When living overseas, you rarely think about how you would get home if something suddenly went wrong.

As an overseas Singaporean, I was heartened when I read about how Singapore arranged RSAF (Republic of Singapore Air Force) flights to bring Singaporeans home from the Middle East, when commercial flights were few and far between. I cannot imagine the anxiety, the scrambling and the decision making that the affected families went through.

PSA: E-register with the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) when overseas, so the embassy knows where you are and can reach you when needed. In corporate terms, it’s called visibility.

At the same time, I felt for those leaving the region. For many of them, places like Doha and Riyadh are homes where they built their careers, found friends, raised families and created a life, albeit outside of Singapore.

Through no fault of their own, they had to leave behind friends, routines and the latest version of life as they know it.

Those places may still be there tomorrow, but the life may not be the same again.

Maybe this is part of the overseas journey, where life is inherently more uncertain.

There is no perfect place, only the right place at the right phase of your life.

I have Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity playing in the background as I write this. Feels appropriate. Nowadays it’s AI this and AI that. Aiyoh!

The latest hype is none other than our agentic bot friend, OpenClaw. Or maybe Fiend, since it never sleeps, never complains, and is coming for our jobs. OpenClaw is so hyped that the Chinese Internet gave it a nickname “Lobster”.

Cloud platforms are rushing to offer OpenClaw as a service. Thousands of people, young and old lined up outside Tencent headquarters in Shenzhen to have it installed on their laptops. You read it right, people are queuing up to install Lobster, not to buy Labubus. Amazing times! And just like that a new trend was born, “Raising Lobsters”. Everybody wants to raise a lobster!

Because of FOMO, I had to try and see it for myself. I did not want to buy a Mac Mini just to raise one, so I opted to deploy OpenClaw on a virtual server. I used the Alibaba Cloud one-click deployment on a Simple Application Server (because why not?). Default settings throughout, exactly as most users would do it.

The result surprised me. Not because OpenClaw did not deliver, but because of what I found on the security side. There was ZERO security.

No authentication. API keys stored in plaintext. The web console sitting open on the public internet for anyone to find.

And this is our new bot friend who will be entrusted with access to our files and calendar, to execute tasks while we sleep. With the default settings, anyone can find and interact with the agent. Sounds like a nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is fantastic and agents are the future. But the speed at which things are moving can put us at serious risk if we’re not careful.

If you have OpenClaw running, here is what you should check right now:

• Make sure it’s not exposed to the public internet

• Enable authentication

• Change your API Keys, if your server was ever publicly accessible

• Connect only what OpenClaw needs, start with the minimum, you can always add more later

Spend some time securing the lobster before handing it the keys to your digital life. 🤖