More than 3 years after first being tabled in Parliament, the South African Cybercrimes Bill is finally on the verge of being officially enacted, with the Deputy Minister of Justice acknowledging that even though many cyber crimes are already illegal under other Acts, the current legislation is not advanced enough to keep up with online [...]
According to the ZACR (ZA Central Registry), more than 1.2 million domains have now been registered across all Second-Level Domains that the registry administers. This includes the SLD's "co.za," "org.za," and "net.za," amongst others, as well as 3 Geographic TLDs (Top-Level Domains), ".joburg," ".durban" and ".capetown." The most popular of these, the eponymous ".co.za" has [...]
In the latest salvo in the fake news stakes, Google itself has been identified as a major enabler of the proliferation of websites which spread fake news, or "disinformation." It has been revealed in a recent investigation that many of these sites support themselves through the user of Google's publisher advertising platform, Google Adsense. Adsense [...]
According to Narratiive, a leading online audience measurement, modelling and verification company a total of 39.6 million unique browsers viewed over a billion pages online in South Africa this past September. Nearly 70% of those were Mobile Unique Browsers. (Yes, mobile really is first.) Here's the rest of their data on what South African's did [...]
At the beginning of this month, Facebook announced that as many as 50 million user accounts had been compromised by hackers who took advantage of a vulnerability in the "View As" functionality (which lets you see how your profile would look to somebody else), to steal Facebook access tokens allowing them to take over other [...]
20 years ago this month, and two years after it was launched internally at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google was officially incorporated as a company. At first, they didn't get much attention, being only one of a large number of competing search engines and "web portals," but within a few months [...]
So-called fake news has been one of the hottest topics for the last year, and platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have working on addressing threats posed by disinformation. At Facebook's developer conference earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said that the platform would "never be unprepared again" for things like the interference of Russian trolls [...]
In Europe's biggest ever anti-trust claim, Google is facing a potential US$ 5 Billion fine for anti-competitive practices relating to their use of the mobile Android operating system to "stifle competition." According to the charge, Google uses the mobile operating system (which is installed on 80% of the smartphones in the world), to unfairly favour [...]
In the first ever public demonstration of an AI technology that IBM has been working on for the last 5 years, last week saw the tech giant's "Project Debater" pit their artificial intelligence against two human debaters on the topics of government-subsidised space exploration, and telemedicine. Although the computer had never studied the topics, it [...]
A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has revealed social media in general, and Facebook in particular, is losing ground as a source for news as more people lose trust in social media for hard news. According to a survey of 74,000 people across 37 countries, the use of social [...]
