Sell your stuff, get currency, use your international connections. It's going to be the hardest thing you've ever done, but liberty is the most important. Who knows what will happen in prison and for how long they will detain you.
Also, depending on how technically competent your government is, you need to get all your services offshore now: Wuala for storage (like dropbox - based in Switzerland); Runbox for email (based in Norway); servers in somewhere like Europe or other nearby friendly countries that provide sufficient bandwidth... Burner phone, TOR, careful about your online presence, etc. In the meantime, move locally and rent a place cash under the table where address won't be registered. Basically, become invisible to your government.
Then you want to move your business domicile and bank accounts elsewhere if feasible so your local government can't confiscate your business once you do leave. Read into the 5-flag theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler
You're entrepreneurial, intellectually curious, freedom-loving - rotting away in prison would be a waste of great talent and not to mention a human rights violation. Starting a startup is hard enough as it is, it's important. But not as important as liberty. If you plan correctly, you can have both. Obviously, I (or likely none of us on here) cant fully empathize with your situation - best of luck!!
Edit: Are you in Singapore? I know Singapore is socially strict, but I thought it was secular. If you're in Malaysia, it's a different story. Moving your domicile and bank accounts to Singapore might make a lot of sense if you're in Malaysia.
Are you in Singapore? This doesn't make sense - you say you live in a Muslim country? I know Singapore is socially strict, but I thought it was secular.
Singapore is big on social harmony. There are laws against offending other cultures and anything considered pornography is illegal. But I think he's in trouble in Malaysia.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has weighed in: "The insolent and impudent act by the young couple who insulted Islam showed that freedom of expression and irresponsible opinion can jeopardise the community"
Yet the Malaysian constitution includes "every citizen has the right to freedom of speech and expression".
The United States is also moving more and more to an offense-based model of disallowed speech despite having strong constitutional protections for free speech[1]. Free speech has never been terribly popular anywhere.
It doesn't really matter whether constitution provides for basic human rights or not. In either case, human race is faced with the question of what to do when basic human rights of people are violated. In general i despise neocons, yet i completely understand their logic of interventionism (note: i don't mean in narrow military sense of Bush doctrine that it was dumbed down to)
You can go to Sabah and pay some fisherman to take you to Palawan, Philippines. Once there, ride a bus or van to go to Puerto Princesa City. From there, you can go to Cebu or Manila and start your life all over again. You can stay in Palawan if you want to, but it's more of a vacation place and it doesn't really have the infrastructure to start an IT business. The Philippines is a 3rd world country, but Filipinos, in general, are quite tolerant of people with different religious and/or sexual orientation.
Big plus one on this - especially the Philippines. Jumping on a fishing boat in a place like Malaysia is probably not super difficult. But would take some capital.
This advice doesn't consider OP's situation at all. It isn't the right solution for everyone to drop all friends, family, connections and familiar culture at the drop of a hat. This is the kind of advice that's really easy to give if you happen to be a perpertual traveler yourself, or if you're sitting comfortably in a democratic country with a stable job.
Hopefully OP will have enough information himself to make an educated decision as to whether skipping the country is the right decision.
How well do you maintain friends, family, connections and familiar culture from the inside of a jail cell? That's the kind of advice that's really easy to give if you happen to be sitting comfortably in a democratic country with the freedom to leave your domicile as you please.
I have plenty of family who did this to escape an Islamic regime.
You need to cross the border into a friendlier country and claim asylum. Pay a smuggler, go by horse (seriously), do what you need to do to get across (bribes). Go and start a better life for yourself, I know so many who did and never looked back. You can visit your family in a 3rd country.
Singapore will also jail you if you did what he did, but in Singapore people know the consequences and generally don't fight the Government Rules. He is in Malaysia and the only way for him is to get out of the country which may be easier if you have the right connections.
It is a very sad state of affairs if pranks by intelligent kids are used against them not because of the actual prank but as a scapegoat so that others don't do this and it is also sad that intelligent people don't understand the consequences of their action and pranks are not worth 8 years in prison.
He is being charged for Sedition which is 8 years in prison. The best thing for him is to escape and i believe even many malaysian muslims will help him to escape as long as he repents for his mistake. People are never cruel only institutions are cruel, because if they are not, they lose control and the consequences are far more than a simple prank.
I really don't think that the OP made any mistakes. And you're wrong about people not being cruel. They can be very cruel. Very recently in my country, four bloggers were jailed because they wrote sarcastic blogs about Islam and one was killed for running a website that mocked religion. And the vast majority of the people were happy. And I'm not talking about the old generation, I'm talking about generation Y and Z.
I myself, received threats because my FaceBook said I was an 'atheist' and I was engaged with social media movement against religious oppression.
I know a guy who came to USA on his friend's passport, and once he was on American soil, claimed asylum. It's entirely possible this same person could do it.
Sell your stuff, get currency, use your international connections. It's going to be the hardest thing you've ever done, but liberty is the most important. Who knows what will happen in prison and for how long they will detain you.
Also, depending on how technically competent your government is, you need to get all your services offshore now: Wuala for storage (like dropbox - based in Switzerland); Runbox for email (based in Norway); servers in somewhere like Europe or other nearby friendly countries that provide sufficient bandwidth... Burner phone, TOR, careful about your online presence, etc. In the meantime, move locally and rent a place cash under the table where address won't be registered. Basically, become invisible to your government.
Then you want to move your business domicile and bank accounts elsewhere if feasible so your local government can't confiscate your business once you do leave. Read into the 5-flag theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler
You're entrepreneurial, intellectually curious, freedom-loving - rotting away in prison would be a waste of great talent and not to mention a human rights violation. Starting a startup is hard enough as it is, it's important. But not as important as liberty. If you plan correctly, you can have both. Obviously, I (or likely none of us on here) cant fully empathize with your situation - best of luck!!
Edit: Are you in Singapore? I know Singapore is socially strict, but I thought it was secular. If you're in Malaysia, it's a different story. Moving your domicile and bank accounts to Singapore might make a lot of sense if you're in Malaysia.