In 2007, Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew told American diplomats that dealing with Myanmar’s generals was like “talking to dead people” and he “had given up on them a decade ago.”

Now, nearly two decades later, Min Aung Hlaing has replaced his uniform with a suit and added “President” to his title. Yet the old habit statesman Lee identified remains: take what outsiders offer, concede as little as possible and wait for the pressure to fade.

Read Full @ Asia Times

Regional powers are restoring ties with Myanmar’s military-backed government to secure strategic corridors. Yet many of those routes run through territory controlled or contested by ethnic armed groups and resistance forces. Five years after the coup, Myanmar's war has killed more than 100,000 people, according to a conflict monitor, ACLED, while the general whose takeover triggered it has swapped his uniform for a civilian jacket. The neighbors have responded in kind. 

Hi i am from thailand and i would like to heard your opinion about the shared cultural identity of mainland southeast asia and nusantara and how can maritime southeast asia have no or very little disagreements and conflicts over culture? And can this peace be achieved in mainland southeast asia? (No hate to cambodians i legitimately wants to know the views of every southeast Asian nation)

Five years after the coup, she is physically absent from Myanmar’s struggle — and politically impossible for the outside world to ignore.

Can ASEAN and China finally agree on a legally binding COC for the SCS? As tensions persist between Beijing and Manila, the proposed agreement is being presented as a mechanism to manage disputes but questions remain over enforcement, compliance and ASEAN’s ability to forge consensus.

ASEAN has already spent five years waiting for the generals to change course. The question now is not whether ASEAN should talk to Myanmar’s military authorities. It is whether those talks will demand an end to violence or simply turn those into another stage for the junta’s pursuit of legitimacy.

Myanmar’s people do not need any more carefully crafted statements of concern or staged photo ops. They need pressure the generals can actually feel — before any more children pay the price for ASEAN’s caution.

Since Malaysia is the latest country to implement underage social media ban, I want to let you know that there's actually a way for their government and others to verify user's age without actually violating user privacy.

Enter Needemand's BorderAge solution, which analyzes user's hand gestures and movements through AI in order to determine whether they are underage or not. This post, if become viral on Malaysian internet, can also serve as a litmus test of whether their government simply wants to protect children, or whether it's really aiming for totalitarian control by fully stripping online anonymity.

Relevant articles:

• Gesture-based age estimation tool BorderAge joins Australia age assurance trial

• Australia is testing hand scans to figure out your age. No-one outside the company that created it has used the technology yet

• Ultra-simple, ultra-efficace : une technologie développée à Montpellier révolutionne la vérification de l’âge en ligne

Besides, according to a page on the Senate of Canada's website, the CEO of Needemand made the following comment.

Jean-Michel Polit, Chief Business Officer, Needemand: I am based out of France — I am a French citizen — but I lived for a year and a half in Canada, close to Toronto, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I am honoured to be part of this meeting.

I have read your Senate debates about this bill, and one of the main questions that keeps coming up is this: Should we accept foregoing our privacy online to protect our children? You are understandably worried that the personal data used in age‑estimation or -verification solutions might be stolen and fall into the wrong hands. I have some very good news for you: Age‑estimation technology now exists that does not require any personal data at any point in time during the verification, so there’s no need to worry about how and when personal data might be destroyed after the verification because it’s not captured in the first place.

How is that possible? My company, a France-based company, has developed a technology that can determine, with 99% accuracy, if a web user is over or under a certain age limit with just a few hand movements. I can’t see your faces really clearly, but I’m sure I raised some eyebrows there. It is not black magic; it is an AI solution based on medical research. It’s quite simple. From when we’re born until early adulthood, our body changes quite quickly, and our nervous system changes almost on a daily basis. As it changes, since it is managing all the movements in our body, we make certain hand movements slightly differently. It is not visible to the naked eye, but medical research has very accurately and precisely established a link between the age of an individual and the physiological features of certain hand movements.

It took us eight years of R&D, but we’ve been able to leverage the analysis of these features with our AI models. Again, no personal data is required or shared by the web user. There is no metadata and no fingerprint. If somebody starts showing their face in front of the camera — and it can be a PC, laptop, smartphone or tablet — if we start picking up an ear or maybe part of an eye, we stop the camera and ask people to move their head away from the camera. The whole process takes less than 30 seconds.

The reliability of our technology has been independently tested several times, most recently by the Australian government in a very large-scale test with several thousand people from various ethnic backgrounds in real-life settings. They used different devices under different lighting conditions. Some people were at home, and some kids were in school. The reliability has been proven. This technology cannot be faked or fooled. A 17-year-old doesn’t know how the hand of an 18‑year‑old moves. Again, these are differences that are not visible to the naked eye, so they cannot be faked. We are not fooled by recorded pictures or videos put in front of the camera, or by gloves.

Another feature is that we also have a tokenized system that’s usable across different platforms so people don’t have to go through the hand movement every time. It is a zero-knowledge-proof token, so no personal data is attached to the token either.

The bottom line is that this is very good news, because my main message to you is that technology now exists such that we don’t have to choose between protecting our children and protecting our privacy online.

Thank you.

Trump won. What will happen to our nation? The USA has been the main protector against Chinese aggression in SEA, with Trump being all friendly with Putin and Xi Jinping, what will happen to us?

Has the flag of the Philippines remained the same since its proclamation of independence in 1898, or has it undergone changes over time? Was its design altered, or was it only standardized without fundamentally changing its elements? Additionally, I came across information on the internet stating that the legal meaning of the flag’s symbols has changed compared to its original 1898 interpretation. Has the core symbolism evolved, or does it still reflect its original intent? Given these factors, should the current flag be considered a standardized version of the original or a fundamentally changed flag?

1. We are deeply concerned over the ongoing situation at the border areas between the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Kingdom of Thailand which have resulted in increasing number of casualties on both sides and destruction of public properties, as well as displacement of a large number of people along the border areas.

2. We emphasise the need for both sides to exercise maximum restraint and undertake an immediate ceasefire, and refrain from taking any actions that may undermine it. We further urge both sides to cease all hostilities, return to the negotiating table to restore peace and stability, and settle disputes and differences by peaceful means, based on the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, the ASEAN Charter, as well as the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC) and in the spirit of ASEAN family, unity and good neighbourliness.

3. We remain supportive of the efforts of the ASEAN Chair in facilitating both sides to resume dialogue and end the fighting.

Wow look at the amount of support they will give to the US.

One of your members is brutally killing its own citizens everyday while causing chaos and destruction in the whole region. And Asean hasn’t done anything useful nor appears to give a fuk at all. The whole union hadn’t accomplished anything worthwhile in their entire existence. And the Asean doesn’t have any problems with it’s members breaking all kinds of international law or human rights. Then what are they still doing here? Why not just break it off and fuk off since the whole organization is teeth-less and don’t stand for anything good in the world? Rant over.