MP's email hacked: Are Ghana's security agencies equipped to fight cyber crime?

After the email account of the Ho West member of parliament, Emmanuel Bedzrah, was hacked, he took the opportunity to urge the security agencies to intensify the fight against cyber crime. But how exactly are the security agencies supposed to do this?

Given the utter and embarrassing cluelessness of the Ghana Police Service and the Bureau of National Investigations about less ingenious crimes that occur in the country, one wonders if this call can be heeded even if the slouchy behemoths had a change of heart. For me, this is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Why do we keep wasting money on ID cards?

Registrant recording his thumbprints

I was impressed that the Electoral Commission (EC) could register 13.5 million people in forty days in the Biometric Voters' Registration (BVR) Exercise. Considering the various impediments to registration--the never-ending queues with their characteristic molluscan tardiness, the violence at some centres, and the frustration that results from the awareness that this whole exercise might be a waste of time as it could easily be avoided or sped up--perhaps, it is a sign that Ghanaians really do want to vote. Over the years, we have acquired a reputation for holding regular presidential and parliamentary elections on a continent for which such processes are a rarity, so it behoves us to maintain the record. Ensuring the sanctity of the register that enables citizens to vote is an important first step in this endeavour, but did we really need to spend as much money and time on that exercise? Why can't I vote with my driver's licence? What about my passport? And even if one wanted to create these new cards, why couldn't the many literate registrants be made to fill their forms at home?

The last time I posed these questions to a friend, he was startled. "Voting with passports and driver's licences? There are too many fake ones in the system," he countered. According to the EC, there were at most 15,000 duplicate registrations which they are seeking to reconcile. To make a valid argument against driver's licences and passports, one would have to argue that the number of fake passports in the system far exceeds the proportions for the new voter's id cards. I would be surprised to learn of the existence of 15,000 fake passports but will grant that for the sake of argument. The reason we are not using other valid photo ids for elections is that we can afford not to.

It is disgusting that we have to print new id cards for almost every election cycle. Even more disgusting is the fact that we do not pay for this renewal of id cards on our own--the process is generously subsidized by donor nations and agencies--so we don't care.

Of course, there would be teething problems to deal with no matter what system we adopt, so that should not be an impediment to doing what is right. We already have biometric passports as the new standard for passports in the country. The more pervasive driver's licences also sport the relevant data that we have collected in the past for voter's ids. The missing ingredient in this recipe is the will to cut down on waste, but, alas, this will is quenched with milk from the teats of our perpetual benefactors of whose care we are yet to wean ourselves.

Interview with Raindolf Owusu, developer of Anansi OS

Raindolf Owusu with his Anansi OS in the background

Tech Digest (TD): Who developed the Anansi Operating System?
Raindolf Owusu (RO): Raindolf Owusu, a 21-year old second year student of Methodist University College, Ghana studying Information Technology. I am also the founder of Oasis WebSoft, an IT start-up.

TD: Why did you develop it?
RO: I am a strong advocate of free and open source software. I realized that proprietary operating systems are being entrenched in our society. Companies and the government spend so much money on paying for licenses for these software whereas these monies could be used to improve other sectors like education. These proprietary software contain so many bugs and also can easily be attacked by viruses and malicious software. I believe that the way forward for advancement in technology is the collaborative use of open source technologies. Africa is on the move, and software and technologies are a powerful tool for boosting economic growth and poverty reduction.

TD: What tools did you use and why?
RO: Building an operating system from scratch is not a one man job so I decided to use the Linux kernel which is open source, as the main platform that Anansi OS would be built on. Linux is stable and has so many code contributors around the world and operating systems like Ubuntu and Fedora were built using this strong kernel. I cloned Open Suse, a Linux distribution, to be a strong engine behind Anansi. I wrote the main Anansi tree with C, with some hardware-specific code using Assembly language. I wanted a simple but user friendly desktop environment so I used Gnome 3 and I integrated it with the main kernel using C++ and C#. 

TD: How long did it take you to develop it?
RO: It took me close to a year to develop it. I spent most of my time in my school’s library and on the Internet researching about Unix and the Linux kernel.

TD: What has been the response so far and how does it relate to what you were expecting?
RO: It has been great. It’s been almost a week since I launched it on-line and it has had over a thousand downloads from Ghana, Britain, Kenya and other parts of the world. Open source communities are creating download mirrors for others to download and also www.distrowatch.com has included my OS as an upcoming Linux distro to watch. I was expecting this because, I am a firm believer in open source and it makes no sense to build software and hide the source code. When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people fix bugs. Intelligence should be open for everyone to learn something from.

TD: Do you have any competition? How is that affecting your business?
RO: Yes. So many people grew up with Windows so it will be very difficult for them to transition to use my operating system. I have devised a way to solve that in the sense that you could still use your default operating system and run Anansi OS on a live CD. Although it will take time but I have a strong belief that we will get there soon.

TD: What advice do you have for people developing such apps?
RO: Always ask God first to direct your path, look for a relevant problem around you, find the right tools  and technology to build the solutions. There are so many relevant data made available online to make your work easy. Use these technologies and don’t limit yourself creatively.

TD: When did you start programming and what languages and platforms did you start with?
RO: I started when I was 16. I started with web development (HTML, CSS, Javascript, FBML) and later transitioned into software programming (Java, C, C#, C++, Python and, Ruby on Rails).

TD: We do not yet have a mass market software product made in Ghana. By mass market I mean a product that many people use (say 100,000 users per day eg. Windows, Facebook, Twitter, etc). What do you think is the reason for that and how can software developers rectify the situation (if it needs rectification)?
RO: Most developers limit their products to only Ghana and Africa. We should be able to build software locally but think globally.Also the reason why products abroad are that successful is because of how they are marketed, we need strong marketing strategies to market our software products to reach the masses.

TD: Is there anything else you want to say?
RO: It is time for our environment to stand firmly behind young African men and women developers who are always up at dawn working on something they believe in. It is not enough to congratulate them vocally for their achievements, it will be right if you can support them with your resources be they financial, intellectual, and so on. Anansi OS is free to use, and if you're using Anansi OS and feeling generous, consider a donation. All donations are sincerely appreciated. Thank you and do check out my website www.oasiswebsoft.com.

Do we need the Germans to tell us to back up our data?

The cost of negligence can be immense (Courtesy backup.info)

The German ambassador to Ghana visited the minister of foreign affairs on Wednesday to present him with soft copies of signed bilateral agreements between the two countries. This became necessary after fire gutted the offices of the ministry three years ago, destroying decades of papery archives scarcely preserved in other forms. I was wondering exactly what precipitated that meeting. Could it be Ghana, as represented by the ministry, claiming to have lost or forgotten the contents of such important documents?

This is yet another example of a major Ghanaian institution playing dumb with tech. With the proliferation of cloud-based backup solutions, not to mention the availability of cheap solid-state and disk-based storage mechanisms it sounds silly that we would lose such important documents because of a fire outbreak. If the documents were important to us we would have scanned and stored them in multiple locations for safe-keeping.

Electronic payment solutions still subpar

Hacker News was all agog yesterday for details on the operation of MPesa, a mobile payment solution that was featured by National Geographic in an article yesterday. The venturesome tech community featured a wide range of opinions from cautious optimism to downright dismissal. I observed the conversation with cynical amusement but found it refreshing to find some knowledgeable patrons unobtrusively steering a productive discussion.

Part of the dismissal stemmed from a suspicion that the article was a shameless marketing job by a journalistic hireling masquerading as mainstream untinged reporting. I must admit that I felt a little bit of that suspicion when I read the article even though I could let that pass granting that the wanton disregard for technical depth stemmed from the author not having a Hacker-News-esque readership in mind.

The fact that I had written a piece about on-line and other electronic--basically seamless, cashless--transactions the day before made the reading a little weird but welcome. "This issue still piques the interest of dissatisfied market actors," the reasoning went. In my piece, I intentionally avoided a discussion of the numerous mobile money and proto-credit card solutions that have arisen in the past few years because I am not thrilled by them. I acknowledge them as progress in the vein of "steps in the right direction," but they simply do not cut it because they fail to answer the basic question: "Why can't I use my debit card (my money in the bank) to buy things on-line?" Gargantuan problems may be best solved by nibbling around the edges for a while, but I reject that as an excuse for tardy progress.

The issue with online payment systems in Ghana

Courtesy theonlinepaymentsystems.com

The ability to identify money-making opportunities without being able to take advantage of them is a frustrating experience for entrepreneurs everywhere. However, in Ghana and other African countries, this problem is pronounced on-line where even though there are millions of Internet users (at least one million in Ghana alone), there aren't any convenient ways of making money on the platform.

The consequences of this state of affairs for tech entrepreneurs cannot be overstated as many of their ideas are automatically censored for a lack of monetization prospect. The problem is not with customers not having money to purchase goods. The problem is with the banks who do not see any need to initiate the processes that would facilitate the so-called cashless economy. Why should I have a bank account and not be able to trade on-line with my debit card? I am yet to see a Ghanaian bank that is troubled by this question. For most (all?) banks, customers don't even have the ability to transfer money from one account to another for two accounts with the same bank over the Web. What most banks think of as on-line banking is spamming the customers with endless emails about one's balance and their trivial, often-valueless products.

The solution to the problem will begin with a bank or some other financial institution. The obvious solution is to invite the companies who have solved similar problems in other jurisdictions to assist in crafting a satisfactory solution; however, this is unlikely to happen as none of the banks is likely to break ranks with the cartel. Hence, the solution may take the latter form, where a budding entrepreneur circumvents the great bank oligarchy. This entrepreneur would implement his system with a virtual currency that would sport an isomorphism with traditional legal tender even though that may not be the focus in the beginning.

The benefits to the one who provides the solution to the problem are immense and obvious but I understand the hesitation. The problem is so huge that it seems unreasonable to tackle it. With the current state of affairs this problem may seem to be of the same order of magnitude as that of achieving African unity.

Where is the de facto Swahili search engine? (Part 1)

The three most popular search engines in
sub-Saharan Africa, according to Alexa

Search engines help you navigate the world wide web (the Web). They help you find things, they help you know what others think is important, and, most importantly, they help the builder set the agenda. All of these three functions are connected. For instance, you usually cannot find information that others consider unimportant. Also, since these are the first points of entry for most browsers, the one who controls them decides what most browsers should see, etc. Hence, it is important who builds search engines and what their agenda is.

The emergence of Google reduced the barrier to entry for most content providers who were not necessarily interested in selling a product or promoting their material. Before then, search engines were just portals that listed websites that marketers fancied, so the entrance of one that considered the structure of networks of web pages to rank them meant the discounting of the opinions of deep-pocketed players--a welcome intervention in the opinions of most browsers. However, that was just the beginning of what a search engine could become.

A study the structure of the Web requires an analysis of the connections and what they mean to both content creators and consumers. This enterprise requires data and algorithms to handle the scale of information that is generated. But it also requires the discretion of the developer. Firstly, there is the discretion to discriminate against which pages to include in the map of the web that one uses for analysis. Then, there is the discretion to discriminate between different meanings of a query--a task that can sometimes be accomplished with the help of natural language processing algorithms. These two liberties that the developer is free to exercise lead to differences between search engines that would otherwise be, for the most part, algorithmically identical. For a long time, some did not appreciate the significance of this point, arguing the impartiality of search algorithms and the blandness of data, but just a cursory examination of some search queries in a language that one understands, or a search for a terminology whose context one could reasonably assume is unfamiliar to the developer of a search engine would reveal how the developer chose to exercise these liberties.

I will continue in another post bearing with our continually diminishing collective attention span.