Fair Treatment for Brandon Huntley
Posted on September 8th, 2009 by Richard Catto 3,113 views
The national debate that has been ignited in South Africa by Canada’s granting of asylum to Brandon Huntley has turned Huntley into a national pariah and seriously prejudiced his ability to lead a normal quiet life in South Africa, should he be forced to return here.
Investigative reporters from newspapers all over the world have probed every aspect of Huntley’s life, approaching his former neighbours in Mowbray, Cape Town, a suburb not far from where I live, downloading his image from his personal FaceBook page and pillaging his profile for dirt, talking to his estranged Canadian wife and even knocking on the door of his father’s Pringle Bay beach house just outside of Cape Town.
So far only one South African political organisation has stepped forward in Huntley’s defense – Afriforum. If you view the staff of Afriforum (here) it’s immediately clear that Afriforum is staffed by white Afrikaans speaking South Africans (aka Boers, as I have previously referred to them on this blog). However, I’m not going to discredit them based on who they are. It is clear that they represent a group of South Africans who believe that South Africa is not a safe place for their kind.
What is undisputed is the fact that Huntley was the victim of violent crime in South Africa and on more than one occasion. Much mileage has been made of the fact that he did not report those crimes to the police. Well that doesn’t make sense to me. I, myself, was stabbed during a mugging back in December 2000 and I did not bother reporting it to the police either because I rightfully believed that the police were not going to do anything about apprehending my muggers. The race of my muggers were Coloured. The South African Police Services are a joke, in my personal opinion, and it is shared by many who have dealt with them when they have fallen victim to crime. So, yeah, in South Africa many people see the SAPS as part of the problem not as “solution providers” and not using them is not an unusual thing to happen. In fact, I would say that many people avoid them.
The difference between myself and Huntley was that I didn’t decide to emigrate because of that mugging. I just made a lifestyle change and I have not experienced crime since then. It is possible to live in South Africa and experience very little or no crime.
What I do find outrageous is the media’s invasion into Huntley’s private life. The Star went and read which FaceBook groups Huntley was subscribed to and decided that because he was a member of some sexually promiscuous sounding groups that his marriage was a sham and that he only did it to get into Canada. His embarrassed wife is now harbouring the same doubts, but to point to a few FaceBook groups as evidence of that I find outrageous. FaceBook is a sick joke and most of those groups on there are as lame as shit. People add themselves to all kinds of groups and it doesn’t amount to a bag of beans.
To wrap all my thoughts up into a tidy conclusion, I think Brandon Huntley should be allowed to remain in Canada. Sending him back here after he has been turned into a national pariah would be most unfair. Secondly, South Africa needs to take note of groups like Afriforum and acknowledge that violent crime is a reality that many South Africans of all races experience and that the South African Police Services are still not being used by many crime victims because of the extremely bad reputation the SAPS still enjoys. SAPS is not an effective organisation. They do not apprehend criminals. They do not treat people humanely and fairly. They, as a police service, consistently fail the people they are supposed to serve. Their reputation takes regular knocks, when for instance they arrest people like Helen Zille, when she was former Mayor of Cape Town.
So this whole Huntley case is no longer about Canada’s “bad decision” to grant Huntley asylum. In fact, Canada can do whatever the hell they like. They can let whoever they like in and for whatever reason suits them and we don’t have to like it. This is now about South Africa and how many South Africans experience it. It’s time we swept our own porch clean and stopped yelling about what Canada is doing.
Additional reading:
About Huntley’s Canadian wife
Clear evidence that Huntley was a victim of violent crime
Afriforum’s support for Huntley
Melanie Huntley’s concern for her husband
Tags: Brandon Huntley
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rpxnow, openid and this blog
Posted on September 5th, 2009 by Richard Catto 4,588 views
One of web 2.0′s great annoyances is the growing multitude of accounts one accrues whenever one signs up for yet another new online service / web site. In fact it is sheer madness.
What would be so much easier is to have one Internet account that logs you into every darn thing you use. This is an idea that first occurred to me nearly a decade ago, but only in recent years has that problem been addressed via OpenID and something called OAuth, which I will explain in layman’s terms in a second.
Each WordPress blog has a user database and a registration facility that can be turned on or off depending on the blog owner’s preferences. So if you are an avid follower of many blogs and you registered with them all (which has certain benefits, including the ability to edit your own comments) you could very swiftly amass a lot of new accounts which you would need to keep track of somehow. If you throw in all the other sites that you register accounts for it’s not inconceivable to have literally hundreds of accounts all over the web, some of which you have probably completely forgotten about. I am definitely in that category. I’ve signed up for so many services and sites over the years that I can’t even remember some of their domains, let alone what username, password combination and email address I used to sign up with.
However, in the ocean of accounts that I’ve accrued over the years, there are some that I use on a daily basis. One such account is my main google account at which I receive all my email. That is the one account I use on a daily basis. So if that one google account could be used to give me access to all those other web sites and services that ordinarily I’d have to register for, then that would solve the whole multiple account problem.
A few years ago, such a protocol was created and we know it as OpenID, and you can go get an OpenID account which will allow you to access a lot of sites, however, for most people, OpenID does not offer anything except a login. If you create an OpenID account with claimid.com, for instance, you just get an OpenID login and a profile page. Big deal. It’s not immediately obvious to many people how that helps them further in life, and I agree with them. It’s much more useful to register a yahoo account or a google account which offers you a whole range of services including an email address. Thing is, both google and yahoo have now converted those accounts you have with them into OpenIDs. Ditto for FaceBook, Twitter, myspace and a whole lot of other service providers.
Each one of those service providers offers the facility to a third party web site, such as this blog, to allow their accounts to verify the identity of the person logging in. The third party site can then give them access to a profile it creates for that associated google or yahoo or etc. account. Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Each third party site owner needs to install or write software which handles the OpenID protocol and all the individual nuances that each different service provider adds to their account offerings. Into this breech steps RPXNOW with a service that unifies these disparate third party implementations of OpenID into a single user configurable service that makes the process of accepting OpenID logins from all the popular services much easier. In the case of this WordPress blog, all I had to do was install the RPX WordPress plugin and do some easy configuration to get this blog accepting OpenID logins.
The above image is what you will roughly see if you click the link to login. I’ve customised my login screen to show the six third party account providers that I think most of my readers use on a daily basis. When you use OpenID to login to this blog via OpenID via RPXNOW, you don’t transmit your account credentials (i.e. your password) to either RPXNOW or this blog. You only tell your provider, what your password is so that it can log you in, then it tells RPXNOW that the login was successful and because we trust them to give us the correct answer, we log you into this blog and allow you to modify your profile on this blog.
The important thing to remember is that your password is never given to anyone except the service provider that holds your account, which brings us back to the other topic of OAuth.
The alternative to OAuth is Basic Authentication which is the familiar username / password combo. With Basic Authentication, all access to a service requires that you hand over your password, even to a third party app, if you wish to give that third party app the ability to modify things on your account. But that is a big security hole and requires you to trust someone other than yourself with your password. So this is a problem and most users refuse to hand over their password, which is the best practise. So the problem remains – how does one allow a third party app to access your twitter account , for example, without having to hand over your password to them? OAuth was designed to address this problem.
When a third party app uses OAuth to access your twitter account, for example, what happens is that you are sent over to twitter to sign in. Again the only party receiving your password is twitter. Once twitter has logged you in, it then presents to you the request from the third party app to allow it either Read only access or Read-Write access. The latter is more common because then you would be allowing the third party app to send a tweet to your twitter account. This all happens in a context of you wanting a third party app to have access to your twitter account so that information from that app is published on your twitter account. If you didn’t want to accomplish that, you wouldn’t grant access to the third party app. When you tell twitter to grant the third party app access, you again are not giving it your password, instead it is given a unique token which is only valid for that app for your twitter account. So the effect is that it strictly limits the app to doing only what you want it to do. If you gave the app your password, as Basic Authentication does, you would be giving it unlimited power to your account and not only it, but potentially anyone else that got hold of the password. The OAuth token is good for only one app to access it, and that is tied to a domain. The token does not expire, but can be revoked at any time, giving you complete granular control.
Some people prefer to look at pictures to understand something, I prefer words, but just so everyone is catered to, here is a pictorial guide on what I just explained in words.
The point of this discussion was to introduce my readers to OpenID and OAuth as two important new web technologies that you can expect to encounter more often now and to help you to understand them and to know how they benefit your online experience. Do not be afraid or wary of them – they are useful tools! Feel free to test OpenID out on this blog by logging in with your favourite third party online account. You will discover how easy it will make registering and logging on to new services and sites.
If you have any further questions you need answering, post them below and I will endeavour to clarify further.
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