Author: Toby Shapshak

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…

Why didn’t Experian immediately tell us that its data had been stolen and that it had been dumped onto the internet? Did the multinational credit agency really think that angry South Africans wouldn’t find out it was economical with the truth when it claimed the data breach of 24-million consumers and 800,000 businesses had been “contained”? The data was leaked onto the internet, as everyone suspected, in the two and a half months that the conman had it. They failed to admit the lengthy delay in their first press release. It’s an astounding irony that a business which essentially provides…

Apart from prohibiting the use of Huawei technology by US law enforcement agencies, US President Donald Trump went a step further by banning US firms from dealing with the Chinese telecoms giant. At the heart of that ban was a stipulation that US technology could not be sold to the world’s biggest maker of network equipment and second-largest smartphone manufacturer. Huawei has continued to operate, and still makes brilliant smartphones, but they are forced to ship without Google’s Play Store. Without the easy access to apps and games, it’s a harder sell for its Android phones despite their good hardware…

The most astounding thing about the Experian security breach of 24-million South Africans’ personal data is not that the credit agency willingly gave the information to a “fraudster”, but that Experian will escape unpunished because of years-long delays in finalising the legislation. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) only came into effect this July and gives companies until next July to comply with the regulations. That means the 24m South Africans and 800,000 businesses whose data was handed to a “suspected fraudster” by Experian have no recourse. Similarly, the so-called masterdeeds data breach – where an estimated 60m South…