Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, Facebook Chairman, and controlling shareholder, has always made a point of ensuring that his power over Facebook is effectively unassailable, an approach that many have felt unfair at best, and totalitarian at worst. Now, in the wake of consecutive years of scandals involving the social media giant on everything from their [...]
At the end of last month, Facebook announced that it would be getting what will probably be the biggest ever redesign of the platform in 15 years. The new look was officially revealed at the annual Facebook Developers conference, (F8) in California. The new design will remove the ubiquitous blue menu bar, and replace it [...]
Earlier this month, researchers released information revealing a flaw in almost every Intel chip manufactured since 2011 that made it possible to harvest sensitive data, including account tokens, keys and passwords, from the processor. Microarchitectural data sampling results from a flaw in the physical design of the chip, and in response, software firms have stepped [...]
The internet has traditionally been seen as largely "ungovernable" thanks to its decentralised nature and the potential (fast decreasing) for anonymity. A popular description for it has been that it's like the Wild West, which has struck me as amusing for years, since I remember when the internet really was a lawless and wild place, [...]
After the relatively recent Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw Facebook user data being harvested and used for political campaign purposes, the Federal Trade Commission in the US began investigating the social media platform, for a potential breach of a 2011 agreement with the platform regarding consumer privacy. Of course, that's only one of a number [...]
According to the Global State Of Digital In 2019 report by Hootsuite, South African's spend among the most time online of any country, with an average of nearly 8.5 hours a day spent online, compared to a bit over 6.5 hours a day for US users. This is despite the fact that we still have [...]
In the unlikely event that you ever needed more evidence that we're in the digital information age, it turns out the emoji's the little pictures (or emoticons, the little symbols) we use in digital / online communication to express emotion are being used more and more frequently as evidence to support arguments in court. A [...]
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 [...]
