another reason to be South African

My friends at Sensepost are looking for an information security analyst. This is probably one of the most rocking jobs on the market - the opportunity to learn from the best and get paid to hack...

I've been to their office a couple of times and it seems like a totally rocking place to work. Apart from spending your time hacking, you'll find the physical environment very dot-comy (pool table, video games, stocked fridge, shorts and slops). Oh, and the guys are cool too ;)

So if you're not going to be living the dream and you think you got what it takes to be leet, check out this post.

Everyones favourite South African Newspaper Media Empire, the Mail & Guardian is launching it's new blogging platform Amagama. It's based on WordPress MU and looks very sleek. Of course, they're having a couple of teething problems but that's natural since they're moving over all their old BlogMark users.

If you don't have a blog yet, give it a try...

The Pew Research Center has just released it's findings from a survey of American Muslims. It's findings? Muslim Americans are

...largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.

It's an interesting survey and well worth the read. The findings shouldn't shock most Muslims brought up in the "West" (or South Africa) and are probably inline with a random sample of Muslims from Johannesburg (or from my wonderfully diverse team).

Some highlights:

• Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live.
• Large majority of Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off in this society....And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.
• Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims in the U.S. were born elsewhere... Among native-born Muslims, roughly half are African American (20% of U.S. Muslims overall), many of whom are converts to Islam.
• ...the Pew Research Center estimates the total population of Muslims in the United States at 2.35 million.
• Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries....
• A majority of Muslim Americans (53%) say it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks....
• Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism...

The answer to the question "Can suicide bombings of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?" seems to be causing a small stir since 13% of respondents aged 18-29 answered "sometimes". Marc Lync provides some well needed perspective to this question/answer and I'm enjoying the resulting comments. Glenn Greenwald also weighs in with a great piece on Salon.com (you may need to click through an annoying ad to get to it) where he argues that

The reality, though, is that it is almost impossible to conduct a poll and not have a sizable portion of the respondents agree to almost everything. And in particular, with regard to the specific question of whether it is justifiable to launch violent attacks aimed deliberately at civilians, the percentage of American Muslims who believe in such attacks pales in comparison to the percentage of Americans generally who believe that such attacks are justifiable.

He provides examples from other polls showing large numbers of Americans supporting attacks on civilians and that 2/3 of US troops support torture to extract information and that most of them would not report collegues who had mistreated civilians.

Of course, whenever quoting these sorts of numbers from polls/surveys, it's always worthwhile remembering the famous Disraeli quote..."There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".

I woke up this morning to an invitation to join the Facebook group "Bullardgate". It seems that David Bullard, the pompous Sunday Times coloumnist has kicked up a storm with a scathing piece on blogging and bloggers. Vincent Maher didn't take kindly to Bullard's piece - not only did he rip it to shreds pargraph by paragraph but also kicked off a campaign to get Bullard to apologise.

I'm all for kicking up a storm and fighting The Man yet I can't help but wonder if David Bullard has just successfully link-baited us all. Maybe next week he'll announce how many links his article got. :)

Of course, this isn't the first time someone has gotten blogs so wrong. At least Bullard admits to having read a few blogs. At the 3rd AlJazeera Forum, straight after Lawerence Lessig's keynote I heard a senior executive from a big news corporation ask the person next to him "what's a blog?".

Ethan Zuckerman posted about a the rise of African blog aggregators a few weeks ago. I had previously written about a couple of different Arab blog aggregators so it was interesting to see how my comrades back South were sizing up.

I've been signed up for both Afrigator and the Mail and Guardian's Amatomu for about 3 weeks now and have been pleasantly suprised. Amatomu has already managed to galvanise the South African blogosphere - I've personally found myself spending more time bouncing around South African blogs linked off Amatomu.

Afrigator has the potential to do the same for the wider continent - it's still early days and it still has to gain critical mass. One of the old-school ways they are trying to gain visibility (and some link love) is by giving away an iPod (and some t-shirts) to people who help sign up bloggers. Vincent Maher (from Amatomu) has setup a Buzz Graph to track the impact of the Afrigator campaign - which is very cool - using one aggregator to track the growth of another!

Last week Turkey banned access to video sharing site YouTube because of a video..

...which has now been taken down, showing Greeks criticizing Turkey and insulting Turkey’s national flag and founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

As expected, some were quick to blame this block on "Muslims" which makes absolutely no sense as the ban was a response to an insult to the non other than Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk was the founder of "modern" Turkey and the man who tried to purge Turkey of its Ottoman and Islamic character by introducing a tradition which I call "Extremist Secularism". From replacing the Arabic script to abolishing religious law and education, Atatürk tried to wish away a long and rich period of history in which the Turks led the Islamic Empire. Given the character of Turkey and the extent to which Islam is ingrained in the fabric of the society, Atatürk's purge was the equivalent of a national lobotomy.

Trying to impose an ideology that is foreign to a nation can only be done by force, intimidation and coercion. And this is why the form of secularism in Turkey manifests itself in this sort of extremism and intolerance. Anything that remotely challenges the idea of secularism and the icons of secularism (in this case Atatürk himself) becomes a threat to the status quo and thus needs to be rooted out.

Take for example another ridiculous ban in Turkey - that of disallowing headscarfs in universities and in Parliament. To everyone (except possibly the French) this seems like a ridiculous measure - I mean, we're meant to embrace diversity aren't we?

Extremism in any form is bad news - even if the alternative to it is "not secularism". Trying to enforce "secularism above all other" will lead to something that looks uglier than fascism...

In case you wanted another reason to be South African, our Cabinet recently approved a policy and strategy to implement Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) throughout the government. In a media briefing at Parliament government communications head Themba Maseko said that

"All new software developed for or by the government will be based on open standards and government will itself migrate current software to FOSS

Just before I left for Qatar, Aslam Rafee (who is a Senior IT Manager at the GCIS) gave me a brief overview of work that IT staff from different parts of government were putting into getting buy-in for a shift to open soure. Hats off to all those who worked to get this policy passed. Now it is up to them to move from policy to implementation which is no easy task.

Alan Levin has an excellent timeline of events and an outline of what the policy means :

1) The South African Government will implement FOSS unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior. Whenever the advantages of FOSS and proprietary software are comparable FOSS will be implemented when choosing a software solution for a new project. Whenever FOSS is not implemented, then reasons must be provided in order to justify the implementation of proprietary software.

2) The South African Government will migrate current proprietary software to FOSS whenever comparable software exists.

3) All new software developed for or by the South African Government will be based on open standards, adherent to FOSS principles, and licensed using a FOSS license where possible.

4) The South African Government will ensure all Government content and content developed using Government resources is made Open Content, unless analysis on specific content shows that proprietary licensing or confidentiality is substantially beneficial.

5) The South African Government will encourage the use of Open Content and Open Standards within South Africa.

It is worth reading the Open Source Software and Information Society report which was one of the landmarks to the adoption of this policy.

hat tip: damien