguing. And to be clear, no new Kindle has yet been announced this year season slash whatever. So we could still be waiting to see stuff from Amazon. And I wonder what would happen if they decided to stuff AI into a Kindle. Like I have no clue. Devindra: It's mainly the [00:34:00] ink technology that keeps Kindles the price that they are. They occasionally go down, but they, those do not have super fast processors. Those are like really like basic devices. I would imagine they could easily get some cloud AI stuff. So like cloud source, Hey, some interesting topics that, you know, that these people have, or also when you go on Amazon now, you get AI crowdsourced user reviews. I can imagine that being a thing. In the kindle like store when you're browsing around. Yeah, Cherlynn: I could see that I could see also with the kindle scribe Like I said being a writing or drawing tablet like they could not only give you prompts for drawing. They could also Start an outline for you teach you calligraphy or teach you show like I used When I was reviewing the Kindle scribe originally, I used it a lot for Japanese, you're not going to practice. So like handwriting practice for a different language. I could see if AI would just generate worksheets for me. That would be interesting. Hire me, Amazon. I will think of these ideas for you. That would be actually useful. Devindra: I don't think [00:35:00] you want to work with Amazon. No, I don't know very few people don't work at Amazon. I want to point out a thank you, Mark Dell for this wonderful comment, because it also fits into a bunch of things. But he says somebody needs to make an AI pin that just listens to everything and makes every decision in your life. Perfect. For those who are bad at decision making, it'll be the last decision you ever make. That is a black mirror episode just waiting to happen. That certainly is going to be a thing. Also, Yeah shout out to the Yorgos Lanthimos movie, Kinds of Kindness, which is sort of about that too, which is sort about the idea that humans, we kind of all just want to let go a little bit and let people make decisions for us and then be like little subservient little slobs. So depending on your view of humanity, you don't even need AI for that. You just need you just need a Dom to basically build your entire life. Let's move on to some other news. How about that? Cherlynn: Did you see, did Sonos stuff, Devindra: Sherilyn? Cherlynn: I did not, but please explain to me. I mean, I saw it floating around and I kind of [00:36:00] have the TLDR, but I'd love to hear your details. The Devindra: TLDR is that Sonos released an app overhaul earlier this year. It was supposed to be a big redesign for them and it was a disaster. It was buggy. It crashed a lot. I honestly had trouble like connecting to my speakers properly. It lost features, including things like setting alarms that the original app did. Disaster. Like literally Sonos, your only job is to give us the software to send music to your speakers. That's all you have to do. And what came out is that basically Sonos is a company that's been sitting on a lot of technical technical debt over the last few years. So there's a lot of stuff. The old app was. Basically built on a lot of things and there were things they never cleaned up. The kind of underlying technology is something they never cleaned up. As Sonos was racing ahead to launch this app, a lot of people inside the company were complaining about it and kind of raised the alarms and saying this is not up to snuff, we should not release this. And people were ignored. People were kind of bullied for even bringing up issues. So [00:37:00] that's a great corporate environment that you want to see. And now Sonos is at the point where they're just like fully fully. Apologizing and basically saying that they're going to do everything it can to fix this. So, the quota here is our priority since its release has been and continues to be fixing the app. There were missteps and we first went in, went deep to understand how we got here and then moved to convert those learnings into action. I love when everybody said, anybody says learnings, by the way. Such wonderful corporate speak. The quote continues. We are committed to making changes to get us back to being the brand people love by offering the best audio system for the home and beyond. And the quote I believe the Sono CEO so they're saying they're going to do a lot of changes. They're going to do a lot more testing. And they're extending the manufacturer warranty for all home speaker products, including home theater gear and plug in speakers. I saw the news that the CEO is also declining to take a bonus this year, which is like the least you could do. You're still going to get paid millions, tens of millions of dollars. Cherlynn: Rejecting this little bonus on top of my multi million dollar salary. Okay. Devindra: Yeah. But at least [00:38:00] it's more than most CEOs do often when a company screws up, either somebody gets fired but rarely is somebody like, Hey, like I'm just going to take a direct hit for this. So, Hey, that's something good to see. I would love to know what your stories are. With with Sonos speakers at this point, folks, I still use them, but it's stuff for sometimes I'm within Spotify and I like to send audio from Spotify straight to Sonos that's hit or miss these days. The Sonos app itself is still all over the place. I still like Sonos speakers cause they sound so much better than a lot of them in the actual networking. The actual synchronization stuff is great. But just kind of a mess. I feel like they should discount some of these things. Be aware of the ARC whatever the new headphones are too. That was kind of the thing they were rebuilding the app for. And Cherlynn: the Devindra: ACE headset. Yeah. Those also don't seem like they're really worth buying at all too. So check out our review of that whole thing. Yeah, Sonos is still keeping it real, I guess, trying to fix all these mistakes. You have something you want to mention from [00:39:00]Google, Cherlynn. Yeah, just a Cherlynn: really quick bunch of news from Google. There was this is like a drive by recap, really, because the stuff that I want to talk about apparently isn't happening yet. Gmail is getting better summaries, and Google is adding a happening soon tab to its Gmail service. I like that. I mean, like sometimes Google has really improved Gmail. Like I think Inbox was an app we all loved for a time and then they killed it. But the Inbox was really where they surfaced a lot of these good features. Oh, there's a pack you know, like notification. You say Devindra: we all very broadly, but it was certainly, I mean, the people Cherlynn: online at that time, Devindra: I remember Inbox. being launched. I'm like, what the hell is this? This was like when Google had 10 different video conferencing apps and couldn't decide on it either. So I was mainly confused by Inbox, but yes, those designs did come over to main email. Yeah. Cherlynn: I think there were some really interesting features that debuted on Inbox. And then finally when they did get integrated into Gmail and then, you know, cohesively bringing all of them into one app is the choice to make. I agree with that. I just think there was some [00:40:00] nostalgia for Inbox. I still see online sometimes. Anyway. I mean, I like when like for example, last two weekends ago or something like that, I was watching James McAvoy movie that I cannot remember the title of anymore. Speak No Evil or something? Devindra: Yeah. Cherlynn: Okay I bought the ticket on an iPhone and had a Pixel 9 Pro next to me. Both had their SIM cards in them. And the Pixel 9 Pro had the SIM card. Tickets just like the instant I hit pay and it pulled up the tickets on Google pay because gmail was so good at parsing the receipt That I got in my inbox and just pulling that information. I mean, yeah, it's a little creepy, but it's also very convenient for me whereas like You know, other features like track your packets, there's an event in this email, I will add it to your calendar that sort of stuff is really helpful in Gmail. And honestly, I think it's not a bad thing. I don't know if there's a net loss overall in terms of security and privacy, but we'll see. So anyway Google also updated its Chrome Plus Chromebook Plus Slate of products this [00:41:00] week. Go to Engadget. com for all the details. Nate covered it for us, but yeah, I mean, as we continue to see all the big companies fight it out over AI it's nice to, you know, I guess, see what else is being put out there. Devindra: That's something. I mean, it's also, I guess we're still waiting for are we waiting for like a Google Hardaware event again? Cherlynn: No, thank God. I hope to God. No, if they did, I would be very upset. Devindra: I mean, looking forward, we were waiting for possibly an iPad event slash Mac book event from Apple. Something more from Amazon. Cherlynn: Exactly. I'm just waiting on Amazon. Devindra: It's a whole bunch of that. There was a cool story. Did you see this one? It's really about a pair of students put facial recognition technology onto meta smart glasses basically to instantly dox strangers. They're not going to be releasing this code. This is more of like a project they did to prove what is possible. And things that, that basically are kind of trivial to add to something like smart glasses. Did you see the story? Cherlynn: I saw the headline, but what you're describing sounds a lot like that black mirror contact lens situation, right? Where you like scan people face [00:42:00] recognition and immediately pull up their like profile info. There are social network and it's not just black mirror, right? It's a lot of science fiction movies have done that, but yeah, I, that's what it sounds like they're doing. I don't know if I'm mistaken. Devindra: So essentially like they, it looks like it's going through the glasses, but also going straight to the information is going to a smartphone. We're actually seeing it too. So you're kind of getting more information there. I will say there is a certain. Especially from a company like Meta, which I'm sure has looked at this stuff. Like we have all your, we have all your friends. We know who your friends are. We have all these databases of faces and names. So we have that information too. I'm sure once Meta is ready to do like true AR stuff, this is going to be something that they do. I also think, and I think I learned this later in life is that I'm probably a little face blind. I used to think I was just bad at remembering people. But I personally think Oh, I have, I genuinely have a problem like deconstructing a face, unless you're somebody with like really distinctive [00:43:00] hair or something like that, or like a really distinctive face, things just kind of blur together for me. So just professionally, I could see it being kind of useful or socially, I guess. So I see the uses, but yeah. Cherlynn: Like that scene in Devil Wears Prada where like Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt are instructing, walking out to her. That's your like nightmare. Devindra: Which is which? Cherlynn: Yeah, but then like with the glasses, you never have to worry maybe, but again, AI has to be like reliable. What if it recognizes, what if AI is also face blind and it's this is the governor or of, I guess, I don't know, Minnesota. I think I already Devindra: know to distrust my brain when it comes to faces. So now it's just okay, you're just helping. Maybe I distrust you a little bit too, but you probably. You are probably better than me at some of Cherlynn: this stuff. However, to be clear, it's not as if Emily Blunt was all that reliable in the movie as well. Anita and Hathaway, the update pack to help her. So we, that's Devindra: a great movie. Cherlynn: You know, I saw that in Devindra: theaters. It's a great movie. Anyway, this is a story from 404media. So yeah, check them [00:44:00] out at 404media. co. Love their work and love that they picked this whole thing up. I also love to see like students doing this sort of work because this is what you want to see people doing, like not being like, I can't wait till I get a job at Google or Meta or wherever, but also taking this technology and like pushing it to its limits and like showing what is possible and what could be dangerous about it too. So this is super cool. Did you have any thoughts, Cherlynn? Cause I know you went to talk about this before, but Reddit's policy changes to make site wide protests nearly impossible. We saw this story float up too. Kind of interesting there. Maybe a little disappointing from Reddit. Yeah. Cherlynn: I am a chronic Reddit. So I am Devindra: as well. Yeah. Cherlynn: Yeah. Devindra: Yeah. Cherlynn: When I'm not playing match factory, I am trying to rot my brain by doom scrolling Reddit, and I know that Reddit has had a lot of issues recently too that's got a lot of us up in arms. There was like that, that, you know, what is it called? Boycott. Thank you. There was a boycott last year or earlier this year.[00:45:00] Time is a blur, but there was a boycott earlier because Reddit was being just. Awful. And, but now today or this week, I guess on Monday it, Made it harder to site wide protest. Basically it's changed his rules so that moderators of subreddits need admin approval to switch it from public to private. It is, that's one of the rules that's being changed and is being interpreted as a way to kind of curb subreddits from protesting and, you know, have being able to do so all at once. Multiple subreddits cannot all go private at once without Reddit. Admin approval. It is very strange. It feels as if this was related to the protest from last year because a post on subreddit, our mod news written by the VP of community said the ability to instantly change community type settings has been used to break the platform and violate our rules in the past. Right. So. It seems as if this could be one of the [00:46:00] reasons. It's only, Devindra: yeah, I mean, Reddit, a site which is full of content that is created by the company Reddit, right? Fully editorialized content from edit. No, Reddit is a company that exists because people love to just post their own stuff. You exist because of the users. So now they're afraid of the users, basically. This is what this is showing once again, Cherlynn: there's a lot of other issues with reddit recently. I mean, the fact that the initial protest was in reaction to the API changes that forced third party apps to shut down. That also led to a lot of accessibility problems. And then the company during those. The boycott just went in and took complete control of one of the big subreddits that had participated and then also recently licensed its content to train AI models So red has been making a lot of missteps lately. This seems one of the more recent ones anyway, it won't I don't think stop people from protesting in creative ways for me [00:47:00] My funny reaction to this is people will just keep posting more pictures of Sexy John Oliver. That's it. Devindra: Flood the zone. Flood the zone with Sexy John Oliver. I've also started doom scrolling Reddit, Cherlynnn, because sometimes it's or Twitter is terrible, especially when it gets I still see random right wing ads on Twitter, but it's also, that's where my friends are, so that's why I can never fully leave Twitter. Blue sky is kind of up its own butt sometimes with some of those users and Mastodon is fine, but it's just the tech nerds. Like I don't have as like engaging conversations there. So sometimes you just want to like the internet as it was somebody asking, am I the asshole? Like that's, Cherlynn: am I overreacting? Am I overreacting? Devindra: It's okay, that's addictive stuff, but it's all user generated content. And that is the danger. Reddit, when you build your entire company. I. On contributions from your users. So at some point, yeah, Cherlynn: just a quick note too, that I don't actually think a lot of the advice given on Reddit is good. Like some of them like default to run and I'm like what are you reading? Two paragraphs and deciding that this person's entire life is boiled down to one word. Stop, [00:48:00] but Reddit is also a very fun place. Like I just, I enjoy a lot of the inside jokes. Some of them get a little overused and stale, but. It is a very fun thing. It is a thing. Devindra: And also we've talked about how Reddit has basically taken over parts of the internet where rather than googling questions often like people just search in Reddit to learn how to fix something. Yes, exactly. Often when I'm googling things, like I end up going back to Reddit threads because that's what Google indexes. Yes. Yes, exactly. Because there's Cherlynn: multiple people with different expertise going in and giving you the answer on something and maybe one answer is wrong, but some other answer below is probably correct. We should talk more Devindra: about Reddit at some point. Cherlynn: We really could. I love Reddit. Devindra: Alright, let's move on to some stories from around Engadget. And speaking of writing on e paper, Mr. Daniel Cooper wrote about the Remarkable Paper Pro. It's a color ink tablet that you can write on. It seems super cool. Are you, and he gave it, he scored it 90. Hehehehe. So that's pretty high. The only thing is this thing is super expensive. So I think that's the main problem here, but the actual tech, like color ink is something I feel like [00:49:00] we've been waiting for a long time. Price, let me hear it's 579 with the standard marker, 629. If you want the marker plus, and you can add a case for 89 and the leather one for 179. So this is a very expensive e ink tablet. Are you compelled by this, Cherlynn? Cherlynn: That was the first thing I told Dan after I finished editing his review. I was like, I want to buy one of these and I might have to save up for it. Yeah, 570. I look, I am a Kindle scribe user. I pick it up once a month to jot down my thoughts. Do I think once a month of scribbles is worth 570 as a starting price? I don't know, but it's cool as hell. And it's a, this, one of the pitches and one of the reasons we gave it a high score is that it is a distraction free writing tablet, right? It's again, like the ink tablets, like the remarkable, like the Kindle scribe you know, books, I guess is another competitor. You don't have that. It's not as easy to just go over to Reddit, right. And in a minute. As it would be on a regular tablet. So [00:50:00]that's appealing. I think Dan was a little nervous about giving such a high score because, you know, it's not a tablet, it's limited in functionality but in its category, I think Dan firmly believes this is the best. And for me, it's like a 90 means it is the best in this category. I can Devindra: firmly also see Dan, lovely, funny, British man, just really quaking in his boots about this course. Oh man, is this, am I showing too much emotion here? Is this too effusive for me? Cherlynn: I will say he was wavering between 89 I was like, no, the only difference here is that we give it a different color award. Devindra: Yeah. Yeah. But I'm glad. I'm glad Dan likes it. It looks, I've looked at the remarkable stuff for a long time. Does this one also require a subscription? Because that was like a sticking point for me before. Cherlynn: So, Dan doesn't mention the subscription in his review. And that is a good point. He does mention that the software has been meticulously fine tuned to make it easy Kindle scribe. I will point out that Amazon has done a [00:51:00] lot of good hard work to improve some of its syncing over the year or months. It's been like six years since I reviewed the Kindle scribe so that like you can now, you know, sync your notes across your Amazon app toting devices, but you can, it's editing them is still tricky. I don't know. It's not an easy space to be in. Let's say Devindra: yeah. Oh, I see. So the subscription is required for clouds thinking. That is like a requirement for me. If I have something like this, like I want to be able to access my digital notes anywhere. So Cherlynn: anywhere, exactly. Devindra: Put that into the price too. But I've been intrigued by the remarkables for so long. And this one is just like the dream of color ink. We're almost there. It's super expensive, but it does exist. So. That is, that's super cool. Yeah. Maybe we'll all get to play with it at some point. Also want to shout out Mr. Team Stevens has written a test drive for us of the Polestar 3. They're a long awaited SUV. They're it's a compact SUV. But it's like a flagship one for Polestar. I'm sort of intrigued by this too, because Polestar is sort of like a sister brand to [00:52:00]Volvo and I'm into like what all the Volvos are right now. Tim also did the Volvo EX90 video for us a couple of weeks ago or months ago. That's also worth checking out, but this one looks really cool. If you want a premium luxury electric, have you driven an electric car yet? She'll end. Cause I know you're in the process of learning how to drive. Cherlynn: Oh, I don't know. Electric. I've driven plenty of gas cars, electric fuels. Devindra: I feel like we get to record that video of just you, like having that experience of the instant torque. And it feels real different. Things can go bad really quickly with an electric car. Cherlynn: Yeah. Devindra: We shall see. We gotta get Trillian on video. That should be a video series at any gadget. That'd be cool. That Cherlynn: might be, yeah. It can happen. Anytime. Devindra: All right, let's move on to what we're working on. I reviewed the Asus ZenBook S14, the new one with Intel's Lunar Lake AI chips. Really liked it. So it's a nice laptop. I wish we had more access to the to the Copilot plus features that it, that update is not fully out yet. So I can't test recall. I can't test all those things, but this is sort of Copilot [00:53:00] ready. It is a nice piece of Hardaware. They're using like a weird ceramic metallic top two at the top of the lid, which I think feels good, looks unique and yeah. Just really dig it. So pretty solid ultra portable. We're going to have a whole slate of like really decent laptops coming soon. So looking forward to that. Anything you want to shout out, Cherlynn? Cherlynn: We just continue to plan for upcoming events and reviews. Not a lot of gadgets will be coming in. We just can't really talk about a lot of them yet. And then I'm hopeful that I'll be taking some time off in October. All right. Maybe you might not hear me for a couple of episodes on the podcast. I know. It's always every time I put requests for a time off, it's always like maybe a tentative request. Cause the only reason, it's not that my team doesn't want me to go off, it's the tech companies that are like, surprise event. And there goes my, like I could still take it off. Devindra: Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our pop culture picks for the week. What do you have, Cherlynn? Cherlynn: So mine's not so much a pop culture pick as a just like general life tip. And not anything that should surprise anyone. So I've been [00:54:00]spending a lot of time watching YouTube more than anything. So I think I sort of already talked about this. The last time I was on that I canceled Hulu just cause it was getting way too expensive. And I also already have Disney plus. And then, you know, watching more YouTube, I paid for YouTube premium. So that's something that, you know, as a piece of advice that everyone's been giving YouTube premium is actually a pretty good, solid thing to pay for. So much stuff to watch Devindra: basically. Yeah, Cherlynn: exactly. There's a lot to watch by creators, but also even from you know, filmmakers that are Hollywood titles out there. There's I was watching, bring it on the other day again for the 300th time on YouTube. But I don't really generally like to like recommend things that we cover. So I tried to stay away but we have a really good. necessarily cover this. I just recently started a course on Coursera. It's the, I can't remember if it's the Harvard course or the Yale course, but one of the IVs, they have a course on psychology. So it's intro to psychology. So far I'm really enjoying it. I think yeah. This program was designed very nicely. [00:55:00] The modules are a mix of recommended readings on the internet, and they're all free by the way, but also these like specially created videos by the academic institution itself and the lecturer who teaches the course at Yale, they've combined it with this voice, a transcript, as well as these animations that make it very digestible. So I really liked that. And I think. My tip isn't Coursera specifically, but it's more like lifelong learning. I think you're never too old to keep learning. And it's so much more information's available out there, whether it be YouTube or Coursera or any number of learning platforms, I have been finding it really fascinating to dive into those. So instead of, you know, and I'm not binge watching. Devindra: You're doing something constructive with your time. First of all, Trillian, of course, for you to relax. You give yourself schoolwork. You're literally assigning yourself homework. So this says a lot about when I'm Cherlynn: not, when I'm not doom scrolling, read it to learn about people or playing match factory. I am sitting on the toilet on Coursera. So you're doing fantasy Devindra: schooling [00

sepanjang lima pentadbiran terkini iaitu dari Perdana Menteri ke-6 (PM6), Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak sehingga ke pentadbiran PM10 yang sudah memasuki tempoh 22 bulan. ???Dapatan kami menunjukkan bahawa jumlah pelantikan politik tertinggi dikesan semasa tempoh pentadbiran Datuk Seri Najib sebagai Perdana Menteri iaitu seramai 301 orang. ???Ia diikuti pentadbiran Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri (273 pelantikan) dan Tan Sri Muhyiddin (186 pelantikan) walaupun kedua-duanya berkhidmat dalam tempoh yang agak singkat, masing-masing selama 15 bulan dan 17 bulan," katanya dalam satu kenyataan di sini pada Khamis. Sementara itu, berdasarkan dapatan analisis, ketika pentadbiran Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad pada tahun 2018 hingga 2020, hanya 86 lantikan politik dibuat. Analisis mendapati jumlah pelantikan politik tertinggi sepanjang lima era pentadbiran Perdana Menteri terdahulu datangnya daripada UMNO, diikuti Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu). Lantikan politik daripada Pas pula adalah seramai 53 orang, diikuti DAP (45 orang), MCA (43 orang), PKR (33 orang), Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (22 orang) serta 15 orang daripada Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah). Justeru, Aira berkata, IDEAS menggesa kerajaan agar melaksanakan reformasi proses pelantikan untuk memastikan pengarah yang berkelayakan dan bebas dilantik mengawasi entiti tersebut. Beliau berkata, kewujudan berterusan pelantikan politik dalam badan berkanun dan GLC menekankan pengaruh politik yang mendalam terhadap sektor tadbir urus utama sektor awam Malaysia. ???Malaysia kini kekurangan mekanisme pelantikan yang telus dan berasaskan merit. Pelantikan boleh digunakan untuk kepentingan politik dan memberikan jawatan. ???Ini boleh mengakibatkan pemantauan dan pengurusan yang lemah terhadap entiti ini, seterusnya menghakis kepercayaan awam terhadap struktur tadbir urus Malaysia. "Ahli Parlimen boleh mengawasi prestasi badan berkanun dan GLC melalui jawatankuasa parlimen, bukan dengan menduduki jawatan dalam lembaga pengarah entiti ini,??? ujar beliau. IDEAS bekerjasama dengan MyMP iaitu laman web yang menyediakan maklumat mengenai ahli Parlimen di Malaysia dalam menjalankan kajian itu. Dapatan berkenaan dikemas kini dan dimuat naik di laman web www.pantaukuasa.com. Mereka mengelaskan sesuatu itu sebagai lantikan politik iaitu melibatkan pemegang anggota Parlimen, anggota Dewan Undangan Negeri (Adun), pemimpin parti serta calon yang kalah pilihan raya.

elektrik dan haji kepada golongan T20. Selain itu, pengapungan harga ayam dan penyasaran subisi diesel turut dilaksanakan dalam usaha kerajaan mengurangkan ketirisan subdisi. Pada masa sama, Anwar berkata, pengagihan dana perlu dilaksanakan secara adil terutama di kawasan yang terpencil dengan kadar kemiskinan tertinggi. Bagaimanapun, Jurucakap MCA, Saw Yee Fung berkata, cadangan berkenaan perlukan perincian dan garis panduan jelas sebelum dilaksanakan. Ujarnya, ia berikutan sistem pendidikan dalam negara ketika ini tidak mengkategorikan sekolah berdasarkan pendapatan isi rumah. Sinar Harian mendapatkan pandangan orang ramai berkenaan isu ini. Ada yang bersetuju dan tidak bersetuju dengan inisiatif tersebut atas alasan tersendiri. SOKONG Hak pendidikan lebih adil untuk semua Saya setuju dengan inisiatif yang bakal dilaksanakan kerajaan seperti diumumkan Perdana Menteri, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim kerana majoriti sekolah kluster dan elit dimonopoli golongan kaya. Ibu bapa memilih untuk menghantar anak-anak ke Maktab Rendah Sains Mara (MRSM) atau sekolah berasrama penuh (SBP) kerana mereka mampu membayar tuisyen dan tutor yang mahal bagi mendapat tempat di sekolah terbaik ini. Mungkin inisiatif PMX ini adalah untuk memastikan ibu bapa berpendapatan tinggi membayar yuran sepenuhnya jika menghantar anak ke institusi berkenaan tanpa sebarang potongan atau ditanggung kerajaan. Usaha tersebut memberi lebih banyak manfaat kepada individu yang memerlukan kerana masih terdapat segelintir pelajar cemerlang tidak mampu melanjutkan pelajaran kerana kekangan kewangan. Kekurangan pendidikan dapat membawa kepada masalah sosial yang lebih besar, seperti peningkatan jenayah dan kemiskinan, yang seterusnya memberi kesan kepada keseluruhan masyarakat. Selain itu, lebihan peruntukan dalam bidang pendidikan ini juga boleh digunakan untuk institusi pendidikan meningkatkan kualiti pengajaran dan pembelajaran melalui penyediaan kemudahan yang lebih baik, latihan guru dan sumber pendidikan yang mencukupi. - Pemilik perniagaan, Carlos Rafael, 35 Subsidi disalur lebih telus kepada golongan memerlukan Saya setuju kerana mengurangkan subsidi kepada golongan mahakaya adalah jalan terbaik pihak kerajaan dalam memastikan subsidi kerajaan disalurkan secara telus dan tepat kepada golongan miskin dan yang memerlukan. Golongan B40 dan miskin bandar juga perlu diberi perhatian dengan kos sara hidup di bandar yang kian meningkat saban tahun secara tidak langsung memberi kesan kepada kos pendidikan anak-anak mereka. Subsidi yang disalahgunakan ini mengurangkan peluang golongan B40 mendapat tempat di sekolah terbaik Malaysia. Sekiranya golongan maha kaya ini berminat dalam menghantar anak-anak mereka ke sekolah-sekolah tersebut, kerajaan perlu meneliti semula sistem kuota atau perlu melaksanakan perubahan semula. - Pelajar, Siew Jia Wei, 22 BANGKANG Golongan kaya berhak merasai hasil bayaran cukai Biarlah dalam bidang pendidikan, kita bagi peluang untuk anak-anak merasai faedah daripada cukai yang dibayar tanpa mengira latar belakang sama ada dari keluarga B40, M40 mahupun T20. Dalam mendidik, kita seharusnya menyampaikan ilmu tanpa mengira siapa pun pelajar yang dididik. Bila kita kaji semula ada keluarga dari golongan M40 yang pendapatan mereka berbeza sebanyak RM100 hingga RM500 sahaja dengan keluarga daripada golongan B40. Selain itu, negara kita juga mengalami kenaikan kos sara hidup dan kos lain yang perlu ditanggung setiap keluarga. Hal ini akan memberi impak terhadap pendidikan apabila ibu bapa tidak dapat menanggung kos pendidikan yang makin hari makin tinggi, di mana anak mereka perlu membeli buku latihan yang banyak, pakaian sekolah dan yuran berkaitan. Diharapkan, orang ramai cuba untuk melihat isu ini dari sudut pandang yang pelbagai sebelum mengeluarkan kata putus mengenai apa yang dilalui orang lain. Hanya kerana mereka M40, tidak bermakna mereka mampu menanggung kos pendidikan sepenuhnya. Kalau seorang, mungkin tiada masalah tetapi kalau lima orang anak di bangku persekolahan pasti terkesan juga. - Penjawat awam, Muhammad Nukman Md Rodzi, 25 Tanda penghargaan kepada pelajar cemerlang Saya bukan tidak setuju sepenuhnya tetapi ada subsidi yang kita boleh berkongsi dengan semua golongan contohnya apabila melibatkan pendidikan di peringkat sekolah. Bagi saya, ia boleh dianggap sebagai penghargaan daripada kerajaan kepada pelajar yang cemerlang tanpa mengira status pendapatan keluarga pelajar berkenaan. Namun, di peringkat pengajian tinggi pula kerajaan perlu memberikan subsidi kepada pelajar miskin atau tidak mampu kerana ramai yang tidak sambung belajar atas faktor kekangan kewangan. Pendidikan yang baik adalah kunci kepada pembangunan sumber manusia, jadi subsidi membolehkan lebih ramai individu menerima pendidikan berkualiti seterusnya menyumbang kepada pertumbuhan ekonomi dan kemajuan sosial. Selain itu, dengan sokongan kewangan, institusi pendidikan dapat melabur dalam penyelidikan dan inovasi serta menghasilkan idea dan teknologi baharu yang bermanfaat untuk masyarakat. Subsidi dalam pendidikan penting dalam membentuk masa depan masyarakat dan negara dengan memastikan pendidikan berkualiti dapat dinikmati oleh semua. - Pekerja swasta, Nurshuhada Hassim, 25

itu juga salah Dr Akmal Saleh? Walaupun Dr Akmal tiada di Sungai Bakap? "Sepatutnya tanya pemimpin kamu yang keluarkan kenyataan mengganggu gugat ketenteraman negara bukan salahkan orang yang respon dengan kenyataan pemimpin kamu. "Cuba contohi MCA yang kuat bekerja dan akhirnya membawa pengundi Cina asas mereka mengundi seperti yang dijanjikan. Nak salahkan saya? Ikut suka hati kau lah, parti kau," katanya menerusi hantaran di Facebook pada Selasa. Sebelum ini media melaporkan, Chin Tong mendakwa perbalahan antara Muhamad Akmal dan Naib Presiden DAP, Teresa Kok menyebabkan pengundi Cina pada PRK DUN Mahkota marah dan kecewa sehingga tidak keluar mengundi Sabtu lalu. Menurutnya, perbalahan itu menjadi faktor mendorong mereka untuk protes dan tidak menunaikan tanggungjawab tersebut sehingga peratusan pengundi Cina rendah. Mengulas lanjut, Akmal Saleh berkata, UMNO perlu berubah menjadi lebih baik supaya kepercayaan rakyat terus diberikan kepada parti berkenaan. Tegas beliau, UMNO juga akan mempertahankan prinsip menjaga agama Islam, bangsa dan tanah air walau dengan sesiapa sahaja.

such as renewable energy, smart city initiatives and innovation, he said. Chow also commended China as a global economic powerhouse advancing in technologies such as AI, chipmaking and big data. He said over the past 10 years (2014-2023), Penang has garnered a total of RM13.2 billion in approved manufacturing investments from China. He added that Penang houses 53 Chinese companies, 46 of which are in manufacturing, five in global business services, and two in logistics. In his speech, Chow mentioned Chinese food and beverage chains operating in Penang such as Mixue Ice Cream and Tea, Tea Expert and Haidilao Hotpot. He also pointed out the increase in Chinese tourists visiting Penang. In the first eight months of this year, the state has received a total of 74,891 and 8,391 Chinese visitors via the Penang International Airport and Swettenham Pier Cruise Terminal respectively, he said. Consul General of the Peoples Republic of China in Penang Zhou Youbin expressed optimism for further mutual development between China and Malaysia. China and Malaysia are friends whose hearts are connected, and partners for a win-win cooperation. Standing at the new historical starting point, the building of the China-Malaysia community with a shared future continues to stride forward, he said. As notable milestones, Zhou cited a recent visit to China by His Majesty the King of Malaysia Sultan Ibrahim and China premier Li Qiangs visit to Malaysia, which culminated in 14 bilateral cooperation documents in areas such as digital economy, green development, urban development and higher education. In addition to economic ties, we look forward to enhancing cultural, educational and people-to-people exchanges, building on the shared history and vibrant connections between our two peoples. Zhou said in the first eight months of 2024, bilateral trade between China and Malaysia surged to US$135.23 billion (RM557.86 billion), an increase of 11% compared with the same period last year. He added that during the plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 300 important reform measures were made. China abolished all the restrictive measures for the access of foreign investment in the manufacturing sector, and will continue to open up service sectors such as telecommunications, education and healthcare. He also said the Chinese Consulate General in Penang will continue to work closely with the four northern states in the peninsula to strengthen China-Malaysia ties. More than 400 people attended the celebration on Sept 24, including leaders from DAP, MCA and Gerakan, and consul generals and honorary consuls from embassies.

pilihan raya kecil (PRK) Mahkota esok sangat bergantung kepada kadar keluar mengundi mengikut etnik, menurut Ilham Centre. Ketua penyelidik Profesor Madya Mohd Yusri Ibrahim berkata BN mula berkempen di landasan yang selesa, tetapi menghadapi halangan di pertengahan jalan. Faktor utama apabila tidak mendapat jaminan undi selamat daripada segmen pengundi PH sedia ada, khususnya pengundi etnik Cina yang kurang berminat untuk keluar membuang undi. Dalam masa sama BN masih bergelut dalam segmen teras Umno sendiri iaitu undi orang Melayu," kata Yusri dalam satu kenyataan yang disiarkan di Facebook hari ini. PRK Mahkota diadakan berikutan kematian penyandang Umno, Sharifah Azizah Syed Zain, pada 2 Ogos lalu. Calon BN Syed Hussien Syed Abdullah akan berdepan calon Perikatan Nasional (PN) Mohd Haizan Jaafar. Mengulas lanjut, Yusri berkata kadar keluar mengundi akan menjadi penentu utama dalam pemilihan esok. Walaupun mengalami ketidaktentuan, BN masih pilihan untuk keluar sebagai pemenang, dengan syarat BN perlu mendapat sekurang-kurangnya 40 peratus undi daripada pengundi Melayu yang keluar, dalam masa sama kadar keluar pengundi Cina tidak kurang daripada 35 peratus. "Jika angka-angka ini tidak digapai oleh BN, PN yang pada awalnya turun sebagai underdog berpeluang untuk membuat kejutan merampas mimpi indah BN dengan memanfaatkan sepenuhnya kekuatan mereka dalam segmen Melayu," kata Yusri. "Namun jika BN berjaya menggapai angka-angka tersebut lebih besar berbanding angka ambang yang dinyatakan, mereka berpotensi menang dengan majoriti lebih besar," tambahnya. Pada pilihan raya negeri Johor Mac 2022, Sharifah yang mewakili BN memenangi kerusi itu dengan majoriti 5,166 undi. Yusri berkata calon BN dan PN mempunyai kekuatan dan kelemahan masing-masing, dengan Syed Hussien mempunyai "sedikit" kelebihan. Secara umumnya calon BN lebih mudah menembusi kedua-dua kelompok terbesar pemilih Mahkota iaitu pengundi Melayu dan Cina. "Latar belakang pendidikan, kerjaya, hieraki dalam parti dan keterlibatan dalam organisasi masyarakat memberi nilai tambah bermakna untuk beliau berinteraksi dengan kedua-dua kelompok tersebut dengan selesa. "Kemahiran berbahasa Mandarin dan memahami budaya pergaulan orang Cina turut memberi kelebihan kepada beliau," kata Yusri. Mohd Haizan pula, katanya, banyak mempertaruhkan penglibatannya dalam bola sepak untuk diiktiraf pengundi. Walaupun kelihatan selesa di kalangan pengundi Melayu, calon PN menurutnya bergelut untuk menyesuaikan diri dengan demografi Cina. Mohd Haizan juga kelihatan berpengaruh di kalangan pengundi tentera, yang membentuk 4,510 pengundi, kerana pernah mengendalikan kafeteria di dalam kem tentera di sana. Dari segi jentera, BN mempunyai kelebihan berbanding PN, kata Yusri. Yusri seterusnya menyatakan perbezaan dalam strategi kempen yang diguna pakai oleh BN dan PN, dengan BN memilih pendekatan "penglibatan langsung" dengan pengundi, berbanding ceramah, walkabout dan pendekatan podcast yang diambil oleh PN. Menurutnya, PN sebahagian besarnya terlibat dengan pengundi Melayu dan menghadapi isu berinteraksi dengan pengundi Cina, dengan kehadiran Gerakan hampir tidak memberi kesan. Dia berkata DAP dan MCA, yang merupakan komponen kerajaan perpaduan, telah berusaha dengan berkesan untuk menarik pengundi Cina dalam kempen Mahkota. Yusri berkata kedua-dua pihak menghadapi isu dalam mengkategorikan pengundi "putih", berdasarkan demografi kawasan itu. Situasi ini banyak mempengaruhi corak kempen apabila majoriti pengundi dirawat dengan mesej hampir sama, tidak terfokus mengikut profil pengundi sasar. "Perkembangan ini juga secara tidak langsung menunjukkan gelanggang Mahkota ini adalah terbuka, siapa sahaja mempunyai peluang untuk keluar sebagai pemenang jika mampu merawat sokongan dan memujuk pengundi," katanya. Kata Yusri lagi, walaupun pengundi Cina selesa dengan calon BN kerana kemahiran bertutur dalam bahasa Mandarin, cabarannya ialah mengajak mereka keluar mengundi. Isu utama pengundi Cina adalah mereka tidak ghairah untuk keluar mengundi esok. Faktornya kerana PRK Mahkota ini tidak memberi sebarang implikasi perubahan kerajaan negeri mahupun kerajaan persekutuan. "Dalam masa sama pengundi Cina menunjukkan reaksi tidak selesa berkaitan serangan Ketua Pemuda Umno Dr Akmal Saleh terhadap (Ahli Parlimen DAP) Teresa Kok berkaitan isu sijil halal. "Walaupun DAP berusaha gigih memujuk mereka keluar, maklum balas mereka secara umumnya masih dingin," kata Yusri. Pengundi India juga menurutnya bersikap acuh tak acuh dalam pilihan raya, dengan tidak menunjukkan sokongan kepada mana-mana parti yang bertanding. "Pelbagai isu diutarakan oleh pengundi India seperti rasa terabai oleh kerajaan, tiada perwakilan yang kuat dalam kerajaan yang menyebabkan suara mereka terbatas, serta isu-isu peluang pekerjaan dan kos sara hidup yang umum," katanya.

lebih daripada 20,000. "(Kemenangan) ini sesuatu yang saya rasa mungkin pada awal di luar jangkaan kita, tapi berkat kerjasama daripada semua pihak itulah keputusannya. "Apa yang penting adalah, dari sini bagaimana kita nak mengeratkan lagi kerjasama di antara dan sesama kita (BN-PH) dalam pakatan ini," katanya ketika berucap Bilik Gerakan Utama (BGU) BN di Taman Sri Kluang di sini pada Sabtu. Pada masa sama, beliau berkata, kemenangan Syed Hussien Syed Abdullah wajar diraikan oleh semua jentera (BN-PH). "Selamat maju jaya untuk kita semua. "Malam ini, malam kita,"katanya. PRK Mahkota menyaksikan BN berjaya mempertahankan kerusi dengan bergaya apabila memperoleh majoriti 20,648 undi, empat kali ganda lebih besar berbanding pilihan raya negeri (PRN) 2022 iaitu 5,166 undi. Syed Hussien mendapat 27,995 undi manakala pencabarnya, Haizan Jaafar daripada Perikatan Nasional (PN) hanya memperoleh 7,347 undi.

effect, if any, will it have? Continue reading...

Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra yang menjadi perdana menteri hampir 11 tahun. Malaya sudah mencapai kemerdekaan lebih 10 tahun dan pelbagai harapan orang Melayu masih tidak tercapai. Misalnya bahasa Melayu yang dijanjikan menjadi bahasa rasmi pentadbiran, pendidikan dan perundangan tetapi belum terlaksana. Itu belum lagi dikira kedudukan orang Melayu dalam ekonomi. Perikatan yang terdiri daripada Umno, MCA dan MIC sedang menghadapi cabaran besar dalam PRU yang dijangka diadakan tahun berikutnya. Bukan saja Umno bergolak bahkan MCA juga. Setelah berlaku pemilihan parti yang memecah-belahkan, calon presiden yang kalah, Lim Chong Eu, meninggalkan MCA dan menubuhkan Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia. Anggap PAS sama macam Umno Maka parti pembangkang utama Melayu, PAS, kekal memerintah Kelantan. Yang dipertuanya, Asri Muda, merupakan menteri besar. PAS menjadi harapan orang Melayu untuk mencabar dan menyedarkan Umno. Tetapi Ashaari yang pernah menjadi aktivis PAS berasa tidak puas hati terhadap Asri. Baginya PAS hanya memberikan perhatian pada tetapi tidak membina gaya hidup Islam. PAS dianggap Ashaari sama seperti Umno, justeru tidak akan membawa kejayaan buat orang Melayu. Bagi dia, hanya dengan kembali kepada Islam sepenuhnya dari semua segi dalam kehidupan, barulah negara ini berjaya. Maka Ashaari dan penyokongnya keluar dari PAS dan mengadakan halaqah (kumpulan diskusi) di rumahnya di Kampung Datuk Keramat. Rumahnya berwarna putih dan anggota kumpulan itu berpakaian jubah dan serban putih. Pada 1971, kumpulan Rumah Putih itu diberi nama Darul Arqam. Pada tahun 1975, saya berada di tingkatan empat dan tinggal di Kampung Datuk Keramat. Pada tahun itu juga Darul Arqam berpindah ke Kampung Sungai Penchala, Selangor. Di Pasar Datuk Keramat ada seorang penjual yang berniaga produk-produk basah buatan Melayu iaitu tauhu, fucuk, tempe, mi dan mihun di samping ikan, ayam, sayur dan ulam. Saya sering membeli barangan halal berkenaan dari situ. Perlu diingat, pada masa itu tidak banyak lagi produk yang disahkan halal. Malah pensijilan halal belum diwujudkan. Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (Jakim) belum ditubuhkan. Gerai itu juga menjual kicap, sabun dan ubat gigi buatan orang Al-Arqam. Anak muda tak puas hati Peniaga itu juga menjual akhbar bulanan bernama Al-Arqam. Ia diterbitkan dalam dua versi, iaitu tulisan Rumi dan Jawi. Arqam juga sudah mempunyai logo iaitu bulan bintang bersinar, serta sebuah menara putih dengan latar belakang hijau. Beberapa tahun kemudian, ada seseorang memberitahu saya menara putih itu sebenarnya menggambarkan menara Masjid Umayah di Damsyik kerana terdapat satu riwayat yang menyatakan, Imam Mahdi akan datang ke situ menjelang hari kiamat. Pada 1975, suasana politik, sosial dan ekonomi sedang mengalami perubahan mendadak. Malaysia di bawah kepemimpinan Abdul Razak Hussein sedang melaksanakan Dasar Ekonomi Baru (DEB) dan dasar-dasar lain yang diharapkan dapat memperbaiki kedudukan sosial dan ekonomi orang Melayu, sekali gus mewujudkan negara yang stabil dan maju. Tetapi orang Melayu terutama anak-anak muda masih rasa tidak puas hati. Pada 1974, berlaku demonstrasi besar-besaran pelajar yang berasa kemiskinan terutama dalam kalangan orang Melayu tidak diatasi oleh kerajaan. Serentak itu, ada pandangan yang menganggap masalah pada negara dan dunia berpunca daripada umat Islam tidak mengamalkan ajaran agama sepenuhnya. Maka umat Islam mesti kembali kepada perkara asas atau fundamental. Kefahaman ini dipanggil oleh para pengulas sebagai fundamentalis". Ia bukan saja berlaku di Malaysia tetapi di negara-negara Islam lain terutama dalam kalangan anak-anak muda. Istilah itu kini tidak lagi digunakan. Sekarang ia digantikan dengan "Islamis". Undangan ceramah di sekolah Pada akhir 1970-an, muncul tiga kumpulan yang disifatkan sebagai gerakan dakwah untuk menampung perasaan berkenaan. Mereka ialah Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Abim), jemaah Tabligh dan Al-Arqam. Di United Kingdom pula, pelajar-pelajar Malaysia menubuhkan gerakan Islamic Representative Council (IRC) dan Suara Islam. Ada satu ketika, terdapat hasrat Al-Arqam untuk menyertai Tabligh. Tetapi ia tidak jadi sebab kaedah pergerakannya tidak sama. Abim pula pernah menawarkan jawatan ketua Selangor tetapi Ashaari menolak. Bagaimanapun, ada satu ketika dia menerima jawatan ketua Biro Dakwah Abim. Beberapa tahun kemudian, Ashaari melalui bukunya mengkritik pertubuhan itu yang disifatkannya hanya sibuk mengadakan seminar tetapi tidak membina sahsiah ahli-ahlinya. Ketika saya berada di tingkatan enam (1978) di sebuah sekolah berasrama penuh di Selangor, pernah suatu ketika seorang wakil Al-Arqam diundang untuk memberi ceramah di dewan sekolah. Saya hadir sepertimana pelajar-pelajar lain. Wakil Al-Arqam itu ialah Akbar Anang yang mengetuai bahagian ekonomi pertubuhan tersebut. Dia berpusat di Muar dan menjadi orang kanan pertama meninggalkan kumpulan itu apabila menyedari Ashaari mengamalkan ajaran sesat. Apabila saya memasuki Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (UPM) pada 1979, ada tiga kumpulan Islam iaitu Abim, Tabligh dan Al-Arqam. Golongan Abim menang pilihan raya kampus. Kumpulan Tabligh dan Al-Arqam pula bergerak berasingan. Aurad Muhammadiyah belum timbul Semasa cuti semester ketiga-tiga kumpulan itu mengadakan program untuk pelajar. Kumpulan pro-Abim melalui Persatuan Mahasiswa UPM (PMUPM) menganjurkan program kampung angkat. Mereka pergi dengan bas universiti. Begitu juga dengan Tabligh yang mengadakan program mereka di Masjid India Kuala Lumpur. Pelajar-pelajar yang mengikut program Al-Arqam pergi ke Kampung Sungai Penchala. Salah seorang pesertanya memberitahu saya, program Al-Arqam adalah ringan dan menyeronokkan. Tidak ada ceramah yang memberatkan kepala, sebaliknya dipenuhi dengan alunan selawat dan nasyid-nasyid yang enak didengar. Antaranya ialah nasyid doa taubat. Selain itu makanan yang disediakan dalam program-program mereka juga dikatakan enak. Semasa itu Al-Arqam belum lagi diketahui sebagai kumpulan yang mengamalkan ajaran sesat. Ia sekadar kumpulan yang dilihat amat konservatif. Belum timbul soal amalan Aurad Muhammadiyah, amalan poligami yang berleluasa dan pemakaian berpurdah. Tetapi ketika itu saya sudah mengesan bahaya Al-Arqam yang akan menjadi kultus apabila diberitahu bahawa kumpulan itu tidak membenarkan pengikutnya membaca buku-buku selain daripada tulisan Ashaari yang mereka terbitkan sendiri. Bagi saya larangan membaca buku lain bermakna kumpulan itu menjadi tertutup dan menjadi ancaman kepada masyarakat serta negara. Pada masa itu lagi sepatutnya perkembangan Al-Arqam perlu dihalang. Al-Arqam terus berkembang pada era 1980-an. Saya mendapat tahu ada pelajar Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) yang berhenti belajar kerana hendak menyertai Al-Arqam. Bagi saya Al-Arqam boleh mengancam aspirasi pendidikan dan ekonomi orang Melayu. Kumpulan mula berpecah Pada 1982 saya menyertai Utusan Melayu sebagai wartawan. Ketua Pengarang Kumpulan, Zainuddin Maidin, mengambil pendirian menentang Al-Arqam yang disifatkannya sebagai gerakan negatif buat orang Melayu. Ada beberapa kakitangan Utusan sendiri yang menyertai Al-Arqam termasuk dalam kalangan wartawan dan pelukis grafik. Namun begitu, Al-Arqam amat aktif dalam bidang perniagaan termasuk penerbitan majalah. Pada 1983 saya mengunjungi Ekspo Ekonomi Al-Arqam di Dewan Sivik Petaling Jaya. Pelbagai jenis produk keluaran mereka dipamerkan dan dijual. Ia adalah sesuatu yang tidak dilakukan oleh pertubuhan dakwah yang lain. Pada 1984 saya membuat liputan dan pembongkaran kumpulan tersebut apabila timbalan ketua Al-Arqam, Mokhtar Yaakob, pula keluar. Alasan tindakan tersebut diambil ialah kerana Ashaari didakwa mengamalkan ajaran sesat. Terdapat beberapa pengikutnya turut mengambil tindakan sama. Saya pergi ke rumahnya di Temerloh dan akhbar Utusan Malaysia dan Utusan Melayu menyiarkan laporan mengenai perpecahan kumpulan tersebut di muka depan akhbar. Ekoran itu, setiap hari Utusan menyiarkan berita mengenai keburukan Al-Arqam dan bahayanya sambil menyeru kerajaan mengharamkannya. Bagaimanapun pengharamannya hanya dibuat 10 tahun kemudian iaitu pada 1994. Ashaari pula ditahan mengikut Akta Keselamatan Dalam Negeri (ISA) apabila ada tanda-tanda kumpulan itu sedang menuju ke arah perbuatan yang mengancam keselamatan negara. Ketika itu Ashaari berusia 56 tahun. Dalam tempoh 10 tahun itu sudah tentu berlaku keburukan yang menimpa banyak keluarga di seluruh negara terutamanya mereka yang meninggalkan pendidikan, terlepas peluang kerjaya dan juga kehilangan hubungan keluarga. Andainya Al-Arqam tidak mengikuti ajaran sesat dan tidak mengamalkan poligami berleluasa, serta ahli-ahlinya pula tidak diajar untuk taasub kepada pemimpinnya, mungkin pertubuhan ini boleh lebih berjaya dalam usaha perniagaannya yang dapat menyumbang kepada ekonomi umat Islam. ZIN MAHMUD ialah wartawan veteran dengan pengalaman lebih tiga dekad

melaksanakan potongan gaji automatik untuk pembayaran balik. ???Sebagai alternatif, bahagian caruman KWSP majikan boleh dialihkan kepada ansuran PTPTN dan bukannya akaun KWSP pekerja. Ini akan memastikan pembayaran balik pinjaman dibuat secara konsisten, mengurangkan beban kedua-dua peminjam dan PTPTN. ???Bagi individu yang bekerja sendiri atau pemilik tunggal, perkenalkan polisi yang melarang pembaharuan lesen perniagaan bagi peminjam ini yang mempunyai pinjaman tertunggak. ???Ini akan memberi insentif kepada pembayaran balik dan memastikan akauntabiliti di kalangan peminjam yang bekerja sendiri,??? katanya dalam satu kenyataan pada Selasa. Beliau yang juga Pengerusi Jawatankuasa Perundingan Pendidikan MCA menjelaskan, pihak berkuasa sama ada PTPTN, Lembaga Hasil Dalam Negeri (LHDN), Jabatan Insolvensi dan Jabatan Imigresen perlu lebih teliti dalam meletakkan semua peminjam dalam senarai hitam, menghalang mereka keluar negara sehingga pinjaman tertunggak mereka dijelaskan. Peminjam PTPTN juga hendaklah dilarang daripada memohon pinjaman baharu, kemudahan kredit terutamanya kad kredit peribadi atau membeli hartanah, saham dan kenderaan. Jelasnya, ini akan menggalakkan peminjam untuk melibatkan diri dengan PTPTN mengenai pilihan pembayaran balik mereka. ???Pengaturan perlu dibuat untuk membayar secara ansuran jika membayar sekali gus bersama faedah terakru menjadi membebankan. ???Menjadi tanggungjawab moral kita untuk memastikan generasi akan datang mendapat akses kepada pendidikan dan dilengkapi dengan kemahiran pengurusan wang yang berhemat. ???Peminjam perlu dihalang daripada ???rasa selamat??? daripada sebarang pembayaran balik pinjaman, sama seperti situasi yang dihadapi oleh Korea Selatan pada tahun 1997 yang memerlukan campur tangan IMF (Tabung Kewangan Antarabangsa),??? jelas beliau. Tambah Hang Soon, memandangkan RM6 bilion itu bersamaan dengan nilai 20,000 Rumah WIP atau Residensi Wilayah dan ramai graduan baharu, dewasa muda dan golongan pertengahan umur mengidamkan pemilikan rumah mampu milik, adalah menjadi kewajipan kepada peminjam untuk membayarnya.

berbeza pada masa sekarang. Kita lihat senario politik agak berlainan selepas melalui proses PRN (Sabah) ke-16 yang luar biasa. Keadaan pada waktu itu dengan sekarang sudah jauh berbeza ... .Jadi kita dalam BN akan bekerja sebagai satu pasukan, dan apa yang penting adalah bagaimana proses perbincangan dalaman BN ini. Saya rasa kita serah pada BN Sabah. Biasanya Sabah diberi autonomi baik untuk UMNO, MCA ataupun parti-parti lain, jadi saya yakin mereka lebih arif tentang apa yang berlaku di Sabah, katanya kepada pemberita selepas merasmikan Konvensyen MCA Sabah di sini hari ini. Turut hadir Pengerusi MCA Sabah Datuk Teah Heok Kuin manakala Pengerusi BN Sabah Datuk Seri Bung Moktar Radin diwakili setiausaha politiknya Datuk Abdul Aziz Julkarnain. Wee berkata masih terlalu awal untuk membuat sebarang ramalan sebaliknya apa yang penting ketika ini adalah untuk melakukan kerja di lapangan bagi memastikan kejayaan pada PRN itu.

political power has shifted. Therefore, BN will work as a team and whats important is how the internal discussion process within BN is conducted. We will leave it to Sabah BN. Usually, Sabah is given autonomy, whether for UMNO, MCA, or other parties, so Im confident they have a better understanding of what is happening in Sabah, he told reporters after officiating the Sabah MCA Convention here today. Also present were Sabah MCA chairman Datuk Teah Heok Kuin and Datuk Abdul Aziz Julkarnain, the political secretary to Datuk Seri Bung Moktar Radin, representing the Sabah BN chairman. Wee added that he did not wish to make predictions, as it was still early. However, he emphasised the importance of the party going to the ground to ensure BNs victory in the state election.

lompat berapa kali. "Tapi ahli MCA khususnya, walaupun kita tewas, yang keluar seorang dua saja. Tak banyak, jadi saya tahu dua, tiga orang saja tak ramai, dia pun tak bawa ahli daripada MCA keluar," katanya dalam sidang akhbar selepas menghadiri Konvensyen MCA Sabah di sini, pada Ahad. Katanya lagi, MCA Sabah tetap ada kemasukan ahli malah 25 Bahagian mempunyai strukturnya sendiri. "Ini bermaksud, setiap Parlimen itu kita ada struktur parti seperti UMNO dan kita mempunyai organisasi yang baik," katanya. Sementara itu, ditanya mengenai pandangannya mengenai kerjasama antara Barisan Nasional (BN) dan Pakatan Harapan (PH) di Sabah, beliau tidak meramal situasi tersebut namun sentiasa memantau perkembangan politik negara. "Maksud saya di Sabah dan Semenanjung ada kelainan sedikit. Tapi apa pun kita kena lihat, sebab kita lihat dalam konteks Sabah, Sarawak dia ada kelainan sedikit. "Di mana mereka ini di sini ada dua pihak yang berlawan walaupun sama-sama duduk dalam Kerajaan Perpaduan. Jadi kita bercakap mengenai rakan kongsi, maksud saya kawan yang dua-dua pun duduk dalam Kerajaan Perpaduan. "Saya rasa inilah prosesnya yang berjalan secara semula jadi dan akhirnya kita akan melihat bagaimana BN mencari rakan kongsi ataupun sama ada kita bertanding dulu kemudian kita menggunakan proses demokrasi menentukan, apabila sudah ada kerusi yang banyak baru kita melalui proses itu. "Terlalu awal untuk kita meramalkan apa-apa, tapi yang penting kita kena buat kerja di bawah nak memenangi kerusi itu penting, bagi saya," katanya.