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Comment by daniel-levin | Hacker News Reader

Telkom has been injecting kak [0] into pages for _years_ [1], [2]. A former employee of theirs told me that at one stage they were replacing ad content with their own adverts - I would dismiss this as hearsay had I not seen it myself.

[0] South Africanism for 'shit'

[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/704472-Telkom-In...

[2] https://www.sadev.co.za/content/telkom-using-man-middle-atta...

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Off topic re: kak. I don't know where exactly it came from, but it's also a word in New Zealand English (and possibly other dialects). If I told someone I kacked my pants, they'd understand that I shat myself. It's not super common, but it's understood.

I wonder if maybe it's because there's a lot of South African expats in New Zealand.

Probably related to "caca" which usually means something related to fecal matter in Romance languages.

And Tamil which is not a Romance language.

It has Indo-European roots https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex/master/0821. Although Tamil is Dravidian, probably a loan word.

Since Tamil has borrowed more Dutch words (and uses at least one from Tamil, being katamaran), I expect your kak to come from the dutch kak, as kak always rolls down hill.

In greek as well.

Latin: cacare (to shit)

German: Kacke (the ck as usual indicates that this word may only be used with the voice raised beyond 85 dB and with at least 5 % spit by volume mixed into the air-stream).

'kak' means 'shit' in Dutch as well. South African is quite similar to Dutch for colonial reasons.

It had a brief moment in the limelight of UK student lexicon during the 1990s due to the TV sketch series "The Mary Whitehouse Experience".

20 years later when studying South African history I was able to subconsciously translate that one word. Die Mann praat kakk!

> A former employee of theirs told me that at one stage they were replacing ad content with their own adverts

This was afaik the main reason, why YouTube went HTTPS-only very early compared to the rest of the internet. Some ISPs exchanged the video ads of YouTube with their own and lowered the resolution of videos to save bandwidth. YouTube's customers were very dissatisfied because it constantly broke and the video quality was very bad and thus HTTPS came to the rescue.

Telkom (and also Eskom) are beyond kak. We desperately need telecoms/electricity to be privatised.

A privatized monopoly, will try to extract profit, as we saw with the SBC management of Telkom from 1997-2007 when there was very little innovation and high prices here.

I meant privatised in order to remove the state ownership and encourage competition in the sector.

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