Author: Toby Shapshak

Until last Sunday, Pegasus usually meant the fabled Greek mythical flying horse. Now the name to stand for arguably the most diabolical spyware the world has ever seen. Starting revelations this past weekend have emerged that a spyware tool called Pegasus – made by Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group – might have been used to snoop on Presidents Cyril Ramaphosa and France’s Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and 11 other heads of state. Once “infected with Pegasus, a client of NSO could in effect take control of a phone, enabling them to extract a person’s messages, calls, photos…

TikTok is the new MTV. Except you don’t actually have to have any talent or do anything original, like sing your own songs or choreograph your own dances. So-called influencers are the ultimate expression of hype over substance, real or otherwise. I read an enthralling, but horrific, profile of the epicentre of so-called influencers’ activity, Los Angeles – or Lost Angeles – in Harper’s magazine, a New Yorker-esque publication that still spends time on so-called deep journalism. Thanks, Anne Taylor, a die-hard journo in her soul. “The Anxiety of Influencers” is a brilliant, albeit disturbing, feature about the TikTok generation by…

There is light at the end of the tunnel for rolling blackouts after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 10 x increase in the capacity companies can self-generate to 100MW. This is good news for mining, manufacturing, farms and other big firms which have seethed at the artificially low 10MW that mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has been trying to impose. Bizarrely Mantashe, who was appointed to the all-important portfolio by Ramaphosa in 2018, claimed during his budget speech in parliament, that “a lot of noise” about the 50MW threshold and incredulously claimed that “our research and survey, where…

Going off-grid isn’t entirely cost-effective yet, but we’re 80% there and it has freed us from Eskom’s sudden-onset rolling blackouts. Now that my new solar household has lived through several cycles of Eskom’s unpredictable load-shedding, I can report back on what the experience was like. But first I have to apologise. It’s the same apology I felt I had to make after I had fibre installed in our home. Suddenly, I know what it’s like to live in the same suburb as a cabinet minister or Eskom manager. When the rest of the neighbourhood WhatsApp group started the usual “has…

The ruling party has mastered the art of not answering the question. Last week the country was treated to the absurd spectacle of ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe trying to not answer a direct question. How hard can it be? The question was: has suspended secretary general Ace Magashule been invited to the weekend Zoom call? “Everyone expected to attend the NEC meeting will attend,” he told an incredulous nation last Friday night. It was an opportunity for a simple yes or no. These words clearly do not exist in the limited logic of the ANC. Politicians have developed a frustrating…

It will be cold comfort to Virgin Active – and all it’s customers – that last week’s ransomware attack is part of a global phenomenon that is scarily gaining momentum. City Power in Joburg was locked out in 2019 while cities all over the world have experienced this form of malicious software (malware) attack. Security firm Kaspersky found that nearly half of the South African ransomware victims (42%) paid the fee hoping to get their data back. Whether they paid or not, only 24% of victims were able to restore all their files. Of all the attacks, 11% lost almost…

For the last few years, my favourite tech companies have been Apple and Microsoft. It’s not just that I use a MacBook (the delightful new M1 Pro) and an iPhone, nor that I use Microsoft Word for all my writing. I like them because they sell me a service which I pay for with my credit card – not from them data-mining everything about me and my online habits so that they can sell me to their real customers, the advertisers. Yeah Google and Facebook, I’m glaring at you. There is no wonder that the greatest outcry from an impending…

“The problem is the batteries are stupid,” a close friend told me 12 years ago about his then highly rare adoption of living off the grid through using solar. He would later write up his experience for the Mail & Guardian in what became the most quoted article on going solar for nearly a decade, and has what must go down as one of the greatest intros. “The salesman at the solar power shop told me: ‘You have no idea how stupid batteries are.’ That comment made me wonder about his intelligence, so it took me some time to realise the canny…

It’s strange to imagine that this once obscure company that specialised in once nascent voice recognition software, has grown into such a prized acquisition that Microsoft this month paid $19bn. You may think you’ve never used Nuance’s technology, but if you’ve ever said “Hey Siri” you’re using Nuance’s voice-recognition technology that Siri is built on. It’s Dragon Naturally Speaking products are much better known, and were pioneers in helping people speak to their computers instead of typing. Nuance has found a fertile niche in healthcare – half of US physicians and 77% of US hospitals use it – which Microsoft…

The first time I opened a bank account it was in a grand branch of Barclays Bank in an era when the bank manager was a kind of demigod. I remember the upheaval and drama when Barclays, quite rightly, left our then pariah country. Back then “going to the bank“ was one of the things that you did like going to the post office or going shopping. The bank had an extraordinarily central part in society by virtue of the fact that everybody got money from the bank. If you had a loan or you wanted to deposit or withdraw money, the only…