The first and foremost thing that might interest the most of netizens is your story. So tell our netizens about yourself, your story? Where do I start and what do I say? Do I get into the deep dark wicked ways of mankind and how much lying, cheating, bribery and corruption there is going on in this world and people conniving ways? Or do I make it a diplomatically simple and naive life of a hermit scientist (engineer!). I wish I had a “normal” benign life but that is impossible when Greed is Good and people lust for money and worship billionaires as their gods.
Once upon a time there lived a young engineer in a far far away land. … Oh I see, I should be writing my story and not another story.
My dad sent me to UK to study Electronic Engineering and to show my appreciation I dropped out of university and got enrolled again in another university to study Computer and Control Engineering. That meant it took me 6 years to get my Engineering degree but because of this I had a very rigorous mathematical understanding of how things worked.
I returned to Malaysia and worked in the Semiconductor Industry, which consisted of foreign companies having their assembly and testing operations here. This meant I began as a Test / Product Engineer in charge of looking after micro computer chip yields and got into equipment development because of my microcomputer expertise.
It was very interesting wonderful world of equipment design and development. High speed robotics, alternative software architectures, multiprocessing multitasking systems written in assembly language, self-diagnosing crash proof and jam proof machines, it was a glorious world of cutting edge technology never seen anywhere else before.
One day it came to an end as glory hunting, in fighting and politics took its toll. I did not want to work in such an unprofessional environment so I went off on my own.
This was the late 1980’s and PC’s and DOS, the Microsoft Disk Operating System where making inroads and everyone wanted to be on the bandwagon. That was when I decided that I too should get into software development. I learned C++ and wrote a file manager cum editor cum word processor for the PC and many other products such as a disk cleaning product, but I lacked the marketing knowledge and marketing network to take off.
Then one day a friend of mine asked me if I could create a program for the stock market. I began to look at this as there were no software products for the stock market and there was no internet yet, no data feed, back in 1992. I began to work on this by using closing prices of stocks and shares published in the newspapers and purchasing copies of the Daily Diaries from the stock exchange library. Very soon I found out that there were no mathematical description or formula for stocks and share and commodities. Everyone, in Malaysia, was trading on rumors and others were teaching the Japanese candlestick method.
In those days the most powerful and most accurate method of making buy sell decisions was the Japanese Candlestick Method. No other method came close. I think many Americans have forgotten that the Japanese traders came to America and were minting money on American stock exchanges at a rate that astonished the American traders. That is the reason the Japanese Candlestick Method became big time news all over the world. The American bar charts and whatever, were nowhere nearly as impressive as the Japanese Candlestick Method and for obvious reasons. The Japanese Candlestick Method had evolved over more than 400 years where as the American methods were very much less than a 100 years old.
My problem was that both these methods were non-mathematical which meant it was near impossible to translate them into programming code. I had to find an alternative method that was programmable. That required time and money. So for 6 years I did the rounds, going from venture capital to venture capital, from fund manager to fund manager, from government research grant institution to government research grant institution, form bank to bank. Everyone told me the same story. They said I was wasting my time and my life as it could not be done. It was impossible to predict the stock market.
I was living at home and working on my computer 14 hours a day, 7 days a week trying to generate mathematical models that could come close to describing the market behavior. Working that hard I became a computer addict. I tried go back into industry and get a paid job but no one would hire me as I had been out of a job for many years. I was shaken by my difficulties as no one would give me a job and the government institutions would not consider giving me a grant. Broke and lost I did not know what I would do if all my research work was lost or worst still if someone came out with a similar theory before I did. If that happened, everyone would say I had wasted my life. A gamble gone one step too far.
Broke, broken and beleaguered I buried myself into the research.
Then the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis occurred and the stock markets began to crash by early 1997. I had told many people to get out of the stock market before February 1997. It was a completely collapse of the South East Asian Economies. That was when I began to explain what was happening and how long this would last and what the Asean (Association of South East Asian Nations) nations should do to lessen the damage. Then in August 1998 I published my chart of the September 1998 KLSE (Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange) Bull Run. This is the first ever publicly published prediction chart of the share price movement which was up to 3 years ahead. Many corporation were pumping in millions of dollars over many years trying to forecast the markets but all of them failed. I told many friends to get in and buy shares before the Bull Run began. The rest is history. Did the governments I had helped thank me for it? Did they reward me with some funding? No.
Then an American university with an offshore campus in Malaysia proposed that I publish my work for the doctoral thesis. That was God sent. The Americans published my thesis and awarded me a Doctorate in Economics but still no income so I printed my doctoral thesis and additional works as a book and tried to sell it. I became a blogger and began to predict commodity charts for wheat, rice, coffee, sugar, Brent Crude, gold, silver …etc, and gave them away freely to show that my techniques can forecast stock and commodities up to 2 to 3 years into the future.
In Malaysia Greed is Great. I began to suspect that my book was being pirated in Malaysia so I abandoned everything and looked for something else to develop. Because Greed is Great, piracy is rampant in Malaysia.
How exactly your idea sparked? I began a blog on making bread, too. Unfortunately, both my blogs, the financial systems blog and the bread making blog where badly hacked many times and no one, not even my hosting support technical staff could help. That meant I had to take matters into my own hands. I learned server-side programming and PHP and began to develop an anti hacking firewall for WordPress sites. It took me almost 3 years to develop the Bad Bot Exterminator. That is how I got into anti-hacking products.
So how this ‘Blog and Website Security and Hacker Protection’ works? This is a crowd funding site, indiegogo.com, webpage and is used to raise funds for my software business. The funds are needed to advertise and promote The Bad Bot Exterminator which is at https://www.dpabadbot.com website. Funds are raised when visitors pay for perks shown on the ‘Blog and Website Security and Hacker Protection’ webpage.
How someone can make use of it? The Bad Bot Exterminator is a firewall to protect WordPress websites. If one is a blogger who is using WordPress, they can install this software, written in PHP, on their WordPress website and once activated it will block bad bots and hackers. It will automatically monitor your visitors and blacklist those that it thinks are bad web crawlers or hackers. This will prevent your site from being hacked and being destroyed. Many bots load your server a lot but never give you anything in return unlike search engine bots like Google, Yahoo & Bing which tell people about your website.
When you run the Bad Bot Exterminator with our SuperFast Cache WordPress plugin your blog webpages pages really speed up. Your webpages can be 100% to 300% faster with them. The combination is one of the fastest WordPress caches in the world.
How you disrupt? What makes your endeavors unique on Internet? I have not checked all potential competitors but I noticed that those that I have observed are either:
- Firewalls installed on the server side, so you need to get their hosting services to get their protection OR
- They are WordPress plugins.
The Bad Bot Exterminator is not a WordPress plugin and that is why it has been very effective at blocking hackers and DoS / DDoS attacks. I have tested it on many hosting services. It works on shared hosting and even on very cheap one dollar hosting services.
How many people got associated for working together? After almost 3 years of development and testing and short of funds I do not have any staff. Once I can raise the funds, through https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/blog-and-website-security-and-hacker-protection/ and get advertising, promotions and sales going I can hire staff to improve my business.
What philosophy drives you doing this, your business philosophy? Do the best you can.
What is your ultimate message for netizens? Be honest, have patience, work hard.
shardulpandey@sangkrit.org