Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

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!