Author: Nick Cowen

Happy POPIA day everyone! Yes, in case you didn’t know why your inbox, WhatsApp groups and other communication channels have become inundated with messages concerning the Protection Of Personal Information Act (POPIA) recently, POPIA became a law of the land today (1st July 2021). As the name would suggest, POPIA essentially gives South Africans a constitutional right to privacy and provides legislative protection over personal data. It also presents problems for certain entities. Unless you’ve been locked in an isolation ward for the last twenty-one years, you’ll know that personal data is big business and the freedom to collect it…

End-to-end encryption is an issue that crops up every now and then – usually when a politician feels bold enough to try and hold the tech industry to account without having the slightest idea of the ramifications tied to what they’re demanding. The latest example is Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary, who recently claimed that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption is “unacceptable”. As Patel would have it, “…the use of end-to-end encryption in this way has the potential to have serious consequences for the vital work which companies already undertake to identify and remove child abuse and terrorist content.” In other…

This week my cat placed himself in the proverbial dog box, after he decided to do a bit of tinkering with my Vumatel box. The little sod not only managed to remove the casing of said device, he managed to sever the wire that connects my internal box to the outside infrastructure. In short, my cat broke my internet connection. Own a cat, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. After an hour during which my wife talked me down from turning the feline component of our family into slippers –- “he’s just a cat!” -– I settled in for…

Picture the scene: The year is 2013. The place is Los Angeles. And the event is E3. The issue? An always-on connection. Xbox has just had its arse handed to it by Sony. The reason being that at Microsoft’s E3 keynote it was announced that not only would the forthcoming Xbox One be rather expensive, it would also require an always-on (read: a constant and decent) internet connection in order to function. That last piece of information was a massive point of consternation at the time – both in the media and among prospective buyers. On the E3 shop floor,…

We knew this one was coming. When Microsoft’s Xbox announced back in March it had acquired Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax — and with it, a ton of other studios — the stage was set for the pair to be more intimately linked at E3. This suspicion was confirmed last month with the announcement that Microsoft was to hold its annual keynote in conjunction with Bethesda. What this meant for gamers was a few questions (would the next Elder Scrolls be an MS-platform exclusive?) and a host of expectations (between the pair of them, these entities couldn’t produce a damp squib…

E3 2021’s virtual conferences have kicked off with Ubisoft being the first publisher to show off their wares. In case you didn’t catch Ubisoft’s Forward at E3, here are the biggest announcement the publisher made. Strap in. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is quite a bit of DLC Ubisoft’s latest instalment in its historical franchise is getting a boatload of content over the next year or so. We’ve already seen the first story DLC Wrath Of The Druids and we know the second, The Siege Of Paris is in the pipeline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlGOrDYycbc On top of that players can expect new infiltration missions, new…

Something important is happening on Facebook. We should all take note. Mainly because using this app is as natural as breathing and it shouldn’t be. According to a report on The Verge, the social media giant is applying a set of terms and conditions that all of us regular users have to observe to political figures. To wit, if a politician – be they the president of the United States, a dictator prepared to hijack a pane to snare a blogger they have a problem with, or – you know – you, violates the platform’s terms and conditions, Facebook is…

UPDATE: Welp, it looks like it can, and will, get worse. Load shedding Stage 4 will kick in from 14:00 today, 9/6/21. That continues until 22:00 this evening, before dropping back to Stage 2. Why? Additional breakdowns, that’s why. https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1402575652335853571? ORIGINAL ARTICLE: Happy Wednesday! Load shedding is back and it’s not going anywhere until the end of the weekend. Well yay. According to a post on Eskom’s official twitter account, Stage 2 will commence at 10h00 today and run through until Sunday at 22h00. https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1402517071364300802 Load shedding ain’t going away According to a report on News24, the reason for the…

It’s not every day you wake up to find large chunks of the internet missing. Reddit is the self-proclaimed ‘front page of the internet’. And it’s currently ganked. As are Amazon and Twitch. The reason for this, according to a report on the BBC, is that a cloud computing company called Fastly, which underpins a lot of websites, is currently experiencing problems. Fastly has apparently said it is looking into raised problems with its global content delivery network. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. No Reddit, Amazon or Twitch for you It’s kind of interesting to sit at the far end…

So it’s Youth Month – yes it is – and wouldn’t you believe it, some people actually care about that sort of thing. Namely, Digify Africa and Facebook, which are organising the Youth Digital Skills Forum on the 11th of June 2021 from 10 am to 12 pm. Mark your calendars. This is an initiative worth taking note of because A) it’s free and B) it’s worth plugging in for. (You could even throw in C) it’s some good news that Facebook is involved with and goodness knows the social media platform could use the boost this year). Digify Africa…