Information is Power

Retired Colonel Dr Kizza Besigye Apologises; Yesterday, I posted on this page my opinion regarding the sudden passing of Archbishop Kizito Lwanga. In that post, I referred to an article of the Daily Monitor newspaper of 5th March 2021 headed: “Lwanga’s postmortem results still inconclusive”.  It said that having failed to see any of the easily seen causes, the doctors had “opted to carry out further toxicological and histological analysis; the first to find out if there’s poison in the body,..” I also relied on some other sources that corroborated the Daily Monitor story.  These sources seem to have had incorrect information, from what has since been formally said by the Catholic Church and the doctors involved in the process.  My apologies to the readers who may have been consumed by the inaccurate information and, similarly, to the Catholic Church and late Archibishop Lwanga’s family. The important point I wanted to highlight though, and which should not be discounted at all, is the

In what's likely to be a goldmine for bad actors, personal information associated with approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular cybercrime forum for free—which was harvested by hackers in 2019 using a Facebook vulnerability. The leaked data  includes full names, Facebook IDs, mobile numbers, locations, email addresses, gender, occupation, city, country, marital status broken, account creation date, and other profile details down by country, with over 32 million records belonging to users in the U.S., 11 million users the U.K., and six million users in India, among others. In total, the data being offered includes user information from 106 countries. Additionally, the data seems to have been obtained by exploiting a vulnerability that enabled automated scripts to scrape Facebook users' public profiles and associated private phone numbers en masse. The flaw has since been fixed by Facebook. "This is old data that was previously reported

The revelation comes on the back of an amended law that will require all motor vehicle owners to pay an annual fee in a larger plan that seeks to increase revenue mobilisation.  Previously, it has only been commercial vehicles that had been required to pay an annual license.  However, under the amended Traffic and Road Safety Act, 2020, government will require all motor vehicle owners, including private cars, to pay an annual license, whose fee is yet to be determined.  Speaking at the weekend, Mr Patrick Ocailap, the Deputy Secretary to the Treasury, said they had discussed different ways through which road users would contribute to creating a sustainable road sector funding programme and decided to revive the road license, which had been scrapped in the 90s.  “Yes, it is one of the discussions. Remember, we used to pay the road license. The discussion took place around owners of motor vehicles in respect to contributing to what we are investing in roads and also contributing to reven

Starting in version 90, Chrome’s address bar will use  https://  by default, improving privacy and even loading speed for users visiting websites that support HTTPS. Chrome users who navigate to websites by manually typing a URL often don’t include “http://” or “https://”. For example, users often type “example.com” instead of “https://example.com” in the address bar. In this case, if it was a user’s first visit to a website, Chrome would previously choose  http://  as the default protocol 1 . This was a practical default in the past, when much of the web did not support HTTPS. Chrome will now default to HTTPS for most typed navigations that don’t specify a protocol 2 . HTTPS is the more secure and most  widely used scheme  in Chrome on all major platforms. In addition to being a clear security and privacy improvement, this change improves the initial loading speed of sites that support HTTPS, since Chrome will connect directly to the HTTPS endpoint without needing to be redirected fro

Employees at Daily Monitor and other Nation Media Group outlets in Uganda are uncertain about their future after the company announced that it would be re-organising itself to become more efficient, a polite way of saying they will be laying off some staff members. In a statement dated March 25, 2021 issued by Tony Glencross, the managing director of NMG in Uganda, the company said its performance had been greatly affected by Covid-19 and even the several cost-cutting measures instituted had not been quite successful. Glencross said under the circumstances, the company will have to make radical changes in its operations and change its business model from “traditional advertising to content-driven revenue.” This, he said, will “regrettably… result in a reduction of our workforce effective Wednesday, March 31, 2021.” “This is an extremely difficult decision especially in view of the prevailing circumstances and the impact it will have on those affected and their families,” Glencross’ sta

The Minerals Protection Unit of the Uganda Police Force is to sensitise the locals in the Karamoja sub region ahead of the aerial survey that is yet to begin.  Aerial surveying is to be done in conjunction with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development.  According to Mineral Protection Unit Commandant, SP Jesca Keigomba, the unit and the line ministry have embarked on a sensitization and alertness campaign in the districts of Karamoja to inform the locals there that the exercise is for the good of the country. The mineral protection unit has been around most parts of the country sensitizing the local artisans miners about the dangers of illegal mining that is taking place countrywide and advising them against the use of chemicals during mining. The sensitization comes after the arrival of two aircraft from a Spanish company,  XCaliber, on Tuesday.  According to SP Keigomba, aerial surveying is expected to improve mineral exploration, increase local and foreign investment in Karamo

Facebook said it has disrupted a hacking operation that used the social media platform to spread iOS and Android malware that spied on Uyghur people from the Xinjiang region of China. Malware for both mobile OSes had advanced capabilities that could steal just about anything stored on an infected device. The hackers, which researchers have linked to groups working on behalf of the Chinese government, planted the malware on websites frequented by activists, journalists, and dissidents who originally came from Xinjiang and had later moved abroad. “This activity had the hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation while obfuscating who’s behind it,” Mike Dvilyanski, head of Facebook cyber espionage investigations, and Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy, wrote in a post on Wednesday. “On our platform, this cyber espionage campaign manifested primarily in sending links to malicious websites rather than direct sharing of the malware itself.” Infecting iPhone