Weekly Wrap 158: NSA and all the cybers, mostly

18 June 2013 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | No comments

NSA Decipher Dog character: click to embiggenMy week Monday 10 to Sunday 16 June 2013 was dominated by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Well, by the news pertaining thereto. Funny world.

I can’t be arsed writing about that any further today. Here’s the links, and you can ask me questions and initiate conversation in the comments. Which I may ignore.

You post your comments, you take your chances.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Wednesday I attended the Sydney launch of Intel’s 4th Generation Core processors at the Museum of Contemporary Art. There was food and drink.

[Photo: NSA's Decipher Dog character, part of the agency's kids outreach program.]

Weekly Wrap 157: Too many spiders and dogs

09 June 2013 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Spider in my water glass: click to embiggenMy week Monday 3 to Sunday 9 June 2013 was laid low by an excess of the black dog. Most unproductive. Most annoying.

I’d intended things to be fairly quiet, to counterbalance the previous week’s hectic pace. Well, quiet it was, because it was the beginning of a new month and nobody had paid me yet. Most inconvenient before a long weekend.

Still, I did nearly drink a spider (pictured), and did quite a bit of pre-production for my new SEKRIT podcast project. The first episode will appear very soon.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I interviewed Sean Richmond at Sophos in North Sydney, and he bought me a coffee.

The Week Ahead

Monday is a public holiday for the Queen’s Birthday, in theory, but I’m planning to continue my planning for the weeks ahead.

The only fixed appointment is on Wednesday afternoon and early evening, when Intel launch their 4th Generation Core processor chips in Sydney. So that means I’ll probably stay overnight in Sydney that night and cluster some appointments around it.

My writing schedule says that I’m doing pieces for Technology Spectator and CSO Online, as well as my usual column for ZDNet Australia.

[Photo: Spider in my water glass, which I nearly drank, but managed to spot it at the very last moment — and there was water everywhere.]

Hillary’s mangoes, no NSA involved

08 June 2013 in History, Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

[I was in a bit of a mood on Thursday, so when The Guardian broke the news that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of American citizens, my tolerance for political arsehattery was nonexistent. Calls for street protests? Bah! My countermove was to tweet a bunch of nonsense, which is posted here as prose.]

Mangoes by umstwitMaybe if we all run around like headless chooks, Mr Obama will say “Oh, sorry” and disband the NSA. And then Mr Obama will mount his trusty cyberpig and fly to the Moon, leaving behind a chemtrail of glitter and Bitcoins.

But look, headless chooks are the important bit. The more rushing around and screeching you can manage, the sooner the cyberpig lifts off. And quite frankly, Obama’s first term was a big disappointment as far as glitter showers go.

By comparison, I imagine that on weekends Hillary Clinton pumps out a steady stream of glitter. Like a Queen Ant, kinda.

Nyan Cat was DARPA’s prototype for that. DARPA’s main challenge was making it come out as glitter. When Hillary gets steam up, there’s no telling what it’ll be. Hummus, sometimes. Whipped cream.

One day it was just mangoes. Whole mangoes. Three a second, hour after hour. Secret Service guys took the whole weekend to clear the mess.

Then they had to figure out a cover story. Why were there mangoes smeared all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue? Eventually they decided just to tell everyone it was Madeleine Albright’s fault, so the press corps obviously bought that.

There’s a reason trams never took off in Washington.

[Photo: Mangoes by Flickr user umstwit, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]

Weekly Wrap 156: An excess of Sydney, with smog

05 June 2013 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | 11 comments

Night falls over Sydney: click to embiggenMy week Monday 27 May to Sunday 2 June 2013 was rather different from how I first imagined it.

I ended up spending much of it in Sydney, covering the CeBit Cyber Security conference and recording all manner of conversations — the results of the latter to appear over the coming weeks.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I covered the CeBit Cyber Security conference, so as usual with such things there was food and drink.
  • On Wednesday I had lunch at the Customs House Bar with some folks from Sourcefire, and they paid.
  • On Wednesday night I was a guest of Kaspersky Lab at their dinner with Eugene Kaspersky at Aqua at Milsons Point. There was fine food and drink, a water taxi there and a Cabcharge voucher for the ride back.

The Week Ahead

Since it’s already quite late on Wednesday afternoon, all I’ll say is that I plan to head down to Sydney tomorrow, Thursday, for an interview recording — at least once I’ve got my ZDNet Australia column out of the way — and what happens for the rest of the week and the annoyingly-positioned long weekend will then depend upon circumstances.

And that’s not all I’m annoyed about.

[Photo: Night falls over Sydney, looking towards the CBD from Camperdown on 29 May 2013.]

Talking ASIO hack on BBC World Service

01 June 2013 in Conversations, Internet, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

BBC World Service logoMonday night’s Four Corners episode claimed, amongst other thing, that Chinese hackers had stolen the plans to the new headquarters of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). It made global news, and as a result, I ended up being interviewed on the BBC World Service program World Have Your Say.

The 15-minute live panel discussion also included Four Corners journalist Andrew Fowler, one of the BBC’s journalists based in China, and a journalist from The New York Times.

I quite enjoyed the chat, but it also showed how new all this stuff is to a mainstream audience.

Here’s the audio of the full 30-minute program. It starts off with a discussion of the current situation in Syria, and then we start at about the 14-minute mark.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:38 — 12.3MB)

The audio is of course ©2013 British Broadcasting Corporation. The audio player is linked directly to the BBC’s copy of the MP3 file. If that ever breaks, let me know and I’ll post my copy.

Talking NBN on Radio Adelaide

01 June 2013 in Conversations, Internet, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Radio Adelaide logoThe National Broadband Network (NBN) has been a thing in the news for years. It’s less that four months until another federal election where the NBN will be a critical policy issue. And yet I still find myself explaining some of the basic concepts in the media.

Tuesday morning saw another such session, on Radio Adelaide‘s breakfast program with presenter Angus Randall.

I wonder how well we managed to explain the differences between the Labor and Coalition policies. In interviews like these, I try to present both policies fairly. While I have my own views on what I think Australia should do in terms of its broadband policies, it’d be completely unprofessional to turn such an interview into an opportunity to push my own agenda.

Here’s the full audio.

[Update 4 June 2013: The interview has been posted at the Radio Adelaide website, and at their request I've linked to that instead of embedding the audio here. Due to a quirk of how they've set up their site, I am unable to make that part of the iTunes-compatible feed on this website.]

The audio is ©2013 Radio Adelaide, of course, but as usual I’m archiving it here because I don’t believe it’s archived anywhere else.

Clive Palmer, “Fisting the Future”

27 May 2013 in Humour, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Photo of Clive Palmer and colleagues, fists raised: click for original story at The AustralianDo billionaire arsehat and political candidate Clive Palmer and his colleagues really think that this is the best hand gesture to make in 2013? “Fisting the Future!” Jesus wept.

As soon as editor Chris Duckett pointed to this photo, which was used to illustrate a story at The Australian, and as soon as Jonathan Green coined the slogan “Fisting the Future”, I knew what had to be done. And here it is.

Nick Hodge has also created an approved-by-Taiga version of this image.

I recommend the hashtag #fistingthefuture in any future mocking of Clive Palmer’s whacky ideas.

And for some not-so-private-joke historical background, please read Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting”.

[Original photo caption: Clive Palmer, with Scott Higgins, left, and Glenn Lazarus, right, says he will announce more candidates for his party. Picture: Glenn Barnes. Source: The Courier-Mail.]

Weekly Wrap 155: Chemtrails, elitism and much thinking

27 May 2013 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

How they make chemtrails: click to embiggenMy week Monday 20 to Sunday 26 May 2013 was spent returning from The America, and then reading, writing, planning and generally trying to focus on the future.

If that sounds vague, it’s because it was vague. And it felt vague. It was all very, very vague. But the next week will be less vague. By at least fifteen percent.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None, which I suppose counterbalances last week.

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’m doing the day trip to Sydney to catch up with Peter Coffee, Salesforce.com VP and head of platform research, for a chat about The Future. This is, I think, our fourth attempt at meeting up since we met at the Dreamforce event two years ago, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Tuesday is mostly a day of writing and research back at Wentworth Falls, although it kicks off with at spot on Radio Adelaide talking about the differences between the broadband policies of Labor and the Coalition. That’s at 0745 ACST / 0815 AEST.

Wednesday sees me heading into Sydney again, for interviews with Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky Lab and Chris Wood from Sourcefire, and then in the evening a long dinner and drinks event with Mr Kaspersky. I suspect I’ll be staying overnight in Sydney that night. If I survive the experience at all.

And then the rest of the week is about writing and podcast production. Probably. You known how my weeks go. Disorganisedly.

[Photo: How they make chemtrails, photographed at dusk over San Francisco International Airport. They're just so blatant about it these days. While this photograph was taken on the evening of Sunday 19 May 2013 local time, it was already Monday 20 May Australian time, so I'm allowing myself to use this photo this week.]

Infosec at AusCERT 2013: the media coverage

26 May 2013 in Defence, Internet, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

AusCERT 2013 conference banner: click for conference websiteHere’s a list of the news stories I’ve found this morning that have been written about the AusCERT 2013 information security conference.

The theme for this year’s conference was “This time it’s personal”:

[The theme reflects] the growth in attacks and unauthorised disclosures of online personal information. Motivated by illicit financial gain, cyber criminals obtain unauthorised access to personal information, but more and more, we are seeing data disclosures being posted publicly by attackers for political motives, rather than financial gain.

Hence the theme will resonate within the information security community and remind us that the online environment provides opportunities galore to capture personal information; of the impact these breaches can have on the lives of individuals; and the importance of information security to prevent these attacks. AusCERT2013 will explore these issues and bring experts from Australia and around the world to provide insight and solutions to deal with these challenges.

Items are arranged alphabetically by masthead and then chronologically. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know. Indeed, I daresay that some more articles will be published on Monday or Tuesday, so if that happens I’ll update this post appropriately.

There’s a lot here for me to read, so if I’m going to write a reaction piece some time then it’ll be… later.

Read the rest of this entry »

AusCERT 2012 and the militarisation of cyberspace

26 May 2013 in Defence, Internet, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

AusCERT 2012 logo: click for conference websiteI didn’t make it to information security conference AusCERT 2013 this year. I’m about to read what’s been written and compile a list — but first, a reflection on what happened in 2012.

When I look back two years to what I wrote from AusCERT 2011, I’m reminded that we were just getting our head around the implications of the Stuxnet worm. Not only was malware being written by organised criminals, and we were facing an explosion of anti-banking malware and mobile malware, and looking ahead to when an angry child might deploy malware against their neighbours — we were now made well aware that malware was also being written by nation states with budgets in the millions of dollars and beyond.

But looking through the list (below) for AusCERT 2012, what jumps out is the emphasis on the militarisation of information security, as well as the emphasis in the scale of criminal activities. I won’t expand on that, because the conversation with AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram speaks for itself.

Articles from AusCERT 2012

Podcasts from AusCERT 2012

  • Patch Monday episode 139, “War talk dominates AusCERT 2012″, the first of two episodes based on material recorded at the information security conference. The overall theme is that infosec is becoming militarised. We no longer talk about “information assurance” but “defensive cyber operations”. Click through for the full list of speakers.
  • Patch Monday episode 140, “Cybercrime: it’s just too easy”, the second of two episodes based on material recorded at the AusCERT 2012 information security conference. AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram explains why cybercrime is here to stay, and F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen details a complex transnational criminal operation that saw goods bought fraudulently in Denmark being resold in Moscow, as well giving his views on hacktivism and the level to which antivirus companies should cooperate with governments.

Bonus Extra Video

After the conference, my flight back to Sydney was delayed. With the need to kill some time, this video was the result.

My compilation of reports from AusCERT 2013 will be posted later today. My compilation of reports from AusCERT 2013 is now online.

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