Unleashing the Power of Code and Jobs In Digital

Girls Invent Tomorrow, in partnership with Intel, HP and The Media Corner, hosted a coding event on 24 April. This event marked the celebration of International Girls’ in ICT Day, a global initiative which aims to create a global environment that empowers and encourages girls and young women to consider careers in the growing field of information and communication technologies.

Coding, programming, scripting, application development – there are many technical definitions and nuisances that can be identified; in practise, though, these terms are used almost synonymously. Coding should be treated as the learning of a machine language, being able to read it, write it and understand it. Much like any other language, practise is vital, while ensuring students find ways to incorporate code in their futures is gaining importance.

“The vision for this joint coding workshop is not only to teach students how to programme, but to allow them to open themselves up to a whole new world where they can seek to further any career choice and to develop skills needed in a digitally savvy and connected world,” says Thuli Sibeko, founder of Girls Invent Tomorrow.

Coding addresses three fundamental skills young learners should develop, namely: problem solving, digital confidence and understanding the world.

1.      Writing, debugging and remixing your own and others’ codes assists in developing problem-solving skills. It encourages working with others, either in real-time or following tutorials, blog posts, groups and how-to guides.

2.     Digital confidence: digital literacy leads to an increased sense of confidence, not only in terms of social interaction, but also a sense of belonging in shaping the environments in which they find themselves.

3.     Understanding the world: helping coders realise they can change and influence society, and develop applications that can help others. In a world where almost everything has a digital component, being able to read and write our environment is more important than ever.

For Intel South Africa’s Corporate Affairs Director, Thabani Khupe, digital literacy is fundamental to learning in a curriculum-based environment. “There’s a need to improve digital literacy skills by integrating training into gender and development programmes in shared computing environments, where women, girls, men and boys can access hardware, software, internet connectivity, and ongoing support.”

Intel South Africa is also working to develop an online interactive gaming platform to encourage learning in an individual or mediated environment, across devices, and in the context of a peer network.

“As much as coding sounds complicated, it really need not be. Together with organisations such as Girls Invent Tomorrow, we can address this fear of coding in our youth and build on our vision for a continent well versed and equipped to be completely digitally literate,” says Khupe.

Jobs In Digital

Jnr Graphic Designer 

Designer Position in Durban

Flash has a vacancy for a midweight designer to join our awesome Branded Marketing team. Applicants must have a three year (minimum) qualification from DUT or Vega, two to three years design experience and one to two years social media experience. Interested parties please send your cv to roxanne.retief@flash.co.za. 

This edition by +Fred Felton 

Digital Strategist Vacancy in KZN Firm

Jobs in Digital Media

A Digital Media Agency Based in KZN is looking for a digital strategist.
The position is 9 to 5 and the company is based in the Umhlanga area.

Please send your CV to Hayley at hayleyd@affirm.co.za

HP Helped To Educate SA With The Anti-Counterfeiting Africa Conference

HP hosted the Anti-Counterfeiting Africa Conference recently, to help educate and empower organisations across the continent against the negative effects of counterfeit trade.

As a leader in the high tech industry sector, and a company that places a priority on protecting customers and its brand, HP will raise awareness on the impact and consequences of counterfeit trade during its summit in Johannesburg.

Reports¹ show that as the global trade in counterfeit goods is growing, Africa is increasingly being targeted as a market for counterfeit merchandise. A new trend has also emerged that Africa is being used as a transit route for fake goods, which also poses an indirect threat to European and American markets.

African nations are therefore becoming increasingly aware of challenges that counterfeit trade represents to their economies and their citizens, and becoming active in the fight against it.

Government officials, law-enforcers and representatives of ministries responsible for Anti-Counterfeiting, are gathering at the summit to discuss consumer protection and raise awareness against illegitimate goods.  Here, HP will outline how to fight counterfeiting, and look specifically at how policy makers can toughen applicable laws and enforcement capacity across Africa.

“The HP Anti-counterfeiting Programme works hard to protect partners and customers, but this is only made possible through close collaboration with law enforcers around the world” said Fabrice Campoy, Printing and Personal Systems Africa Director. “We therefore truly appreciate the cooperation of African law enforcement to helping to make this event possible, and protect African customers from the inferior standards and potential risks of counterfeit.”

Original HP supplies distinguish themselves by their superior quality and reliability at competitive prices. Authentic HP LaserJet and HP inkjet print cartridges, unlike counterfeits, benefit from a history of investment and testing to provide superior performance and consistent results.

“False goods impact businesses and global trade through lost revenue, damage to brands and the negative effects on hard-earned reputation and consumer confidence,” said Jeff Kwasny, Brand Protection Programme Manager for HP’s Printing and Personal Systems group. “At the 2014 Anti-Counterfeiting Africa Conference, we are bringing together those most affected by counterfeits in the region – from policy makers to brands like Unilever and Nike – so we can work towards tackling this criminal activity together”.

Across the EMEA region, over the last five years (2009 through 2013), HP has conducted around 1,600 investigations, resulting in about 1,300 enforcement actions (raids and seizures by authorities) and around 11 million units of counterfeit products and components seized, thus preventing them from being sold in the EMEA marketplace and beyond.

The Programme has also overseen around 4,000 unannounced inspections of HP products at the warehouses of HP Channel Partners across EMEA in the past five years (2009 through 2013), to verify that they are not selling counterfeit products to their customers.

Through its Anti-counterfeiting Programme, HP actively educates its customers and partners to be vigilant against fake printing supplies. It also cooperates closely with local and global law enforcement authorities to detect and dismantle illegal operations that produce counterfeit HP printing components.

For details on the event, and its speakers please visit http://hp-acf-africa-conference2014.com/

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software,services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

(1)  Based on report from South African-based research and strategy firm Consultancy Africa Intelligence (CAI), entitled “The trade in counterfeit goods: What is it, why is it a problem and what is its impact on Africa?” http://www.polity.org.za/article/the-trade-in-counterfeit-goods-what-is-it-why-is-it-a-problem-and-what-is-its-impact-on-africa-2010-08-04

Government could lose billions due to Malware

As much as pirating software is illegal and punishable by the law still a majority of people in different parts of the world practice it and this has become the most serious issue globally because it’s unacceptable and wrong to illegally use or copy software without purchasing the software legally. This act of immoral behaviour got the government blowing out a lot of cash and these days it’s more than just hacking consumer PCs, home and business network, copying or sharing someone’s work. Cybercriminals are starting to depend on software piracy industry to leave the ‘security backdoor’ open, enabling them to more easily steal identities, passwords and banking details.

The study, titled The link Between Pirated Software and Cybersecurity Breaches is a joint study conducted by IDC and the National University of Singapore, working with government officials within countries ranging from Brazil to the United States. About 203 PCs were purchased in Brazil, China and other countries were pre infected with unsafe malware including hacktools, viruses and Trojans which has expressed concerns over tireless cybercriminals employed malware that are embedded within PCs that are running pirated software. It has been suspected to be sold to consumers or companies. According to the study global enterprises are expected to spend nearly $500 billion this year in order to deal with issues caused by malware deliberately loaded onto pirated software.

Whilst $127 billion is expected to be spent on security issues and $364 million would be spent on dealing with data breaches. When it comes to consumers they are expected to spend $25 billion and waste 1.2 billion hours this year alone because of security threats and costly computer fixes from malware pirated software. And primary concerns for these institutions were the loss of business trade secrets or competitive information (59%), unauthorised access to confidential government information (55%) as the government could lose about $50 billion due to them having to deal with the costs associated to malware pirated software.

On top of that the study revealed that 60% of surveyed said that their biggest fear from infected software is the loss of data whether in form of file or personal information. Followed by the fear of data of internet transactions (51%) and hijacking of email, social networks and bank accounts (50%) though (43%) of those same respondents did not install security updates which indicates that as much as there are fearful of malware viruses but still they leave PCs vulnerable to cybercriminal attacks.

Two best ways to avoid purchasing malware-infested PCs

         ·        Whether you are an individual user, a company or even government make sure you buy new PCs from credible reputable sources to ensure that you receive authentic software.

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                  You can visit www.howtotell.com or http://www.microsoft.com to know more about malware    and in order to protect your family or business from malware associated with pirated  counterfeit software and to be able to have access to the tools needed to remove the      infection rather a virus.   

              Article by +Molly Dimpho