nyllithiu

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This is the Syrian flag that was showcased at the Asian-African Conference Museum in Bandung. The conference was held in 1955.

At first, I was quite surprised. I thought the Syrian flag had always been red, and that they had only recently changed it to green during the al-Sharaa regime.

It turns out that, when I checked Wikipedia, it was originally green from the start. It was later changed to red when Syria joined Egypt to form the United Arab Republic (1958), and it remained red even after the political union dissolved.

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And there are some other interesting flags in this display too.

"In 1955, Sudan was not yet an independent country. At that time, the territory was known as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and was ruled under a "condominium". A joint administration between Great Britain and Egypt. The administration used two completely different flags flown side by side to represent the two ruling powers : The British Union Jack and The Egyptian Flag. But in 1955, necause Sudan was on the verge of independence but didn't have an official flag yet, a makeshift provisional flag was made just for the conference so the Sudanese delegates would have something to stand behind. It was a simple white field with the word "SUDAN" written in red right across the center."

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Wikipedia states that this flag is actually the flag of the "Kingdom of Yemen" (second revision ver : 1927–1970). "The five stars represent the five geographic regions of Yemen / the Five Pillars of Islam / the five daily prayers (Shalat). The saber, widely used as an emblem by Arabs, and the red field on which it is placed, remind the people of the blood they have sacrificed in defense of the liberty and independence of their country."

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And there were two Vietnams invited to the conference. I’m familiar with one flag (I think that’s the modern-day Vietnam flag), but I didn’t recognize the other one (the yellow one). It turns out that the left one is ‘North Vietnam’ and the right one is ‘South Vietnam.’ North Vietnam eventually managed to unify the whole of Vietnam.

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Kalau gak salah, di Dispusip Bandung Jalan Seram, ada ruangan yang mirip persis seperti ini juga di dalamnya. Dulu, aku pernah diajak masuk ke sana. Jadi juri lomba. Aku sudah lupa, lomba apa yang kujurikan waktu itu. Tiba-tiba saja aku diajak jadi juri setelah ngobrol-ngobrol dengan petugas perpustakaan keliling yang standby di CFD Dago.

Oh iya, foto ini diambil di "Perpustakaan Proklamator Bung Karno", katanya.

Setelah ku lihat-lihat lagi koleksi foto di laman Foursquare yang itu, aku menemukan patung Bung Karno ini.

Kalau tidak salah, ada patung Bung Karno dengan pose yang serupa seperti ini di JIExpo.

nyoo... my free hosting is broken... ᓀ‸ᓂ

There's this "c0nnect easy messenger" app on the Android Play Store (4.8 stars - 137 reviews). The reviews seemed good enough, so I tried it. I logged into my c0nnect.de account there. Then, for testing purposes, I logged into my Disroot account on my PC (web client) and tested it by sending messages to each other.

The first "annoying" thing in this app is, right after login, you have to add a new contact. This one is unskippable, I guess (or maybe, I didn't find the exact button to skip this part). So annoying that I had to randomly search for strangers' Jabber addresses via Google dorking for the sake of skipping this part.

Alright. Next. So in this app, there's this menacing "send unencrypted message" notice by default. The reason why I moved to Jabber is for the sake of privacy, and somehow here it is, unencrypted by default!?

I tinkered with the settings and found a checkbox to enable encryption (OMEMO? What is that?)

But when I sent a test message (OMEMO encrypted) from the c0nnect.de server to the Disroot server, an error happened. It seems that the Disroot server didn't understand how to properly handshake the OMEMO encryption protocol (?)

Then after that, I switched back to the unencrypted setting, and it worked. I could even send images. The delay was noticeable though, but I think it's still acceptable.

Can we rely on this thing for "secure" communication?

Well... the reason why I'm really interested in this one is because a certain criminal hacker that I knew years ago smugly published their Jabber contact in order to negotiate the ransom...

Is Jabber even that safe? I don't even know. But I think it's worth trying.

Some people said that Jabber is decentralized... like email... but optimized for chatting purposes. So I guess they simply operated their own server then...

Since in my case, I rely on both c0nnect and Disroot infrastructures, I think this one is not comparable in terms of privacy to those hacker groups...

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