Ricky’s Online Business Blog

This is an announcement for BizPartner customers.

We have been communicating with others by email everyday for many years. It is such an indispensable tool that it is now part of our lifestyle. But have you taken it for granted? Do you know that the emails you send and receive can be intercepted and read by third party?

When you send an email out, your email content travels from your computer to the Internet in clear text format. That is, what you write can be read plainly if it is intercepted by someone or some machine while it travels to the destination. If you send password, it can be retrieved and your online security will be compromised. The same risk applies to incoming emails.

But worry no more. You can “encrypt” your emails before sending out, or get incoming emails “encrypted” before receiving them. When your emails are “encrypted”, it means that the email content is turned into garbage text before traveling on the Internet. When the emails reach the destination, they are “decrypted”, being turned back to normal text for your reading.

This is done by using a technology called SSL (Secure Socket Layers). By using a connection secured by SSL, your computer cooperates with your incoming or outgoing mail server to encrypt and decrypt your email message accordingly. This way, your email content becomes unreadable even if it is intercepted while traveling on the Internet.

If you are currently connecting to your mail server without SSL, it’s time to consider adopting such security measure now. Please change your email settings as below now to enable SSL on your end!

Outgoing mail (SMTP) port number: 465
Incoming mail (POP) port number: 995

Please turn on SSL for both outgoing and incoming mail servers. In Outlook Express, this is in the “Advanced” tab, the same place where you change the port numbers above.

For customers hosting on the new cPanel-based Linux server, SSL works immediately upon changing your settings as above. For customers hosting on the old server (non-cPanel based), please inform us at info [at] bizpartner.com.my that you wish to activate SSL email service.

Click here for some basic instruction to set up your Outlook Exress for SSL

I’m helping a student on NextLevel Tutor Network to find a home tuition teacher for Form 5 physics and chemistry.  The location is in Subang Jaya, Petaling Jaya, Selangor.

A Chinese female tutor is preferred.  Click here for more information on the tuition job. If interested, please contact info [at] nextlevel.com.my.

If you operate a tuition agency or a tuition web site, you are welcome to contact me if you have any tutor under your belt who can take the student.  We can work out some deal for this job, or even for future jobs in the long-term.

I have many partner tuition agencies in Singapore, but almost not a single reliable one in Malaysia.  Why?  Perhaps tuition agencies in Malaysia think NextLevel is their competitor.  But this is a misnomer.  Actually NextLevel is a platform not only for tutors, parents and students.  It is also for tuition businesses to promote their tuition service online.

For example, after I met the entrepreneur behind one local tuition web site, I offered him to take over all tutiion jobs on NextLevel Malaysia site that are not taken by our tutors.  But apparently, somehow he was not interested.

By the way, what do you think of the current debate whether to continue teaching maths and science in Malaysian schools in English?  No offense to anyone, but I think it should continue for now.  Once launched, it takes years to gauge the results for an initiative.

By the way, learning something in English does not necessarily mean a threat to any other language.  Let’s not have such “red ocean” kind of mentality.

Recently I found an interesting mission statement of a newspaper. It reads “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind”.

I don’t know why they have such a mission. Perhaps they aspire not to hurt others, but to bring goodness to the world through its existence. Unlike some other newspapers who are used to criticize and hurt others, this is indeed a noble mission for such a media company.

How about a blog? Blogs are transforming from being “alternative media” to being a “main media” on the Internet. Should we not aspire to bring some goodness to people also through the existence of our blogs?

We can see some blogs being used to criticize and hurt others. Some point fingers, complain and even swear against company, service provider, government, college and even lecturers. Of course there is freedom of speech. But do we really need to do so?

I understand that everything is permissible under the sun. We can do anything we like. But not everything is beneficial. We will need to be prepared for the consequences of our words and actions.

The mission “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” sounds attractive to me. I might have to reflect and even repent on how I wrote against some people in the past, though I kept to my policy never to mention names.