Talking anti-piracy laws on SBS World News

I am so many different kinds of expert these days. On Friday I was on SBS TV’s World News talking about the UK’s High Court decision to order the country’s largest internet service provider BT to block access to a website that provides links to pirated movies.

The video of the news story is embedded in the website article.

SBS has also posted the complete 7-minute video of the interview they recorded.

Yes, I’m wearing a hoodie on national television. At least it was a clean hoodie. I’d taken a cab to SBS straight from the airport. It’s actually a small miracle I had any clean clothes with me at all. Besides, the cameraman chose the hoodie over my black shirt because he wanted to “break things up a bit”. The TV news has too many men in suits and business shirts for his liking, it seems.

Talking LulzSec/Anonymous vs PayPal on TripleJ’s Hack

On Wednesday afternoon, LulzSec and Anonymous joined forces to encourage people to boycott PayPal by withdrawing their money and closing their accounts.

The back story is that PayPal has cut off WikiLeaks’ account, meaning that people could no longer donate money to WikiLeaks via PayPal. Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal. Last week the FBI and others arrested people alleged to have been responsible for those attacks. So this week, the boycott of PayPal.

The joint statement by LulzSec and Anonymous makes for interesting reading. It describes DDoS attacks as “ethical, modern cyber operations”. Such things are actually a criminal act, despite what Anonymous may imagine the law to be. “Law enforcement continues to push its ridiculous rules upon us,” they write, when it’s not law enforcement who makes the laws, but governments.

The call for the boycott was unfolding as Triple J’s current affairs program Hack was going to air, and I phoned in a report. Here’s the audio.

I found it interesting that presenter Tom Tilley responded to my comment that DDoS is a crime by saying “Yeah I imagine there’d be people with lots of different points of view about what they’re doing and whether it’s indeed lawful.”. Personally I reckon the law in this is pretty clear. Pandering to their audience?

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It has been extracted from the full program audio [MP3].

Visiting Melbourne for IBM’s Pulse 11

I’m heading to Melbourne this week to cover IBM’s Pulse 11 for ZDNet Australia. The event runs 27 to 28 July at the Crown Promenade, although I’ll be flying down late Tuesday afternoon and returning on Friday.

“Pulse is your premier event for accessing the solutions and expertise that can help your organisation transform the way it designs, delivers and manages business services,” says the promo material in a sentence remarkably free of concrete nouns. About eight pars in you’ll discover that it’s about things like managing cloud services and making sure your IT systems are secure and compliant with regulations.

I simply do not understand this corporate aversion to being specific.

It’s my first trip to Melbourne in about five years, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll have a little free time on Thursday afternoon and evening, so do feel free to make suggestions.

I’m attending Pulse 11 as a guest of IBM.

Weekly Wrap 59: Making paragraphs while the rain pours

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. While Sydney dealt with its wettest July since 1950, I was at the Bunjaree Cottages in Wentworth Falls, writing and writing and writing and writing. And talking on the radio.

“Make hay while the sun shines,” goes the old saying. But for a writer, it’s about making paragraphs while the rain pours. Being stuck indoors with a magnificent view really helps.

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None. But there’ll be plenty next week. I’ll tell you more about that later this morning.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Potholes on Frenchmans Road, Wentworth Falls, photographed on 20 July 2011. This is a slightly modified version, here’s the original.]

Talking Tasmanian goverment hack on ABC 936 Hobart

Yesterday the Tasmanian government was hit by a hacker.

Sp1d3r from the hacking crew S4t4n1c_s0uls got into a Debian Linux box and inserted his graphic into an email sent to state’s media.

I reported this for CSO Online.

S4t4n1c_s0uls has claimed responsibility for almost 100 website defacements this month, including sites in Brazil, Jamaica, China, India and the Philippines. Five Chinese government websites were hit, and one in the Philippines.

I spoke about the hack with Louise Saunders on ABC 936 Hobart, and here’s the audio.

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but it hasn’t been posted on their website so here it is. In return, I reckon you might choose to listen to Louise Saunders’ drive program some time soon.