davevi

I'm in the market to purchase a new Samsung Galaxy S 8.4 tablet.

No matter where I look, online vendor or physical store, Samsung branded shop or just a generic electronics shop, this tablet is always exactly the same price 16,900 baht.

There has to be a place to buy this tablet below this suggested retail price of 16,900. I am not open to importing the tablet and opening myself to potential customs duty.

Can anyone suggest a Chiang Mai or Bangkok source that will sell a Galaxy S 8.4 below the MSRP?

I'm in the market to purchase a Samsung Galaxy S 8.4 tablet.

No matter where I look, online vendor or physical store, Samsung branded shop or just a generic electronics shop, this tablet is always exactly the same price 16,900 baht.

There has to be a place to buy this tablet below this suggested retail price of 16,900. I am not open to importing the tablet and opening myself to potential customs duty.

Can anyone suggest a Chiang Mai source that will sell a Galaxy S 8.4 below the MSRP?

I forgot to ask the price. What is the price to renew a 1 year license and move to 5 years? I have a motorbike and a car driving license.

Also, do I need to redo the pictures or will they take them from the existing license?

Thanks everyone.

Change of address will also cost you an extra 50 baht i done my 5 year renewal lat week .

you also do not need a resident certificate if you have a work permit or a yellow book (i had a work permit) so i did not use resident certificate .

Excellent. Thanks.

I have a Work Permit so I'll skip the Resident Cert.

I'm guessing I'll still need the medical report?

If so I'll just go back to that same small clinic along the same road as the DMV by the airport.

I have a one year car and motorbike license that will expire next week. When I received my original 1 year license I present all the documents including a Resident Certificate which I got by stopping at a small office behind immigration and presenting my passport and a letter from the manager of the condo where I lived.

Now I want to renew my 1 year and get a 5 year driving license. I have all the paperwork I need to do this, but do I need a new Resident Certificate? If I do need a Resident Certificate I don't know what to do. Since getting my one year license I've moved from a condo with a manager's office (who wrote the letter to support the Resident Certificate) to a house. If I need the RC document, but now rent a house, what do I do to get the certificate?

Thank you.

There's a western clinical psychologist with an office near CMU.

Therapy Help Center. Website is at www.therapyhelpcenter.com.

Highly recommended.

By the way, how do people draw the conclusion that "Thailand is intercepting emails"?

This is a man in the middle attack most likely perpetrated by hackers.

(1) It involves the infrastructure of multiple Thai ISPs.

(2) It uses the same technique as is used by various USA ISPs for surveillance purposes.

This is most unlikely to be a hacker intervention.

I ran the Berkley test mentioned in the previous post (page one) and found other potentially disturbing things. The sites for Microsoft and for the US Bank WaMu are redirecting to other URLs. This could be in-country data caching, which is quite normal, or it could be something more. I worry that the proxy infrastructure, which appears to be centralized in Bangkok, could be open to security flaws and something or someone else injected code to move traffic to places it should not be.

I am not presenting undisputable facts with this post, I am suggesting that if you are concerned that you run the Berkley test (available from your browser or as an Android application) and see the results for themselves and get an interpretation that you are comfortable with.

The OP is 100% correct. At first I thought this was not possible at the Country-wide level, but it is.

Here is more proof:

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer's web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks.

In recent months, researchers have reportedISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers' data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flagis an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls,including Cisco's PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

This type of STARTTLS stripping attack has mostly gone unnoticed because it tends to be applied to residential networks, where it is uncommon to run an email server2. STARTTLS was also relatively uncommon until late 2013, when EFF started rating companies on whether they used it. Since then, many of the biggest email providers implemented STARTTLS to protect their customers. We continue to strongly encourage all providers to implement STARTTLS for both outbound and inbound email. Google's Safer email transparency report and starttls.infoare good resources for checking whether a particular provider does.

The SMTP protocol, the underpinning of email, was not originally designed with security in mind. But people quickly started using it for everything from shopping lists and love letters to medical advice and investigative reporting, and soon realized their mail needed to be protected from prying eyes. In 1991, Phil Zimmerman implemented PGP, an end-to-end email encryption protocol that is still in use today. Adoption of PGP has been slow because of its highly technical interface and difficult key management. S/MIME, with similar properties as PGP, was developed in 1995. And in 2002, STARTTLS for email was defined by RFC 3207.

While PGP and S/MIME are end-to-end encryption, STARTTLS is server-to-server. That means that the body of an email protected with, e.g. PGP, can only be read by its intended recipient, while email protected with STARTTLS can be read by the owners of the sending server and the recipient server, plus anyone else who hacks or subpoenas access to those servers. However, STARTTLS has three big advantages: First, it protects important metadata (subject lines and To:/From/CC: fields) that PGP and S/MIME do not. Second, mail server operators can implement STARTTLS without requiring users to change their behavior at all. And third, a well-configured email server with STARTTLS can provide Forward Secrecy for emails. The two technologies are entirely compatible and reinforce each other. The most secure and private approach is to use PGP or S/MIME with a mail service that uses STARTTLS for server-to-server communication.

There are several weak points in the STARTTLS protocol, however. The first weakness is that the flag indicating that a server supports STARTTLS is not itself encrypted, and is therefore subject to tampering, which can prevent that server from establishing an encrypted connection. That type of tampering is exactly what we see today. EFF is working on a set of improvements to STARTTLS, called STARTTLS Everywhere, that will make server-to-server encryption more robust by requiring encryption for servers that are already known to support it.

It is important that ISPs immediately stop this unauthorized removal of their customers' security measures. ISPs act as trusted gateways to the global Internet and it is a violation of that trust to intercept or modify client traffic, regardless of what protocol their customers are using. It is a double violation when such modification disables security measures their customers use to protect themselves.

This article first appeared on Electronic Frontier Foundation and is republished under Creative Commons license. Image by Steve Petrucelli under Creative Commons license.

The longer I stay in Thailand the more I see a great need for support. Sometimes when we move here from our home country we end up isolating ourselves from the people and support systems that keep us attached to others, human, sane. It is too easy to become isolate here when this is not your home country. The number one issue I see is depression, followed by isolation and despair.

There is hope. We are the hope. Forums like this where we can reach out to one another and let someone else know that we are having trouble, struggling, and in anguish. This is the best thing to do for depression, to talk about it, share it, seek comfort and care in one another.

Depression is an awful state, but I feel the best thing to do is move forward, no matter how small that step, move forward, reach out for help, as some of you here are doing now. This is the best way to deal with depression if your support system has failed and you cannot get professional help.

For those in trouble who want professional assistance there are Clinical Psychology services in Bangkok (PSI) and Chiang Mai (Therapy Help Center). I'm not sure I'm supposed to list those, but there it is.

For those struggling out there, there is help. Take one small step forward at a time, even when you feel you cannot.

Seek help, talk about how you feel, find those who have been through this before and know the way out.

There is light ahead. Keep moving forward.

I have a one year driving license for car and motorbike. They both expire this year in December. How far in advance of the expiration date can I renew my license? I now have the proper paperwork and government permits that will allow me to get a 5 year license, and I want to get this settled earliest as possible.

I want to mirror my company's US website in Asia so that it loads more quickly for Thailand based customers.

I am looking for recommendations on the best web hosting company in Thailand, or Asia.

My first choice would be to have it hosted within Thailand, but a nearby Asian country, like Japan, with excellent hosting capabilities would be acceptable.

Thank you.

We tried to work with Sinet then we walked away.

After working with the same manager for weeks we approached the Sinet sales booth one day when he was away to ask about the status of our price estimate for installation. That's when we learned the major fact the manager had kept from us -- that I would be required to pay 100% of the one or two year contract in advance, plus installation costs over the free distance. We thought the person at the sales booth was simply incorrect, but she was not. The manager had never told us about this prepayment requirement in the seven or eight times we spoke with him. Sinet was a frustrating and time wasting experience.

While I'm on the topic of higher speed internet...

3BB has something called VDSL which has the same speed (30mb/3mb) as Sinet at the same price. This turned out to be an extremely frustrating experience as 3BB, we found out later, never properly measured the distance from the source to our house even though the sales person told us she had. After nine on-site visits, five office visits, more than twenty phone calls to 3BB support, and a full week without any internet, we gave up after an operator in Bangkok for 3BB told me "you are too far to get this service" and went on to say this had been known for some time but the Chiang Mai office kept opening the case and sending techs so they kept dealing with the issue. I spoke with a 3BB "manager" who listened to my issue, she was in Bangkok and spoke English quite well, then told me she wasn't really the manager when I asked for a partial month's refund, the manager was on holiday, and she'd call back with an offer for a discount after he was back in two days. She never called back and we never received a discount -- just a bill for the full month's DSL usage.

It seems there is currently a targeted crackdown on westerners on motorbikes near Central Festival in all directions, just after you turn either left or right.  

My Thai friend was not stopped.  He was on a motorbike next to me.  I was stopped (I am western) along with a westerner who was moving through the intersection just behind me.  

The officer, who was very professional, said hello followed immediately by "you have license?"  I am fully licensed for motorbikes and cars.  I showed him my card, he read it carefully, then smiled and commented in Thai on my good helmet.  We were then allowed to leave.

I am not sure what the fine would have been had I not produced a license.

To be clear westerners are not the only people being stopped.  They are also stopping Thais, pick up trucks mostly in the time I was in the area.   

Although I have been stopped a few times in Chiang Mai at these surprise stops around town, I've never been asked specifically to produce a driving license.  

I am looking for a recommendation for a shop that can produce a high quality professional sign of metal for my business.  

This would be a small sign to put on the front gate of the office/home, A3 size or smaller.

The sign would include a complex logo that I'd like in high resolution.

Can anyone recommend a company in Chiang Mai with this service?

Thank you.

I've been searching for a house for the last two months.

I've worked with five different real estate companies around town.

I can only recommend Elite Properties and Sompong. She speaks perfect English, is professional and efficient. They handle only better quality properties.

I found most of the other agents to either be more interested in the interests of their Thai owner's at the expense of the renter, or that their lease agreements were heavily weighed against the renter, rights, rules, vague language allowing the owner broad control, etc.. In one case the lease agreement used by one company was so renter-biased that I thought at first it was a joke. It was not.

One thing I found about Chiang Mai is that if you're looking for a house there are not many quality homes to chose from. When you do find one you have to insure you and the owner get along well and can communicate, then you need to be sure their lease is acceptable, then check there are no owner-imposed exceptions to how the house can be used, how things are to be repaired, who will pay what expenses, etc.

I've also learned...

• Be prepared to move on if there are any issues with the house you can't compromise on.
• Be prepared to move to another agent or company company if your gut tells you something isn't right.
• There are no exclusivity agreements to rental properties -- any agent can pretty much get you a property -- so don't fear moving on to another company.
• Have an attorney handy to review your contract and never sign a lease that is not translated within the contract.
• If your contract is in Thai and English, be sure to get the Thai sections translated to make sure they match the representative English section. I've found clauses in Thai that are not the same in the English translation.

Those are my thoughts...

And I still haven't found the right house yet.

Excellent experience. Are you talking about the one upstairs near the parking garage?

For us, if it's the location near the garage, we'll never go back.

Their services are awful. We dropped off a Macbook for service and when we returned to pick it we discovered before leaving KSK that they'd returned to us the wrong Macbook.

When we took it back to the shop and showed them the problem, the entire staff had a great big "so what" moment with no apology, not a care in the world that they'd given us THEIR OWN in-store laptop (you know the one with all their customer data and records on it).

I'd rather ship something to Bangkok or wait for my next trip down to BKK, to make sure my Apple product gets repaired correctly.

Haven't got a date but I was told they are having trouble finding staff.

Could be the reason for no opening date.

Asked my Thai friend, shortly after posting this, and he told me the hospital was open.

To verify he called the hospital's call center just now and verified that they are open, -- even spoke directly with staff at the Chiang Mai branch of Bangkok Hospital.

So, they are open, but I am not able to determine if that means all areas and all functions are open for business.

The new Bangkok Hospital...

Does anyone have a revised date for the hospital to open?

Stopped by their booth in Central Festival and was told they would open on 08JUL.

Checked their main website today and Chiang Mai is not listed as a branch of their hospital.

Using Google I found a Facebook page for "Bangkok Hospital Chiang Mai" and on that page is a website URL for the Chiang Mai branch -- but the link goes to a dead page that belongs to a web server company.

Does anyone have a revised date for the hospital to open?

Has the aircraft been delivered yet? Quick google doesn't seem to show any photos of it at BKK or news of it being delivered. It's 5th July now and its supposed to be flying on the 8th?

Delivered and ready.

Thai has been very shy about showing the interior of the 787. By my count there are only two photos of business class available online.

The interior design for the 787 is very nice, but does not match the interior style of other Thai business class cabins.

Not sure why they are using a new design style interior for this plane.

The aircraft is built and flying but its not been handed over to the airline yet and is not in Thailand. Google has no news of it being delivered, The aviation photographers who linger at the end of the runway at BKK have not photographed it either. These guys are all mad keen to be the first one's with the image and upload it to airliners.net and get it on the Internet. It's still in the USA with Boeing but could arrive in BKK any day now I guess......

Rubbish. I am fully familiar with the unique appearance of the 787 and the new livery TG has on it. The 787 I saw climbing out of CNX RW 36 was not a figment of my imagination. And I saw one on the ground at BKK as well.

I would have to disagree here. Checking by Tail Number it is clear that this 787 is still in Washington State USA. Search for the plane by it's number HS-TQA using Google.

You can see it's current location is in WA, and it has not moved since July 3, 2014. You can also view its test flights in and around WA state.

I cannot explain why this plane is still in the USA, but this might be why they have delayed the CNX-BKK route using the 787.

I wish I could post the link here, but I believe I'm not allowed to do so, so I've posted a screenshot from the tracking system.

The system used to track tail numbers of planes is an international and universal system, and while not 100% foolproof at all times, I've never seen an inaccurate tracking of plane's location using the tail number system.

Has the aircraft been delivered yet? Quick google doesn't seem to show any photos of it at BKK or news of it being delivered. It's 5th July now and its supposed to be flying on the 8th?

Delivered and ready.

Thai has been very shy about showing the interior of the 787. By my count there are only two photos of business class available online.

The interior design for the 787 is very nice, but does not match the interior style of other Thai business class cabins.

Not sure why they are using a new design style interior for this plane.

Does the new credit card system avoid the problem of having to have the credit card used to pay for the ticket with you when you board? My daughter got stuck by this a few years back when she had replaced the card used with a new one. She spent 40 minutes at check-in on the phone to Oz and fortunately got her branch manager to dig out the old number. Thai is one of the few airlines that I know of that seem to do this.

The need to show your credit card is not a Thai Air requirement, but a FAA rule shared among airlines worldwide.

If you pay in cash at a Thai Air office, something you could do for your daughter if you are already in Thailand and she's flying in from abroad, she will only need to show her local ID or a Passport. Otherwise, prepare to have your credit card ready when checking in.

I've been to Ragu twice and both meals were excellent.

First meal was with a European friend who is particular about their food. The verdict "excellent".

Second visit was with a Thai colleague who lived in the US for 10 years. Their verdict "excellent, really good, we have to come back here".

For me the food was excellent, especially when I remember that I am eating at a restaurant in Northern Thailand, yet enjoying Italian food made well. My one piece of feedback would be about the Spinach Lasagna. On the night I was there it was heavily seasoned with rosemary for some odd reason. But I ate the entire portion and enjoyed it.

I would have no hesitation to visit Ragu again.

I enjoy going to Promenada and I am glad to see more people each time I visit. It's a nice place to eat, lots of food variety, and you can enjoy Uniqlo or a movie before or after dinner.

I called TG city ticket office yesterday to book a seat to BKK on the B787, business class of course. They told me the CNX-BKK sector rollout of new fleet has been delayed to July 25. Two flights a day at 10:~and 15:~

Too bad it's been delayed.

My home is in the take off path most days for CNX. I've notice, and confirmed with Flightradar24, that they're currently running various 777 models on the TG103 morning flight (formerly using a 747, then the A300). Some of the 777 they're using are their new 300's that have the new staggered biz class seats and layout. Unfortunately there isn't a pattern yet on what kind of 777 they're using on what days.

TG116, the largest plane that they run on the return flight (BKK-CNX) uses a 777-300 (BKK-CNX) with the last generation biz class, still quite nice, they are the shell style nearly-flat seats.

Thai's use of the 777 on the TG103 flights may be tied to the similarity of flight deck operation with the 787. Pilots certified on the operation of a 777 can use the same controls and processes to fly the 787. The pilots scheduled to run the 787 may already be on CNX-BKK route and waiting for the 787 to appear.

had really good results with the frame shop almost across from Suan Bak Had. 24 hour turn-around. but terrible trying to find parking!

The one just on the other side of the moat, across from the park, next to the car repair/sales building? It's right where the u-turn intersects with the oncoming traffic. Right?