Author: Toby Shapshak

There is an awful irony in the hack of US agencies as part of some 250 networks compromised by Russian hackers last year. Piggy-packing on Orion software used to manage the many computers on a network – made by US firm SolarWinds ­ – these hackers have gained unprecedented and seemingly unlimited access to American secrets. It was a catastrophic failure of cybersecurity, arguably the greatest cyber hack in modern times. It’s akin to the Allies capturing the Nazi’s cryptography device, the Enigma machine, which allowed them to eavesdrop on German military communications. Instead of directly attacking the networks themselves, the…

Of the many companies who will breathe out in relief that Donald Trump is no longer US president, surely the deepest sigh will come from Huawei and TikTok. Without Trump and his chaotic and spontaneous approach to geopolitics and his haphazard use of executive orders, what does it mean for the Chinese companies that he has been relentlessly attacking? These Chinese firms have been battling perceptions and innuendo from the Trump administration for years, as securocrats have convinced the former president and much of the western world that Huawei poses a threat to telecommunications, despite never providing any evidence. Huawei…

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Marcé Bester is not only Stuff’s new digital editor, but also our publication’s first female editor. I’m also thrilled to welcome Nick Cowen as Stuff’s new Associate Editor, while Brad Lang is now deputy digital editor. Marcé has been with Stuff for three years, having interned for us when she was studying. We tracked her down and hired her after she graduated. And, like all of us at Stuff, she is an ardent gamer.  Marcé says: “Over the past year, it’s become clear that Stuff’s digital channels play a significant role in…

Despite a rush by millions of people to download Telegram and Signal, I suspect the vast majority of people will accept the latest WhatsApp terms of use anyway. It’s human nature and Mark Zuckerberg knows it. The Facebook CEO has been pushing the boundary of what is private and what is permissible for the last 15 years. Remember the outcry when he said in 2010 that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people”. What he failed to mention was that Facebook has been consistently pushing its users…

Facebook has “switched to covert marketing” and is using “paid bots [which are] adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia” entry because it is unable to compete with Telegram, claims its cofounder Pável Dúrov. After last week’s latest bombshell privacy scandal about Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and now wants users to agree to a new set of terms and conditions or lose access to the messaging app with over 2-billion users. Dúrov says “Facebook has an entire department devoted to figuring out why Telegram is so popular” but he’s “happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give…

WhatsApp just made it really easy for me to write my first column of the year. Because it wants to change the terms and conditions of its service, WhatsApp now requires users to provide a whole host of information about themselves, their contacts, and location. All of this must be agreed to before 8 February or users would lose access to WhatsApp. Readers of this column know I have long feared and worried about the extensive power that Facebook has over the billions of people who use its messaging platforms. At the beginning of last year, I tried to convince…

Readers of the column will know I have no special love for unions, especially not the ones involved in the destruction of our civil service, education and South African Airways. But there is a fascinating development brewing in big technology where the firms have strongly resisted any attempts at unionising. Google and Amazon, most notably, are the most resistant to these forces. But this week a union was formed at Google, with all of 230 members, called the Alphabet Workers Union, named for Google’s holding company, Alphabet. Members will be asked to pay 1% of their salary and equity as…

A fascinating debate is unfolding in the nascent field of artificial intelligence about the fundamental building blocks of this new technology. At the heart of the debate is ethics – and how to build it into these new AI systems. Attempts to introduce algorithms to help judges make less emotive or prejudiced sentences has resulted in rulings that have shocked the organisers, in some instances in the United States, by being more prejudiced and sentencing black defendants more harshly. The problem is the underlying assumptions can be prejudicial, it seems. While computer scientists assumed the base statistics of incarceration (in…

Twenty-seven Instagrams. That’s what Salesforce paid for Slack, the upstart messaging app that has become a market leader in its rapidly growing category. Actually, nearly 28 Instagrams, given the $27.7bn price tag. It’s a phenomenal success story for a company that started out making computer games. The game was called, ironically, Glitch; while Slack was originally the in-house messaging tool for the company that made it, called Tiny Speck. It has raised about $15bn but the game, launched in September 2011, bombed. However, that messaging app proved to be the real star of the show and Slack was launched in…

Facebook used its “monopoly power to crush smaller rivals [and] snuff out competition” argue 48 US states – along with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – which in two mammoth lawsuits want it to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. The most damning quote comes from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself, who wrote in a 2008 email about smaller competitors: “it is better to buy than compete”. There you have it, the Zuckerberg Approach to Innovation in a sentence. This email is included in the FTC’s filing, which argues that Facebook had a “systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly” and Zuckerberg…