On the 16th of June, around midday, I left home to travel to China on a university studying programme for the second time in a year. Besides the basics of worrying about whether I had enough clothes, or my toothbrush, I had to consider my social media and messaging applications, which was a strange experience because even though I went to China last July as well, some things have changed in China regarding our beloved social medias.
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Everyone has at some point either got an email from someone from an obscure African country or a phone call from an Asian call centre asking for your personal details and banking information. Now while we may laugh at these very transparent attempts at identity fraud or theft, there are groups or individuals who are stealing thousands of people’s data from cleverly made online traps.
This process of theft was coined as “Phishing” by a well known hacker from the mid 90’s, Khan C Smith. Phishing usually takes the form of email spamming and/or scamming and can also be found over instant messaging applications.
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If you’ve opened your email recently, there’s a very high chance that you have been flooded by tons of “Update our private policy” emails. Well, as much as these emails might look like spam… they’re not…
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The world wide web is the greatest source of knowledge that mankind has ever had at its fingertips. We live in an age of data and information, where any question you could possibly have can be answered in less than 5 minutes, thanks to search engines, social networks, wikipedia and dozens of other sources of information spread across the web.
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On Friday the 11th of May, I arrived at the Vanilla offices for a very different reason. It wasn’t for a meeting, or to work, but rather to taste test chilli sauces. And so, just before 1pm, the rest of the staff at Vanilla and I piled into the Play Room where our trial by fire had been set up.
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The word “polyglot” comes from the ancient greek words, “polu” (meaning many) and “glotta” (meaning tongues) and is used to describe people who can speak 5 to 6 languages at a very high level. In order to flex their languages muscles, polyglots around the world organise meet-ups, where they compare notes on language learning and listen to seminars given by researchers who are dedicated to develop new methods of language acquisition. All the while, chatting along in six different languages…
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Every second, 40 000 burning questions funnel into the Google search bar from millions of internet users worldwide. Doing the math gets the daily take of searches up to just over 3.5 BILLION! Not being able to consult Dr. Google about every aspect of life might be a genuine concern for many users. Well, their worst fears are actually realised, and somewhere not too far from home…
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“Vanilla provide a hardware and systems procurement service for all our clients. We spend a few million rand per year on computers and associated hardware and software. We are dealers with many wholesale distributors around South Africa. After working with Frontosa for more than a decade – who we have always respected to have great computer build skills – we are shocked at the recent decision not to accept return on an “”Asus Universal Docking station””. The docking station was bought a few days after a new Asus Zenbook was purchased as the way to connect the notebook to ethernet cable and external monitor.
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“There’s something special about experiencing the full speed of fibre for the first time. After coming from my home with a slow 6Mbps fixed wireless line (which, I should add, is not symmetrical, so my upload speed is woefully slow), Vanilla’s fibre network in the office blew my mind. It was unbelievably fast, and I had no idea that plebs like myself and the other interns that had started would just be allowed to use all that speed at whim.
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Well, it’s clear that there isn’t just some magic internet port installed into every home, or some sort of magic wifi. Far from it actually.
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