Duncan McLeod, the Financial Mail’s technology editor, has an excellent column up on the nasty business of capping the bandwidth usage of “broadband” consumers.

Though the cost of broadband has been falling steadily over the past few years, telecommunications service providers in SA continue to impose severe restrictions on how much bandwidth consumers can use. It’s harming innovation and development.

He concludes:

Then there are plans, by both government and the private sector, to construct new international submarine cable systems to link SA with the rest of the world. Despite the feckless department of communications, which has threatened to block majority foreign-owned cable systems from landing in the country, it’s unlikely that the projects will be barred. After all, one has to believe that government ultimately has the interests of its citizens at heart and won’t chase away hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investment in an area where investment is so critically needed. Right?

An incurable optimist, is Mr McLeod.

Is it just me, or do statements like these from the ANC smack of a stifling and all too familiar authoritarianism?

The African National Congress regards as unfortunate reports that ‘Tokyo for President’ posters have been put up on street poles in some parts of the Eastern Cape.

The ANC distances itself from this practice.

It urges all its members to approach the process of selecting leadership according to the established principles and traditions of the movement.

We welcome statements by a spokesperson for Tokyo Sexwale that Sexwale knows nothing about these posters.

The ANC is concerned that some people - whether inside or outside the organisation - may use such tactics to influence internal constitutional processes or to cast aspersions on the integrity and discipline of individual ANC leaders.

Clearly, knowing the principles and traditions of The Party, Sexwale himself would have been daft to put them up. Therefore, one can only assume that supporters are exercising their freedom to express, in public, their political opinions. I’d hoped the Wagging Finger had died with PW Botha.

Cartoonist Zapiro recently pictured the South African Broadcasting Corporation as the SANC, reflecting its political control by the ruling African National Congress through its appointees, CEO Dali Mpofu and news director Snuki Zikalala:

Jean Barker, at 24.com Entertainment, writes that often, censorship is more interesting than a film or book itself, “publicising the very film it was intended to make disappear”, and reviews some films that the SABC has declined to show. She recognises that this doesn’t technically amount to “banning”, but that the effect is for practical purposes similar. Hanging her story on Unauthorised: Thabo Mbeki, which the SABC cancelled at the last minute, Barker writes:

“Winners write history,” as the saying goes. And the ANC won the struggle, or the War on Apartheid, at least politically speaking. Now, films like Cry Freedom and Come Back, Africa aren’t rebel yells, they’re a record of our history. And the ANC-aligned SABC is doing its own censorship. While it could be said, correctly in some cases, that they’ve chosen not to show stuff because it’s just bloody boring, sometimes it’s not clear whether it’s really their right to decide for us what’s interesting.

She selects four films, two from the Apartheid era, and two from the ANC era, to illustrate a thought-provoking point.

Mostly consisting of a cutesey, flashy casing and an operating system that is remarkable only for the fact that it isn’t Windows, Apple’s products have long struck me as expensive fashion items of little real value. Much like a quarter of a million dollar Chanel handbag. Now there is finally a serious reason to aquire one:

MacSaber 1.1

MacSaber uses your Mac’s sudden motion sensor to detect movements, fast and slow. As you move your laptop, MacSaber plays varying levels of Light Saber sound effects, from a waving sound to exciting saber crashes.