According to a blog post on the Official Google blog posted on January 12 2010, Google detected “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their corporate infrastructure originating from China in mid December 2009. Google alleges that the cyber attack was successful in stealing intellectual property. In addition, Google discovered that 20+ other large companies had also been targeted by the Chinese attack.

Further investigation by Google has allegedly revealed that the Chinese cyber attacks had as its real goal the hacking of gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists. This led Google to discover that many such gmail accounts had already been comprised and were regularly accessed by (unauthorised) third parties.

It is clear from Google’s post that they feel the Chinese government has abused the trust they once shared, and as a direct result of that breach in trust, Google has now decided that it is no longer prepared to dance with China. Google has announced that they are now no longer willing to offer a localised Google.cn, which is censored, and if that means ending its operations in China, then so be it.

Earlier this year in July, Google announced on their blog that they were building a new operating system, The Google Chrome Operating System, or ChromeOS for short. Yesterday, Google announced on their blog that they are open sourcing ChromeOS and they published a whole bunch of videos to YouTube describing their vision and released their source code to the public.

Google’s idea, in a nutshell, is that they believe there is demand for an operating system that is really fast, really secure and exists purely to facilitate Internet access. All user created data is stored in the cloud, in fact on Google’s servers. All applications are web applications. So the only thing installed on the computer is the operating system. Everything else is accessed via the Internet.

Is such an operating system competition for Windows, Linux, Apple Macs?

Well, for starters, Google’s ChromeOS is not going to be designed to run on any old white box pc, like Windows and Linux are. ChromeOS is going to have custom firmware and a narrowly defined hardware specification, because that is necessary to achieve its goals of fast boot and security. Businesses which deployed ChromeOS based workstations, would have to be comfortable with storing their data on Google’s servers instead of their own, unless Google builds a ChromeOS server, but that is not currently envisaged.

So the market for ChromeOS seems to be people who are prepared to accept a machine that is very locked down, runs a limited set of applications and is tightly integrated with Google’s online services.

Personally, it doesn’t hold much appeal for me because I want to be able to play games on my PC for relaxation. Yes, it is true that a lot of what I do depends on having an Internet connection, but not everything. If my Internet connection is unavailable, I still have access to all my data, which allows me to continue developing applications, for instance. It seems to me, that ChromeOS is so tied to the Net, that if it loses it’s connection then the box running it reverts to being a giant paperweight.

If ChromeOS was developed to run on a wider range of hardware, store its data on user chosen servers and allow continued productivity if the Net connection is lost, it would be of greater interest.

UPDATE:
This Wired article (Why Google Should Cool It With Chrome OS) agrees with me and suggests that Google ChromeOS should be engineered to co-exist with other operating systems on NetBooks so that people can enjoy a hybrid experience.

On Friday, October 24 2008 17h00 until Monday, October 27 2008 14h05, iBurst first suspended my account without contacting me first. When contacted on Friday evening, the support people at iBurst would not reinstate my account. I was told that I was in arrears and that the problem could only be attended to on Monday at the earliest. On Monday, it transpired after asking iBurst accounts department why the account was suspended, that in fact they had screwed up. We had to fax bank statements to them to prove that the subscription had been paid. Eventually they worked out that the error was wholly on their side and my account was reinstated.

Up until this day, I have never received an apology from iBurst for this suspension of my service over an entire weekend. Emails to them asking for compensation have been ignored. It is clear that iBurst doesn’t care about me, nor do they care about any of their subscribers. They do not care how much they inconvenience their customers. The lesson here is that YOU should not do business with iBurst.

On Friday July 17 until Monday July 20 2009 iBurst again suspended my account for being in arrears. The pattern repeated itself. iBurst failed to contact me to rectify the problem before it summarily suspended me. Support staff over the weekend at iBurst were wholly unable or unwilling to attend to my problem and restore my Internet access. Only on Monday once we were able to speak to the “right person” could the problem be remedied. Again my account was not in arrears. iBurst had erred again and suspended my account again without cause.

This time I didn’t bother emailing them to ask for compensation. I knew that they would ignore me again.

This past week, on Wednesday November 11 2009 after 17h00, iBurst suspended my account for the third time without contacting me first. Apparently my account was in arrears again. This time it turned out that their billing system had failed to debit September’s subscription, due wholly to an error on their part. They had put through the debit order for October and November (and received payment). It took them until November 11 to discover that September’s debit had not occurred and instead of contacting me to ask me to provide funds and authorise them to debit my account, they simply suspended my account. Because iBurst does not care if they inconvenience their customers. Contacting iBurst’s support staff after hours proved fruitless – none of them would reinstate my account.

The pattern should be clear to you by now: iBurst suspends accounts after hours, without having staff on hand who can deal with suspension queries, because iBurst doesn’t care how much they inconvenience their paying customers.

On Thursday, I was told that my account would only be reinstated once September’s subscription had been paid. Never mind that they caused this problem in the first place – that did not enter into the equation. Funds were duly provided, the debit went off, and my account was reinstated, for about an hour, then iBurst’s network went down. Support staff told me that my account was active, but their network was down. So after paying the subscription, iBurst couldn’t even deliver me service. The next day,  Friday November 13 2009, I found my service active, but again for only about an hour,  and then it went down again.

I was then told that my service was offline because I had exhausted my bandwidth for the month! While this was true (I have indeed used up my 5GB quota), my Xtreme account, which is the second highest account, is still entitled to remain connected at the throttled rate of 64Kbps.

If you are on a Giga package or higher, your service will be slowed down (throttled) to a maximum of 64 kbps once your cap is reached. – iBurst’s web site

I was told that an iBurst representative would call me back, but that never happened. Eventually, my account was reactivated without anyone calling me to apologise or notify me.

All these calls to iBurst’s support come at a price – iBurst does not have a toll free customer support line. You have to call 087 720 7200 and wait in a queue, while your telephone air time is eaten away. All because they screwed up.

iBurst is just as bad as Telkom, if not worse. At least with Telkom, you can call their support for free.

As I said above, my contract with iBurst expires on February 04 2010. At that time, I intend taking my business to Neotel. I hope that they turn out to be winners.

UPDATE:

Nov 14 2009 19h30: After writing this blog post, my iBurst Internet connection failed again in the early hours of Saturday morning. When I called iBurst support I was again informed that I had no access because my bandwidth was exhausted. The support personnel could not be made to understand that despite this, I was still entitled to remain connected at the throttled rate. They simply refused to help me. So in desperation to get their help, I added 3000MB to my account at a cost of R499. This I did via the iBurst.co.za web site which is the only site my iBurst connection could access. I again called Support and they were just simply unable to help me. This is because iBurst deploys support personnel who don’t know how to do their jobs.

At around 17h00 today I tried again to access the Internet and saw that I was still offline. Eventually, after numerous calls to iBurst support, someone called Jacky called me back and told me that she had reset my account by suspending it and then reactivating it. She asked me to switch my computer and iBurst modem off, bring it back up and then try logging in again. This worked and I am now reconnected. However, I do not consider this to be acceptable service. iBurst completely screwed up my connection this past week and I have been offline for most of this week as a result, which means that I have been completely unable to do my work, which is all conducted online. Furthermore iBurst does not provide a toll free support line so getting their mistakes corrected costs me a lot of wasted phone time. Finally iBurst does not train their technicians to know how to do their jobs. I was incorrectly told that I needed to purchase more bandwidth. If only one person at iBurst knows how to fix things, then they are doing it wrong.

My conclusion remains the same – I refuse to put myself through the wringer with iBurst for another month longer than the contract I have with them says I must.

UPDATE:

Email to both Sandra Smit and Shaun Green of iBurst asking for compensation have been ignored.

Lest you think I am the only person afflicted with an iBurst connection, here’s another South African blogger who received similar treatment. It seems to me that South Africans cannot run a First World quality Internet or telecommunications company. Maybe we’re just too pathetic to do anything right?

Thank your lucky stars that you no longer resemble your pic and go down to the local for a celebratory pint?

OR

Decide this will not do and send in a more recent cheesy snapshot of yourself standing brazenly in front of a police van so that everyone will know how handsome you really are?

A vain Welsh burglar from Swansea chose the latter option. Police have thanked him for his help in tracking him down and the South Wales Evening Post published his updated profile pic on its front page.

I think right about now is a good time for him to turn himself in and decide on a new career choice, because any guidance councilor could tell him that being a career criminal is not going to pay out for him.

via Reuters.

Like many technically-minded persons, I have a long history of doing Windows installs, both for myself and for my customers, and let me tell you, Windows 7 is the least painful install I have ever done.

Back in 1994, before Windows 95 came out (in October 1995), I was running Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was  really unstable and a very unreliable operating system to use. It frequently embarrassed presenters doing PowerPoint presentations on it at conferences, because it would often terminate with a GPF (General Protection Fault) in the middle of their presentation, usually at the point where they were boasting about how robust their new software was. The alternative at that time was Windows NT workstation 3.51, which was better in many ways. However, the biggest obstacle to running Windows NT was it’s huge memory requirement – 16MB! Okay, today that is a joke, but back in 1994, 16MB of memory was expensive, and only “high end CAD stations” had so much memory *rolls eyes*.

By the time Windows 95 came out, Windows NT 4.0 was also on the scene and there was some confusion about whether to run Win95 or WinNT. I eventually sided with Win95 and then later Win98SE because it boasted plug-and-play, a feature which only made it into the NT line in Windows 2000. Windows 98SE served as my operating system till October 2005 when I finally decided it was worth my trouble to upgrade to WinXP. I was supposed to have migrated to Windows 2000 in 2001 when I purchased a new PC from Siltek Dynamic Distribution (shortly before they went bust) which came with Win2000. However, Win2000 never worked on the supplied hardware. It continually froze the system and I was forced to downgrade to Win98SE in order to use the system.

In 2005, in order to install WinXP, I had to buy a new machine, because the hardware of 2001 was not good enough to run XP. I purchased an entry level Intel Celeron machine from LightEdge (which has also subsequently gone bust), which suffered continually from an overheating problem which would cause the PC to just turn itself off, often right in the middle of something important. In July 2008 its motherboard finally gave out, and I purchased a new Foxconn 45CMX motherboard, 1GB DDR2 667Mhz RAM, 160GB SATA2 HDD and Intel Celeron 440 2.0Ghz processor from Sahara. Sahara assembled the components for me. This system, although Celeron based, is fully capable of running Windows 7, both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

One might think that a mere Intel Celeron processor is not powerful enough to run Windows 7, but if you think that, then you are wrong. In fact, Windows 7 runs faster on this hardware than WinXP did. With 1GB of RAM, the 32 bit version of Windows 7 can be installed. If you want to install the 64 bit version, you just need another 1GB of RAM, which costs about R250. To install the 64 bit version, your processor must support 64 bit operation. There are two utilities you can use to check out whether your hardware is up to scratch: Belarc Advisor and Windows 7 upgrade advisor.

I never installed Windows Vista. After hearing about all the problems people were experiencing with Vista, I felt it really wasn’t worth the trouble to switch from XP, which was doing the job well enough.

In March this year, I purchased an external 1TB USB hard drive, which I use to store all my data on. At the time, WinXP was installed on a 20GB IDE drive, and I wanted to see if it would run any better on a faster SATA2 drive, so I did a reinstall of XP on the 160GB drive I had purchased last year from Sahara. However, something went wrong with the installation. I’m not sure what, but there was something about the new hardware configuration that XP didn’t handle well and some parts of XP remained broken (I managed to fix almost all the issues, but not all) until last Friday when I decided to install Windows 7.

The installation of Windows 7 was much easier than I anticipated. I expected to hit numerous driver issues, but I only had one (with getting my iBurst Desktop USB modem installed). Unlike with installing WinXP, Windows 7 didn’t ask me to feed it a driver disk for each bit of hardware in the system – Windows 7 came equipped to handle all of it (with the exception of my iBurst modem).

Before installing Windows 7, I knew the most important thing to me was that my Internet work right away. So a week before doing the install, I checked for drivers for my iBurst modem on iBurst’s web site, but did not find one for Windows 7 at the time. They only had the usual 32 bit WinXP drivers, a 64 bit driver and a 32 bit Vista driver. I downloaded all of them, just to be sure. They now have a 32 bit Windows 7 driver available for download, which is the correct one to use. I managed to get my iBurst modem working with the Vista driver, just to get online and then I got the Win7 version. The XP drivers do not work with Win7.

One of the questions I had to answer before installing Windows 7 was whether to install the 32 bit version or the 64 bit version. To get the full benefit of a 64 bit operating system, the software you use should be compiled to that platform. When I checked, I saw that there exist no 64 bit versions of Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome. There is a hacked 64 bit Firefox version, but no official 64 bit release. It seems likely that within the next 12 months, a lot more 64 bit software will be released, but right now there is still a dearth of 64 bit applications. 64 bit drivers are also scarce. Not every bit of hardware has a 64 bit driver, and if you are the owner of such hardware it means that you will not be able to use it with the 64 bit version of Windows 7. At this time, Linux has more support for the 64 bit platform, mainly because most of the software can simply be recompiled for the targeted platform. Doing that on Windows is only possible if you have access to the driver source code and the requisite compilers.

So my personal recommendation, after doing a lot of reading around, is that the 32 bit version is probably the “right version” to install for most people at this time. The nice thing about getting Windows 7 Ultimate edition is that it includes DVDs for both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions. So when my favourite web browsers are available for the 64 bit platform, I will be interested in giving 64 bit computing a try. But I will probably only do that on future new hardware. Without a doubt, the future of personal computing lies on the 64 bit platform and five years from now, new systems will install 64 bit operating systems without a second thought about it. If you do install Windows 7 64 bit, you will not be able to run any 16 bit software, which includes old DOS and Win3.x apps.

WinXP cannot be upgraded, so to install Windows 7, I booted from the 32 bit Windows 7 DVD. The installation process allowed me to delete the partitions on my 160GB SATA2 HDD that contained my WinXP installation and then recreate them for use by Windows 7. The whole installation process was fast, lasting about 20 minutes. It basically did everything and only asked me a few questions, such as my username, computer name, password to create, what country I lived in and what hard disk to install Win7 on.

If you only have one hard disk, upgrading will be painful, because you will have no choice but to back up all your data to CDs or DVDs before you trash your system and start over. A two disk system is much less hassle because then you just use a smaller hard disk for the operating system, and a larger one for your user data. A 1TB or 1.5TB hard disk for user data is a good option. I recommend an external USB hard disk for data, because you can take it anywhere with you.

So once its all installed what do you get that’s so fantastic?

Essentially, you get a very polished operating system that just looks great and works well from day one. Windows 7 seems to be on top of things from the start. It knows what hardware you have, knows what drivers to install to make it work and then gets everything setup right, so from the moment you first start using it, you don’t have to spend hours tweaking it.

For instance, WinXP didn’t know what to do with my Samsung SyncMaster 24″ LCD display, nor did it have the drivers to make my RADEON ATI HD3450 1GB display card work right. So I had to install drivers for both the display card and the LCD display panel and then with those great specs, XP thought it would be great to default to a screen resolution of 800×600. Like duh. Nobody installs a 24″ display to view the world in 800×600 resolution. Windows 7 has the sophistication to know that a screen like that should default to 1920×1080 resolution, with 32bit pixel colour. And it turned on the fancy new Aero desktop, without me having to tell it what refresh frequency to use etc.

Out of the box, Win7 has great support for multimedia applications. If you have a sound card and a DVD writer installed (like most systems do these days), you can start listening to music, watching DVDs, managing your library of movies and music without having to scramble for software disks, because Win7 installs both Windows Media Player and Windows Media Centre for you.

Navigating your hard disk with Windows Explorer is much easier than the old My Computer interface. I found the bread crumb navigation bar really effective, because you can jump back up the directory (folder) tree with one click. The bread crumb navigation style is found everywhere, even in applications, and in the Control Panel. The Control Panel interface is slick. It hides complexity from the non-technical user, but easily allows more advanced users to access the finer details.

Everywhere you look, you see enhancements – a better interface, an easier way of doing things, more eye candy. The built-in Calculator mini-app, for instance, now has options for programmers and statisticians in addition to the usual standard and scientific. I like the Sticky Notes app. Just write a short note to myself and stick it on my desktop. I like the built-in Chess game. I like how they have a desktop theme for South Africans which displays a gallery of photos of locations from around South Africa, including my home city, Cape Town. I like that I can go browse for more eye-candy laden themes online. When you have a huge LCD display, you can treat it like your very own personalised window on a world of beautiful art and natural beauty from all over. My personal preferences are for photos of beautiful landscapes. Windows 7 helps me to indulge this fetish.

Running on the same hardware, Windows 7 offers a more compelling user experience than Windows XP. Nevertheless, I will be installing an extra 1GB of RAM into my system (for a total of 2GB). Windows 7 will make good use of it. Windows XP would look at the extra RAM and wonder what to use it for.

So if you’re wondering if it’s worth it to switch to Windows 7, then my conclusion is a resounding YES. This is a good operating system, the best version of Windows to date. If you like using Windows, you will love Windows 7.

UPDATE:

Microsoft has two useful utilities for businesses wanting to deploy Windows 7 across their network. Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit and Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5.

Eskom has already hit South Africans with two massive price hikes: 27% last year and 31.3% this year. Earlier this month, on October 14, Eskom CEO, Jacob Maroga, announced that he wants a 45% increase each year for the next 3 years. This outrageous demand has led to widespread shock and anger.

Today, it is rumoured that the board of Eskom has asked Maroga to resign. Could this be the beginning of a new more rational response to South Africa’s energy crisis?

In September 2009, the Mail & Guardian reported that the reason why South Africa experienced massive power outages and load shedding in January 2008 was because Eskom had totally bungled their management of coal. Furthermore, in an Eskom report dated mid 2007, this problem had already been reported to Maroga by an American consultant, Susan Olsen, but no action was taken to prevent what turned out to be a major national disaster and embarrassment for South Africa the following year.

As Harry Truman famously used, the buck stops at Maroga’s desk and it seems that that buck is now kicking the crap out of him. We can hope.

FURTHER READING:
Eskom board asks CEO Maroga to resign
Eskom board asks CEO Maroga to resign – report
Eskom’s proposed hike ‘a serious shock to economy’
Cosatu outraged over Eskom’s proposed 45% hike
CEO scores R5m amid new claims of incompetence

If there is one company which has most held back the economic development of South Africa, it is Telkom. It is the single most hated organisation in South Africa. Telkom has ruined individuals and businesses. It has held South Africa back from developing the cheap telecommunications infrastructure that our country desperately needs to compete in the Internet powered global market. It has contributed to the flight of hugely successful South African business people who realised that they could never realise their dreams in a country so crippled by Telkom. People like Mark Shuttleworth, Vinny Lingham could not soar to the heights they have achieved in a country where Internet bandwidth is non-existent, where it is sold at hugely inflated prices and where the development of additional infrastructure is hamstrung.

Telkom is the dog that has financially depleted the bank accounts of myriads of consumers and businesses, artificially driving up prices for all sorts of things across the board. Telkom has done its level best to impoverish South Africans at every level of society. They are an absolutely despicable evil empire and they must now kneel before the sword that lops off their head.

It is not good enough for Telkom to pay the proposed R3-4 billion fine. All its directors must be imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives without the possibility of parole. We must sink these bastards into the deepest darkest black hole and deny them the ability to ever see a single green leaf or the naked sky again. We must strip from them all their assets, including their pension funds. We must impose upon them and their families the poverty they imposed on the rest of us. Every single asset of Telkom must be sold and the money raised given back to every Telkom account holder for the last 10 years pro-rata. Every person owing Telkom a cent, must be forgiven in full their debt.

It is not possible for us to completely undo the harm that Telkom has done to South Africa over the last decade, but we must try. We must purge this country of their evil, and we must make the severest example of them, lest any other South African monopoly is tempted to follow in their footsteps.

FURTHER READING:
Telkom faces multibillion-rand fine for ‘abusing dominance’
Telkom faces record fine for malpractices
New threat of billions in fines for Telkom

Well, you cheat, of course!

Unless you’re some culinary expert at creating wonderful sauces, your best alternative is to find a really great sauce to accompany your home cooked fillet banquet. Which is precisely what I have done.

Now, there are two fillet sauces that I love above all: pepper and mushroom, so I thought, why not combine them and have them both in one delicious sauce? I give you, my solution, which is so easy, even the most challenged stay at home bachelor can manage it all by themselves, with the minimum of fuss.

Here is what you need:

• 1 kilogram of fillet steak (R140)
• Real butter (to pan fry the steak in)
• 200ml Royco Pepper Sauce sachet containing Green & Black peppercorns
• 285 gram tin of Spar Creamed Mushrooms

Method

• Toss a large knob of butter into your pan with the heat turned up to maximum. You want to cook your fillet at maximum heat so that it sears all the goodness in and browns the meat quickly.
• While the pan is heating up, cut your 1 kilogram of fillet steak into medallions (for fast cooking) or larger chunks if you prefer it that way. The larger your chunks, the redder the interior will be. If you like your steak well done, cut the fillet into medallions about 1.5 cm thick.
• As soon as the butter is all melted and it’s reached maximum temperature, dump your fillet steak into the pan and brown your fillet on both sides, turning it quickly to avoid burning it. When it’s cooked to the degree you like it, which should take about 20 – 30 minutes, take all the meat out and place it on a serving plate.
• Turn the heat down to the lowest setting, because now it’s time to create your perfect sauce. Do not discard what’s in your pan, or swop it out for a fresh one – you want to keep all the flavour from cooking the meat in the pan, when you add the sauce to it.
• Empty the tin of Creamed Mushrooms into the pan and stir quickly, because the pan will still be super hot. The temperature will come down very quickly.
• Add the contents of the Pepper sauce sachet to the creamed mushrooms and stir until the sauces are blended together.
• Add your cooked meat back into the pan of sauce, pushing them down into the sauce mixture so that all the pieces are smothered in sauce.
• You can now serve yourself some of the fillet steak drenched in a unique pepper mushroom sauce blend. You can leave the heat on the lowest setting to keep the rest of the meal warm.

1 kilogram of fillet is enough to feed two people or 1 extra greedy person.

Anyway, try this out if you like. It works well with Rump steak as well, if fillet is a bit too expensive for you. If you like steak, and you enjoy pepper and mushroom sauces, you’ll love this meal. If you like potato chips with your steak, you can oven bake some while you’re preparing the steak.

Of course, the best way to round out this meal is with a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, an intimate candle-lit table for two, and good company.

What brought this topic on? After a long hiatus, I decided to go back and revisit my old Yahoo 360 blogs that I had created back in 2006, only to discover that the whole of 360 had been wiped out by Yahoo! They didn’t bother to migrate them to my profile, because that was supposed to be done by me. Yahoo did send me an email to this effect on June 30 2009 notifying about this, but they neglected to copy the message to my gmail address, even though I had indicated in my yahoo profile that my gmail address was my primary email address! I have never used my yahoo email address for anything. So all my 360 data is gone for good. Oh well.

Yahoo has recently gone on a crazy shutdown spree, wiping out huge portions of the Internet that they used to control, like GeoCities, for instance. There’s a fascinating article about the origins of GeoCities here. The real story in the article was how badly Yahoo mismanaged that valuable online real estate, and now they’ve just shut it all down, obliterating huge amounts of legacy web sites. The Archive Team tried their best to back it up and mirror GeoCities before Yahoo pulled the plug yesterday, October 26 2009, but guess what? Yahoo refused to assist them in any way to archive the data! Now that’s just mean!

Another site on Death Watch that caught my attention was ma.gnolia.com. Magnolia was a popular social bookmarking site like Delicious or Reddit. It was launched in 2006 and died in a single day on January 30 2009 when all data was lost due to disk failure. The crazy thing was that the owner self-hosted the 500GBs of user created data and had no useable backup. The service is being relaunched now at gnolia.com and is by invitation only. The owner has apparently learnt his lesson and will be using all the data redundancy hosting services that money can buy this time around. This post sums up what went wrong at Magnolia.

One local web site that I used to enjoy reading on and off was tashitagg.co.za. (also tashitagg.com). If you do a search on Wikipedia for tashitagg, you’ll find 6 different articles have a reference link to a tashitagg article, none of which are still accessible, which is a great shame. Tashi Tagg, and her husband, Luke, created tashitagg from their home in Kenilworth, Cape Town. It was originally centred around the first South African Big Brother reality TV show. It gathered a large readership from being ranked high for that show and went on to discuss a whole slew of other reality TV programs, such as The Amazing Race.

Luke wrote a no-holds barred column called The Daily Smoke (link goes to archived site) which was often entertaining reading. As TashiTagg grew, they decided to add blogs to their original site, which also had very active forums. However, I believe the blogs feature proved its undoing as they allowed it to completely takeover the site and ultimately led to a large falling out with their audience over an argument over who owned the copyright to material posted. Tashi and Luke Tagg clarified the issue by telling their contributors that all the content they had added in the blogs didn’t belong to the authors, but to Tashi Tagg, at which point, many blogs were promptly erased and many members departed in anger. That crucial misstep by the owners ultimately led to the disbandment of tashitagg, both of whom now edit tvsa.co.za.

What dead sites do you miss?

Investigative reporters from newspapers all over the world have probed every aspect of Huntley’s life, approaching his former neighbours in Mowbray, Cape Town, a suburb not far from where I live, downloading his image from his personal FaceBook page and pillaging his profile for dirt, talking to his estranged Canadian wife and even knocking on the door of his father’s Pringle Bay beach house just outside of Cape Town.

So far only one South African political organisation has stepped forward in Huntley’s defense – Afriforum. If you view the staff of Afriforum (here) it’s immediately clear that Afriforum is staffed by white Afrikaans speaking South Africans (aka Boers, as I have previously referred to them on this blog). However, I’m not going to discredit them based on who they are. It is clear that they represent a group of South Africans who believe that South Africa is not a safe place for their kind.

What is undisputed is the fact that Huntley was the victim of violent crime in South Africa and on more than one occasion. Much mileage has been made of the fact that he did not report those crimes to the police. Well that doesn’t make sense to me. I, myself, was stabbed during a mugging back in December 2000 and I did not bother reporting it to the police either because I rightfully believed that the police were not going to do anything about apprehending my muggers. The race of my muggers were Coloured. The South African Police Services are a joke, in my personal opinion, and it is shared by many who have dealt with them when they have fallen victim to crime. So, yeah, in South Africa many people see the SAPS as part of the problem not as “solution providers” and not using them is not an unusual thing to happen. In fact, I would say that many people avoid them.

The difference between myself and Huntley was that I didn’t decide to emigrate because of that mugging. I just made a lifestyle change and I have not experienced crime since then. It is possible to live in South Africa and experience very little or no crime.

What I do find outrageous is the media’s invasion into Huntley’s private life. The Star went and read which FaceBook groups Huntley was subscribed to and decided that because he was a member of some sexually promiscuous sounding groups that his marriage was a sham and that he only did it to get into Canada. His embarrassed wife is now harbouring the same doubts, but to point to a few FaceBook groups as evidence of that I find outrageous. FaceBook is a sick joke and most of those groups on there are as lame as shit. People add themselves to all kinds of groups and it doesn’t amount to a bag of beans.

To wrap all my thoughts up into a tidy conclusion, I think Brandon Huntley should be allowed to remain in Canada. Sending him back here after he has been turned into a national pariah would be most unfair. Secondly, South Africa needs to take note of groups like Afriforum and acknowledge that violent crime is a reality that many South Africans of all races experience and that the South African Police Services are still not being used by many crime victims because of the extremely bad reputation the SAPS still enjoys. SAPS is not an effective organisation. They do not apprehend criminals. They do not treat people humanely and fairly. They, as a police service, consistently fail the people they are supposed to serve. Their reputation takes regular knocks, when for instance they arrest people like Helen Zille, when she was former Mayor of Cape Town.

So this whole Huntley case is no longer about Canada’s “bad decision” to grant Huntley asylum. In fact, Canada can do whatever the hell they like. They can let whoever they like in and for whatever reason suits them and we don’t have to like it. This is now about South Africa and how many South Africans experience it. It’s time we swept our own porch clean and stopped yelling about what Canada is doing.

Additional reading:
About Huntley’s Canadian wife
Clear evidence that Huntley was a victim of violent crime
Afriforum’s support for Huntley
Melanie Huntley’s concern for her husband