I DON`T KNOW, but if I had a brother serving a prison/hospital term for fraud, resulting in my family suffering immeasurable public scrutiny, I`d try and stay out of the public eye – especially if the origins of my PhD in Mechanical Engineering were questionable. I certainly wouldn`t wage a public attack on someone who holds a grudge against me and I wouldn`t wave my dubious qualifications in the face of people who have access to information that could see me painted with the same brush as my brother.


Though I`m sure it was not his intention to have yet another Shaik under investigation for what could be fraud, the recent events sure got the media`s attention. Insinuating that the media is staging a smear campaign against the family in the wake of his brother`s appeal court case in the high court, Chippy Shaik has denied that his thesis is a collection of plagiarised thoughts. His counterpart in academia, Dr Richard Young, however, begs to differ. He says that among spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, he also found that in the first few chapters of said thesis Dr Shaik exhibits three different thought patterns written in three different styles - coincidentally all closely resembling content found on the Internet. Should Young be proven right, Shaik`s best defence would be that he has multiple personalities.

Responding to repeated incidences of similar unsolicited usage of the information highway, a government contractor in the US, said to have played an integral role in the birth of the internet, is now said to be toying with the idea of redesigning the entire thing.

Redesign the internet? I mean, that`s right up there with adjusting the air pockets in the atmosphere! The point of the exercise is to combat crime and fraud allowed, I presume, by the lax security installed when they first introduced the concept. So now, are they going to turn the whole thing off and start again?

It wouldn`t help much. The brainiacs are just going to build new networks and rewrite software, resulting in billions of dollars spent on new architecture that will be hacked in any case.