Author: Toby Shapshak

The latest controversy to hit Facebook is its lame attempt to change its holding company’s name to Meta, believing it will somehow convince people not to notice its ongoing privacy and mental health scandals. Named for the metaverse, an early depiction of virtual reality conceived by science-fiction author Neil Stephenson in his groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Published in 1994, it depicted a computer virus and, arguably, one of the first examples of cybersecurity. CEO Mark Zuckerberg – besieged by the swirling dragons of angry shareholders, US state attorneys-general, the US Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission – tried…

Sim Tshabalala is a modern-day Medici. Appearing like a conventional banker in his immaculate suit and tie, he’s a deep-thinking man who understands the power of commerce to uplift the country, the role of arts in society and democracy. He’s also the CEO of Standard Bank, the largest financial institution in Africa, who isn’t afraid to compliment (and name-check) smaller competitors. He spoke to Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak about the 159-year-old bank’s evolution in this new cloud computing era, and how small fintechs are helping revolutionise financial inclusion in Africa. Also on Apple podcasts | Google podcasts | Spotify…

When someone thinks you are wrong on the internet, they waste no time telling you – nor smirking when they think they have proved you wrong. I’ve experienced it many times over the years, but perhaps never as intensely as after a recent column about Minerals & energy minister Gwede Mantahse’s frankly irrational defence of “cleaner coal” as a power source for the future. My Twitter timeline was clogged with response in defence of Mantashe – and I was followed by numerous fake accounts which I blocked and reported to Twitter. It’s noteworthy that the only time I see clearly…

“How easy is it to type on?” a friend asked me about the smartphone I was testing. It’s not a question I get very often, but then the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 5G is not an ordinary phone. It’s the third generation of Samsung’s remarkable new form factor which has a foldable screen. It’s an innovation I didn’t ever think I would come to like so much, because it enables you to open the “normal” sized 6.2in phone into a small tablet with a 7.6in screen. It’s a screen that folds. That alone is impressive engineering, especially given how badly-received…

Wholly unscientific justifications for inexplicably weird decisions have been a hallmark of the SA government’s response to Covid-19. The alcohol ban, prevention of e-commerce stores doing even a little economic activity during lockdown, and curfews are some of the lowlights. The latest confounding decision to withdraw the temporary spectrum from the mobile industry by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) is a new low in irrationality and pettiness. Icasa is an agency that is often maligned for imposing the frankly weird regulations the government passes. In this instance, the blundering is all of its own. At the beginning of…

Who does Gwede Mantashe think he’s fooling? The mineral resources & energy minister has been leading a one-man, climate change-denialist charge against common sense and the country’s best interests with his inexplicable defence of fossil fuels. Whose interests is he fighting for, when his public statements are so at odds with logic, common sense and the country’s best interests? Last month climate envoys from the UK, US, France, Germany and the EU came to SA to convince our government that Eskom should accelerate its shut down of coal-fired power stations, specifically nine of them by 2035. Please note that Eskom…

It’s hard to say what is more devastating for the Twitch community, that the source code for the game streaming service has been released or that all of the top gamers’ incomes have been revealed? This is after all an audience of people who tap into the strange voyeuristic nature of humanity that wants to watch sportsmen, and now gamers, do their thing. This generation of gamers has luckily been able to capitalise on this happy circumstance which allows video gamers to make a pretty decent income just by playing games. Never in all of human history have we geeks…

With a valuation reportedly of $3bn, Nigeria’s Flutterwave is one of the most successful – and inspiring – startups in Africa. Stuff Studios editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak spoke with its CEO and cofounder Olugbenga Agboola during a recent trip to Lagos, where he also interviewed Lidya co-founder Ercin Eksin. Also available on Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google podcasts Visit getshyft.co.za for more info.

“hello literally everyone,” @twitter tweeted last Monday during *that* outage. The six hours that Facebook and WhatsApp went down was a moment in internet history that will be recalled alongside that other famous outage when BlackBerry went down for three days in 2011. That catastrophe, which demonstrated how ineffective crisis communications can be just as catastrophic, was the beginning of the end for BlackBerry – the pioneer in mobile email and messaging. Will Facebook’s massive outage be as catastrophic to its fortunes? Probably not, you might say. Facebook is insanely integrated into our lives and is a gigantic profit-spewing multinational giant used…

Whistleblower Frances Haugen reveals the depravity of how the social giant is “tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world”. While not many people remember the name Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the same is not likely to be true of Frances Haugen. The former Facebook product manager of its civic misinformation team has blown the case against Facebook’s profit motive over the mental health of its users wide open. “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” the 37-year-old, who has an engineering degree and did a Harvard…