Author: Toby Shapshak

This may be the crucial moment in history when the age of the desktop computer is truly replaced by the age of mobile. On Tuesday night, without much surprise, Apple announced its new laptop line-up proudly running on its own Apple Silicon processors. The new range of M1 chips are faster, more powerful, use less electricity, and everything else promised in an Apple launch event, where hyperbole is as essential as tech specs. Notably, the M1 processors are based on the mobile chips that power the iPhone and iPad ranges. For a long time, it’s been unfolding before our eyes…

It turns out there is a way to get Donald Trump off Twitter. All that has to happen is him losing the US presidency. Now we know. It’s heartening to know that Facebook and Twitter, two of the greatest titans of this current tech empire, have found their spines at last. The Washington Post calculated that Trump had told 25,000 lies in the last few years. Most of those, until now, have never been factchecked by social networks too afraid of #PresidunceTrump – as one hashtag has already labelled the Tweeter-in-chief no longer. Finally, instead of the rampant lies and…

I didn’t really believe that Checkers would actually take sixty minutes to deliver the groceries I had just ordered, but I was happy to get them on the same day. I’d heard people raving about the new Sixty60 app even before that economic elephant called the Covid-19 lockdown that trampled on us. But the reason I had downloaded it was because I’d seen the advert in the Daily Maverick newspaper. Not only was I pleased to see the launch of a new newspaper (a good democracy needs all the voices it can get), but a decent share of advertising, including…

He may have left the building but the ghost of Hlaudi Motsoeneng lives on in the SABC headquarters. Or, sadly, his convoluted, irrational attempts at logic remain. In fact, over in Auckland Park, sanity itself has left the building. We know it is in short supply, along with rationality, over at the Department of Communications and Other Redundant Technologies and Deadwood Deputies. I’ve often wondered what they smoke at this department, certainly in the minister’s office, given the inexplicable and unintelligible decisions that are made there. The latest hair-brained scheme was announced by Deputy Communications Minister Pinky Kekan, who last…

Let’s use a sports analogy to understand President Cyril Ramaphosa’s economic recovery plan. It’s not the game plan that we should be most worried about (albeit it’s the same one, recycled with new words and loftier goals) but the players themselves. Any good coach can tell you the game plan is irrelevant if the players can’t play it. Looking at the current South African Cabinet, it doesn’t inspire many choices. In the communications ministry, we have a minister who has broken the law and been fined for lockdown breeches. Broken the law. And yet Stella Ndabeni-Abrahms is still in her…

In the week Facebook so proudly announced its integration of backend messaging between Messenger and Instagram, US lawmakers trumped that with a searing report suggesting breakups for Big Tech which has abused its monopoly position. It was schadenfreude for many Facebook critics who have long accused the world’s largest social media network of breaking the competition agreements it made when it bought Instagram in 2012 for $1bn and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19bn. Quite a difference two years makes, you might be inclined to observe. And you’d be perfectly right. We now know from Mark Zuckerberg’s emails – subpoenaed as…

It’s the antitrust bombshell that everyone has been waiting for. The US government wants to break up Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, which is says have grown from “scrappy, underdog startups” to “become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons”. A 16-month investigation, which culminated in a virtual hearing with the big four tech firms’ CEOs, has produced a 449-page report that was released on Tuesday. After interviewing Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google holding company Alphabet, the report found “their answers…

The convoluted state of US President Donald Trump’s tax affairs is a useful metaphor for the ongoing drama around the banning of Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat. Or, to put it plainly, clear as mud. Who wouldn’t want to pay $750 in taxes in the year you’re elected President of the United States and serve your first year in the White House? The New York Times explosive investigation into the Tax Evader in Chief rings familiar to South Africans, who have seen former #Presidunce Jacob Zuma and EFF leader Julius Malema fighting their own rear-guard actions against tax claims. Try…

Along with Edward Snowden, Sophie Zhang will be remembered as one of the great whistle-blowers of our age. The former Facebook data scientist’s bombshell memo has refocussed attention on the social media giant’s inability to stop the spread of disinformation and false information on its platforms. “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” Zhang wrote. “I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce…

If Oracle does buy TikTok’s US operations, it will be one of the most unlikely pairings of an old-school enterprise technology firm with a new social media phenomenon. To say that the users of Oracle’s brilliant database technology and TikTok’s youthful happy-snappers have no idea that the other exist is no understatement. The parent users of the former almost certainly have children of their own using the latter. It’s no understatement to say the two companies come from vastly different ends of the software spectrum – high-end databases and mission-critical business software to the seemingly ethereal, virtual bling of short-form…