Megan Knight

Chances are you’ve received several e-mails that promise you cheap Viagra, diet pills that really work, a chance to win a million-dollar lottery in some country you’ve never heard of, and several million dollars needing to be liberated from a Sudanese government minister’s bank account. If you have, then you’ve been spammed.

"We will do what has to be done to achieve good broadband Internet access in South Africa." So says Rudolph Muller, founder of MyADSL, a South African website aimed at providing a forum for the discussion of broadband Internet access issues.

Geoff, a South African software developer, says that he downloaded about 30 gigabytes of music to his computer over the past year. This collection, which, depending on the quality of the files, would take him about 20 days of continuous playing just to listen to, didn’t cost him a cent — he downloaded it all from the Internet. Until intellectual property rights can be properly enforced, piracy will continue to be ‘part of Internet culture’.

Open-source software (OSS) has had a lot of publicity recently, the most noticeable of which was the launch of the Mark Shuttleworth-backed Go Open Source campaign earlier this month. Everybody, it seems, from the government to private corporations, NGOs and home users, is hailing open source as the saviour of the IT industry in South Africa. But is it really?

On Monday morning, thousands of computer users woke up to the news that yet another worm was wreaking havoc on computer desktops and networks across South Africa and the world. The fact is, that these attacks are becoming more frequent, and in some cases more sophisticated, than ever before. The whole thing is a race between virus writers, developers and security experts, and it’s getting faster.