Email reads:

Right now, the Avaaz website is under massive attack. An expert is telling us that an attack this large is likely coming from a government or large corporation, with massive, simultaneous and sophisticated assaults from across the world to take down our site.

We were expecting this. Our people-powered campaigning has been fearless, and we’ve taken on the world’s worst actors head-on, in ways that genuinely hurt them – from the Syrian and Chinese regimes to Rupert Murdoch, Big Oil and organized crime. The Syrian dictatorship called our campaigner ‘the most dangerous man in the world’, and a UK inquiry recently revealed emails between Murdoch’s news corporation and top levels of government saying the Avaaz campaign against Murdoch was their biggest concern. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering when these people are going to come after us.

And it’s begun. We have urgent campaigns on oceans, forests and Syria we need to run, but the attack has been going on for 36 hours straight, threatening our ability to keep campaigning. Because of top-notch security, our site is still up, but it’s not enough. We need to show these actors that when they attack Avaaz, they’re messing with people. And people-power can’t be intimidated or silenced, it only grows stronger. Click below to donate to an Avaaz defence fund to take our security to the next level, and show our attackers that whatever they throw at us only makes us stronger:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/massive_attack_on_avaaz_a/?vl

National authorities have been alerted to the attack. But we urgently need the defence fund to help us:

• rapidly build industrial-scale security so that no attack can stop us campaigning
• hire top hackers and technologists to manage our systems, defend us and test our defences
• increase the physical security of our most vulnerable staff in places like Lebanon and Russia
• take a range of other actions to improve our technology and security

Avaaz is a lightning rod that channels voices from across the world, from incredibly brave Tibetan, Russian and Syrian demonstrators risking everything for their freedom, to Bolivian indigenous communities saving their forest from being chopped in half. These people face intense danger, and repelling this attack is just another front in their and our struggle for democracy.

Millions of us have campaigned to keep corporations and governments from censoring and controlling the web. Now one of them is trying to censor us. So far, we’re still standing, and our amazing member-funded systems mean that we can run this appeal for support safely and securely. But our campaigning is under real threat. We need to act, and show that these tactics only make us stronger:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/massive_attack_on_avaaz_a/?vl

Avaaz can stand up to governments and corporations only because all of our strength, legitimacy, and funding comes from people, and people alone. We don’t accept money – any money – from governments, corporations, foundations, or even large individual donors. It’s extremely rare among large civil society organizations today, but 100% of our money comes from small online donations, and we don’t accept gifts over 5000 Euros from anyone. That’s why we’re independent, and that’s why we’re a threat to those who put power before people. Let’s keep being a threat.

With hope and determination,

Ricken and the whole Avaaz team.

THE chairman of Nedbank , SA’s fourth-largest listed banking group, Reuel Khoza, has warned SA’s democracy is under threat from a “strange breed” of political leaders who appear to be incapable of dealing with the demands of modern-day governance and leadership.

He said SA was fast losing the checks and balances provided by the constitution, and called on South Africans to hold to account “putative leaders who, due to sheer incapacity to deal with the complexity of 21st century governance and leadership”, could not lead.

“We have a duty to insist on strict adherence to the institutional forms that underpin our young democracy,” Dr Khoza wrote in Nedbank’s latest annual report, which was released on Friday.

His comments are the first so far by the chairman of a JSE-listed banking group since the government announced plans to review the judiciary, and some leaders in the African National Congress (ANC) called for the constitution to be reviewed as it hindered social and economic transformation.

On the same day, the embattled president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, derided President Jacob Zuma ’s leadership, describing it as a ” dictatorship” at a public lecture at Wits University.

The fact that the chairman of one of SA’s largest companies has publicly rebuked the political leadership could be seen as an indication of the depth of disquiet in the private sector about the political direction of the ANC ahead of its elective conference in December.

“Our political leadership’s moral quotient is degenerating and we are fast losing the checks and balances that are necessary to prevent a recurrence of the past,” Dr Khoza said. “SA is widely recognised for its liberal and enlightened constitution, yet we observe the emergence of a strange breed of leaders who are determined to undermine the rule of law and override the constitution .”

Dr Khoza said this was not the accountable democracy for which generations had suffered. “The integrity, health, socioeconomic soundness and prosperity of SA is the collective responsibility of all citizens, corporate or individual,” he said.

He also called for a partnership between the government and the private sector to solve SA’s worsening unemployment crisis. This could be achieved by dismantling barriers to entrepreneurship and seconding graduates to local authorities to gain the experience needed in the private sector.

SA has more than 800000 unemployed graduates, most of whom studied humanities and arts, which the private sector does not need, says research company Adcorp Analytics.

Dr Khoza said: “One of the major socioeconomic and political challenges facing our country is addressing unemployment and creating jobs. While these issues are priorities on the national agenda, it should be acknowledged that there are few cases in the world where government and big business have been able to create jobs on a large scale.

“Job creation is also stifled if our economy is not expanding. The issue needs to be addressed by focusing on entrepreneurship. Government should create an enabling environment with minimal regulation to enable entrepreneurs to flourish,” he said.

Dr Khoza said the education system was producing thousands of graduates each year, yet the lack of skills and experience made it difficult to accommodate them in the formal economy.

“At the same time local governments … are in dire need of efficient administration and management. We believe government and the private sector should collaborate to create a programme to deploy these unemployed graduates and recently qualified people to local authorities for a few years,” said Dr Khoza. ” Corporate SA can play a key role in sponsoring these graduates .”

There was also a need to use retired executives to mentor young graduates.

kamhungas@bdfm.co.za

As long as I pay the bill, Eskom can kiss my ASS !!!

Once again this ANC government has managed to introduce yet another tax to punish primarily white taxpayers, how lovely. The constitution of this country forbids racial profiling, it forbids discrimination, it says everyone is equal but we have yet to see any such a thing come out of ANC mouths. Add to this the recent statement from Desmond Tutu saying that rich whites should be taxed more, literally to keep punishing them for Apartheid and you certainly know who he’s speaking for. How UTTERLY SHAMEFUL for a supposed “man of the cloth” to utter such words, he is not an archbishop’s ass. So far our Constitution is nothing more than idle words on useless paper and its clear that from now till the end of time the ANC will keep conjuring new taxes to keep filling their own pockets, they certainly are not doing this to help their own people, the last 17 years has proven that the ANC only wish to line their own pockets.

Article reads (from Buanews):

Pretoria – Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele says the new toll gate system on major Gauteng roads is a done deal and that it is just a matter of time before it is implemented.

“It’s done. The tolls are there, the money has been spent and decisions have been taken,” Ndebele said at an Infrastructure Development Cluster media briefing in Cape Town on Thursday.

The tolls between Pretoria and Johannesburg are expected to be up and running in the next five months.

Last week, Cabinet approved the revised fee structure for the toll system, instructing Ndebele to effect the approval in terms of the SA National Roads Agency Limited and National Roads Act.

While the implementation of the system has sparked fierce criticism and opposition from motorists, Ndebele is adamant that the user pay principle, which he said was common in all major and emerging economies across the world, will be enforced.

“The debate about nationalising the department cannot be encouraged … You cannot expect someone in Lusikisiki (in the Eastern Cape) to pay for a road that is in Johannesburg. So the issue of nationalising the department is not in the picture at all,” he said in response to calls that the debt incurred as a result of provincial toll gates should be paid for from the taxpayers’ purse.

The South African National Roads Agency Limited had borrowed more than R20 billion to roll out the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project and has introduced the toll system to repay the loan.
Motorcycles would pay 24 cents a kilometre, light motor vehicles 40 cents, medium vehicles R1, and “longer” vehicles R2 a kilometre.

In addition to the 31% e-tag discount, other discounts applicable would be the time of day discount available to all vehicles, and a frequent user discount for motorcycles and light motor vehicles fitted with an e-tag.

Qualifying commuter taxis and buses would be exempted entirely, a decision Ndebele said was taken to avoid the costs being passed to commuters.

Meanwhile, the minister also announced that his department and the National Treasury were in talks to create a ‘rural transport grant’ as part of efforts to speed up improvements in the public transport system of the country’s rural areas. Such a grant would also serve as a long term commitment to the country’s public transport strategy as adopted by government.

“With regard to the improvement of strategic roads and implementation of the Road Infrastructure Strategic Framework of South Africa, National Treasury and the Transport Department  have rolled out the provincial road maintenance grant to the value of more than R22 billion,” he said.

More than R6 billion of the money, meant to eradicate potholes across the country, has already been allocated to provinces, with Ndebele saying individual premiers were expected to outline their spending on the projects in a meeting to take place in Cape Town next week.

“I am meeting with them and each premier will have to say where and how the money was spent to improve the condition of the roads and if people were employed, how many.”

The funding is on top of the R30 billion that government is spending over the next three years to upgrade the country’s ageing rail system.  – BuaNews

It’s been several hours since I installed it and it’s certainly appearing to be less sluggish than Firefox 3 or 4 were but granted it’s only been a few hours. After installation I had several plugins that were disabled due to incompatibility but found updated versions for all of them except one but I have the most important ones I need and they all work so far, most importantly my tabbed browsing plugin (Tree Style Tab) works perfectly which is more than I can say for Chrome with their childs rendition of tree style tabs.

It’s still worrying that Mozilla are caught up in a version number war with the likes of Chrome. In the past Mozilla maintained a reputation of releasing stable versions and fixes to those versions but this year alone we’ve seen them jump in just 5 or 6 months from ver 4, to ver 5 and now to ver 6. As mentioned already Firefox 6 does appear to be stable and running smoothly so far, Firefox 4 took a mere hour to become sluggish before I killed it and went back to 3.6. Either way I’m still a loyal Firefox user, I tried new versions of Chrome recently after not touching it for well over 18 months and really not much has changed and it honestly still lacks a lot of features when it comes to plugins like Tree Style and NoScript, it seems just about everything that Google creates is permanently a BETA piece of software but it’s not to say they won’t eventually get it right. If you’re wanting to try out Firefox 6 you should go ahead and try it out, back up your existing profile and the setup file for your current version so that you can go back anytime you like in case you are not happy. I hope to see myself sticking with version 6 and I guess I’ll know for sure by days end if it’s staying or going, so far it looks like its sticking around.

But it seems Google does not share the world’s enthusiasm to Facebook and once again is digging their fingers into yet another slice of pie to further try and dominate the world. Google announced their new social networking site called PlusOne which at this stage is only available to those with an invite because, like most Google products, it’s still in a beta phase. Prior to this announcement Google introduced a new PlusOne button to their search engine and provided the API to webmasters to use on their web sites, as can be seen at the top of this post. This effectively allows you to promote certain search results to your socialite friends on Google PlusOne, pretty much a carbon copy of the Facebook LIKE button just with a different name.

My biggest question is who really has time for yet another social networking site? Facebook already dominates most people’s lives and you can walk into virtually any company right now and you would find a great precentage of employees stuffing around on Facebook. Now with Google PlusOne people will have to find even more time to say what they want across multiple networks. Of course you can download a piece of software that will do it for you but really what’s the point? Is it really necessary to let the same friends know that you just ate breakfast but now across multiple networks, seems like an awful waste of time to me.

If anything it shows how we have degraded as a human race. We have tossed personal communication in the waste bin favouring online social networks, yet in all honesty there is nothing “social” about sitting in front of a computer screen or being tied to a mobile phone all day long.

Will social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and PlusOne eventually result in the human race evolving into beings that no longer need to speak? (Scene from the Matrix)

Many of the people on Facebook these days could hardly hold down a 5 minute conversation in person but can blabber on every 5 minutes of the day when they have a keyboard in front of them. I can only see Google’s PlusOne adding to this very big problem with human communication. You can tell how it’s affected us a race by watching the teenagers of today and how they communicate with each other. They can not get by without Mxit, Facebook or Twitter, I’ve seen groups of teenagers all sitting in a row, not uttering a word to each other but instead texting and messaging each other with their phones …. but they’re sitting right there next to each other … how daft.

I have little hope for the future of our race, we may just lose the ability to speak with our mouths in the next 100 years ….. that’s what I call progress !!!

I personally hold back on any new versions because they always come with problems and so was the case with Firefox 4 which worldwide gained itself a really bad reputation in just a few weeks. I tried it myself for a mere hour or two and immediately went back to ver 3.6. I have not yet tried version 5 as I am hesitant but I’ll give it a go sometime, perhaps when they reach 5.10 or thereabout. The big problem right now is that 3.6 seems to once again have started its problems so I guess a downgrade to 3.6.15 is in order for a while.

I just wish the Mozilla team would keep focus on the absolute basics of browsers like speed and stability and once they have that right then they should worry about introducing things like Personas which to me are features for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than make their browser look pretty.

Google has the right approach with Chrome giving it a very lightweight interface but sadly Chrome after all this time is just one big piece of Google BETA software and lacks a lot of necessary plugins/features like side tabs and a no-script plugin. There are ways to enable side-tabs in Chrome but they look awful, like a 3 year old designed them and the equivalent of Noscript from the Google Chrome Plugins called “NotScript” leaves much to be desired. So after a few hours of trying Chrome again the other day I am straight back to Firefox, even with its bugs and will wait another year before I try Chrome again. Hopefully before then the Mozilla team pull their fingers out and get back on track.

In just one drive on Hendrik Potgieter Road a week ago I witnessed over 40 moving violations just going one way and another 50 or so going back home. In both directions I never encountered one JHB Metro cop anywhere … not one in sight.The only time I have ever seen Joburg Metro Cops on Hendrik Potgieter is when they rock up, seven vehicles at a time and conduct random pullovers checking vehicles and drivers for licensing. This is always done on a section of the road where the officers can hide in the comfortable shade of some trees but almost every day you can drive on Hendrik Potgieter and seldom will you ever see a Joburg Metro Cop prosecute someone for a moving violation.

The types of moving violations I witnessed in just one day are as follows:
- Vehicles using the left hand emergency lane for overtaking
- Vehicles using right hand turning lanes for going straight
- Vehicles regarding a red traffic light as permission to keep driving through
- Taxi’s using left hand turning lanes as places to stop and alight passengers
- Sand & Stone Supplier Trucks dropping sand and stone all over the road
- Emergency lane used to pass large queues of vehicles who are all abiding by the law

These kinds of violations happen every minute of the day on this road and it leads to a great deal of frustration for those who choose to abide by the law and follow traffic signals and road markings. The problem is that one driver sets a bad example and 10 follow him thinking they also have permission to transgress the law and because of the total lack of presence of any Joburg Metro Cops these problems are now starting to spiral out of control and violating traffic signals and road markings seems to be something that everyone thinks is OK to do.

Just spend 30 minutes at 5 in the afternoon at the point where Hendrik Potgieter crosses the N14 highway. Here you will see at least 5 vehicles at every change of the traffic light using the right hand turning lane as permission to cut into the long queue of traffic moving straight. You could spend 2 hours at this traffic light during peak hours and you will not see a Joburg Metro cop doing anything about it. You may see one pass this intersection on his way elsewhere but you will NOT see him stop and deal with these people who transgress the law and cause a great deal of frustration for other law abiding citizens.

As far as the trucks owned by construction companies or sand & stone suppliers who constantly drop sand and stone all over the roads, this not only leads to frustration but actual damage to people’s vehicles. I’ve personally had two windscreens smashed on Hendrik Potgieter Road from stones thrown up by other vehicles and I can bet there are thousands of people a month who go through the same thing. These companies are getting off scott free and instead the vehicle owner has to pay an excess to his insurance company to get a new windscreen in his vehicle. If Joburg Metro were pulling these trucks off all day every day and issuing the company with a fine that HURTS we’ll quickly see an end to this kind of blatant disregard for our roads.

Many articles criticizing Joburg Metro have been written in the last 15 years but it seems they continue to do as they please and instead of dealing with moving violations (part of their job) they continue to choose the easy work to do, like sitting around in large groups where they can chat with their friends and pull over cars to check for licensing and to collect bribes. But actually asking them to patrol this road 24 hours a day and to set an example by prosecuting those who clearly transgress the law and set a bad example is asking too much of our public safety workers.

Stupidly thinking that Kalahari was well into the digital age, I thought nothing more and purchased the book. Upon completion of the order I then went to download the book and all I received was a small file in .acsm format. After a bit of Googling I discovered that the .acsm file is merely a download ticket for receiving the full book. The .acsm file needs to be opened using Adobe’s Digital Editions Reader, Kalahari’s “BETA” reader software or other Ebook readers that Kalahari is trying to sell into the SA marketplace.

After already losing faith in Kalahari who failed to disclose from the start that they were not selling me a simple EPUB book, I chose to download it using Adobe’s Digital Editions reader and to avoid any BETA software from Kalahari. What DRM / Adobe Digital Editions does is lock the book to be read on only one device and at this point in time it’s locked to my laptop, so if I want to read the R140 book I just purchased I have to sit and read it on a laptop ….. how stupid.

I wonder what dark age Kalahari is living in? Their Ebook format cannot be read on a Kindle without first removing the DRM and converting the book which most people won’t know how to do. Kalahari seem to rather want you to buy one of their Ebook readers but sorry to say, nothing comes close to a Kindle and never will. So for now stick to buying your kindle books from Amazon and be aware that your Kalahari books won’t work on a Kindle without some tampering.

Instead of buying any more Ebooks from Kalahari I’ll rather pressure authors to release their Books on Kindle’s store, they’ll sell much more anyway than they ever could through local book sites like Kalahari. I’ll keep supporting Kalahari when I need printed books but they’ve lost me for good as an Ebook purchaser.

Mobile Device manufacturers like RIM (Blackberry), Apple (Iphone, Ipad) and others are not much different to buying poisoned apples (excuse the pun) at your local food market. The reason is that your mobile device tracks every single move you make, every key you press, every web site you visit, every call you made or received, it even tracks where you were at the time. What’s most disturbing is how these vendors who take your money in exchange for their product simply try to keep this information under wraps.

Well, thanks to the large community of users, these “secrets” are always discovered and exposed to the masses and as such I am helping to expose the hidden Event Log of a Blackberry phone. Sure the information is out there if you search for it but the more web sites that reference this, the better.

First off to see all the information that is currently logged on your Blackberry right now, do the following:

Hold down the ALT key and keep it down …. now press LGLG and then let go of the ALT Key. Whoa baby, you’re looking at your event log. For interest sake go to some of the entries like “a net.rim.browser” and look through some of the entries by clicking on them one at a time, you’ll see every web page you visited, the full url, date time etc. Interesting stuff isn’t it?

Now click the Blackberry button and choose “CLEAR LOG” and it wipes the entire log.

Now there are numerous privacy issues here but another big problem with this event log is how it slows down your phone. Have you ever found that when you’re doing a lot of browsing on your blackberry how your phone keeps getting slower and slower? Sure you have. Well due to the insane amount of logging going on it’s no wonder your phone slows down and it also makes you wonder WHY you spent good money buying the latest mobile device which promised to be faster when it’s actually slower due to all the privacy invasion going on.

So now you ask, how do I turn this logging off? Well YOU CAN’T !!! Simple as that. RIM have hardcoded it into the Blackberry Shell Operating System and you cannot turn it off. But you can automate your phone to clear the log every hour.

A software author going by the name of Phrehnck from Los Angeles in the US created an application called “LogMaid” and has made this available for free to all Blackberry users.

You can download LogMaid from this link. You’ll need to create an account in order to download the application but the actual application is FREE. The application auto clears your event log every hour on the hour, it does this as long as your phone is idle (backlight off) when the time comes to clear the logs. LogMaid also invokes Blackberry’s built in memory cleaner, kick starts the Java Garbage Collector and Logs an Event letting you know the logs were cleared.

What’s amazing is after clearing your logs, let your phone operate as normal and after 15 minutes open the log file again (ALT+LGLG) and see just how much information has been logged inside of 15 minutes.

It’s time consumers start to challenge the creators of these products who violate our privacy without even mentioning it to us, it makes you wonder exactly what else they are doing that they are not telling us about. Are they downloading these logs at any point? Nobody seems to know, but there are indeed ways of finding this out. If they want to know our every move, they should be handing these devices out for free and not charging money for it.

One thing is for certain … every year BIG BROTHER tightens the noose around our necks and takes away more and more of our freedoms.