Author: Toby Shapshak

It was easy last week to focus on the failure to fire South Africa’s two most incompetent Cabinet ministers – Bathabile Dlamini and Nomvula Mokonyane – but the country should be heartened by our new communications minister. It might be facetious to say Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams is infinitely better than any of her predecessors because they are such a motley crew of useless and corrupt Zumaïtes who did more to advance state capture than they did the country’s best interests. None more so than the utterly reviled Faith Muthambi, who the GuptaLeaks revealed committed a crime by forwarding Cabinet minutes to…

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? It’s a decade-old question that has gotten more and more attention since this mythical figure came up with the idea for Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology. Bitcoin, the world’s newest and perhaps most controversial currency, turned 10 this month; prompting a wave of nostalgia and innumerable commentaries about its significance to the world. Nakamoto proposed the idea to a cryptography mailing list in October 2008 and released the first bitcoin software in January 2009, and mined the first block of bitcoins, called the genesis block or block number 0, in which he embedded this text:…

Although the internet has enabled an “amazing advance” for humanity, it has “real problems” with social networks, the addictive nature of smart devices and the loss of our personal privacy, says Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was an unusual scene: a former US president and former first lady, the two most powerful elected officials in America some might say, sitting on a stage in Johannesburg discussing the state of the world – and the effects of the internet and technology on democracy and our mental health. Their interviewer was Adrian Gore, the CEO of Discovery Health, which puts on its…

“So you just view it in Safari,” a friend asked me with great bewilderment when I explained I didn’t have the Facebook app on my phone and the interactions he saw were through my iPhone’s browser. Just over a year ago I deleted Facebook off my phone. Not long afterwards I deleted its companion Messenger app. I can safely report that I haven’t missed anything. When I first wrote about it last year, my reasons were pretty simple: we had a child and the usually useful notifications became a pest. Instead of notifying me about meaningful details, the app was…

Perhaps because it was Apple CEO Tim Cook sounding the alarm, his admonishments that our personal data “is being weaponized against us with military efficiency” are all the more real. Cook, the long-time Apple insider who took over from Steve Jobs, shares his predecessor’s stance on privacy, which is a rare difference in the world of tech firms who make money from their users. Facebook, Google, YouTube and to a lesser extent Twitter, use the information provided by users to sell advertising against. Instead of buying a product (a phone or a software program) people are buying a service and…

Most of the conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be focussed on the potential job losses this new form of automation will result in. Some 800-million people could lose their jobs by 2030 according to the figures from a study by the McKinsey Global Institute last December, which also predicted AI will affect 800 various job types and occupations in 46 countries. That’s 20% of the global workforce, a not insignificant number of people who will be affected. “We estimate that as many as 375-million workers globally (14% of the global workforce) will likely need to transition to new occupational categories…

When I handed cash to the cashier at a restaurant in Shanghai, he looked at me blankly for a moment. In front of the register were prominent signs for WeChat Pay and Alipay, the two dominant forms of mobile payments which are used by hundreds of millions of Chinese instead of cash. He took my money, and I ate my noodles overlooking the pond in the famous Yu Gardens, feeling uncharacteristically like a yokel. We’ve pioneered mobile payments in Africa. I’m used to using M-Pesa in Kenya and haven’t walked into a branch since FNB’s smartphone app became my personal…

Having created the number one restaurant in London on TripAdvisor, which never existed, serial prankster Oobah Butler has delivered another hilarious riposte to our online world. Having created a fake restaurant called for “The Shed at Dulwich” and propelled it to the top spot, Butler was inundated with media requests to appear on TV and radio shows. His antics were debated in the Singapore parliament and a Japanese television program about him trended on Twitter in that country with the hashtag #LacksHonor. (Watch the video here.) He also masqueraded as a fake jeans designer Georgio Peviani at Paris Fashion Week, before hunting down the actual designer of the…

When it first burst onto the app scene in 2010, Instagram was a revelation. This little picture-sharing app let iPhone users not only share their pictures but add clever filters at the touch of a button. Suddenly everyone could be Obie Oberholzer, the extraordinary South African photographer whose richly coloured images are artistic genius. Earlier this month the co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left in a huff, the exact details of which we don’t really know but the broad strokes are: Kevin and Mike started their ridiculous adventure in 2010, growing their user base at a fantastic rate. Then,…

This time Facebook can’t blame a third party for last week’s major hacking of some 50m accounts, nor its seemingly scandalous use of cellphone details for marketing purposes when they were logged as security backup numbers. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook tried desperately to paint itself as the victim by an outside party that said it would delete user details but didn’t. Actually, the personality quiz app that scraped all that data – an estimated 87m users – was just using the extraordinarily lax privacy controls Facebook itself allowed such apps. This time there can be no excuses.…