This video was shot with a Nikon Coolpix S8100 compact digital camera, using the in-camera stereo microphone for the audio. The only post-production was to top and tail it, and compress it to a YouTube-optimised MP4 using iSkysoft Video Converter. Otherwise it’s exactly as it came out of the camera.

Should I list the tips themselves, here, in text form? Perhaps later. I simply couldn’t be arsed right now.

We spoke about the conference atmosphere itself, cybercrime, cyberwar, the risk of Cybergeddon (yes, I know), and the claim by Eugene Kaspersky that Apple is ten years behind Microsoft when it comes to security.

Not that Mr Kaspersky would ever, like, troll the entire planet.

What we didn’t talk about, really, was the two stories that have been published so far:

• Russian crims evade transaction profiling, which details a trans-national organised crime operation profiled by Mikko Hypponen.
• DNS poisoning the thin end of a wedge’, in which domain name system pioneer Dr Paul Vixie supports my argument that fiddling with the internet’s fundamental navigation systems probably isn’t such a great idea.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

Here’s what I wrote last year when, just like this year, I was on the ZDNet Australia team:

• AusCERT 2011: Firms ignore ID theft risk, in which Bennett Arron explains that police forces don’t yet take this stuff seriously enough. Has this improved? I’m seeing talk but no action.
• AusCERT 2011: Son of Stuxnet within a year: expert, in which Eric Byres explains why the Stuxnet worm — the presumed US-with-Israeli-help anti-SCADA attack on Iran’s nuclear program — would spawn a wave of copycats. This didn’t happen. Why not?
• AusCERT 2011: Black hats and whitegoods, a story which was provided with the year’s best headline by CBS Interactive’s Brian Haverty where I discussed how the Internet of Things and a billion smart appliances would be the vector for a new wave of attacks. This hasn’t happened — yet — but is it still just around the corner?
• AusCERT 2011: Bank theft goes truly mobile, in which Amit Klein, chief technology officer at Trusteer, predicted third-generation anti-banking malware on smartphones by Christmas. Did this happen? Well, not really. Why not?
• AusCERT 2011: Silent victims thwart cybercops: Qld Police, in which Detective Superintendent Brian Hay, head of the Fraud and Corporate Crime Group of the Queensland Police Service, bemoaned the lack of hard data. I know how he feels. Do we have any yet?

The feeling I get from scanning those headlines is that there’s always a lot of scaremongering but the threats often don’t materialise. Are the threats over-stated? Does pointing out the threats trigger an effort to counter them, thus defeating them? Is it all just a bit too screechy?

And over the last year there’s been so much talk of imminent cyberwar. Is that just this year’s fashionable scary thing on a stick? I intend to ask a few questions. And I’ll plug it again: Thomas Rid says we shouldn’t believe the hype.

I haven’t yet looked in detail at the conference program but will do so over the next few hours. What do you reckon I should be investigating?

[Update 16 May 2012, 0625 AEST: Changed second paragraph to emphasise that I am covering the event for ZDNet Australia this year as well as last.]

The numbers in the story don’t surprise me. Typically a Facebook user’s posts are only seen by around 12% of their followers, depending on whether Facebook’s secret-sauce algorithm decides whether you’re a sufficiently close friend or the topic is of sufficient interest to the viewer.

Why not let people pay money to change that?

I could tell from the tone of his voice that ABC 702 Sydney host Richard Glover did not approve.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

I’ll leave the article to explain itself once you click through, but to provide some Googlejuice here are the words hacking, infosec, cybercrime, cyberwar, information security, malware and cows.

“How do you think that tweeting your day plans affects your personal safety?” asked Ravneel Chand a short time ago. Overall, I reckon it actually increases my safety. Here’s why.

Background first. Here’s today’s “daily plan” tweet which, like those on pretty much every other day, is tweeted shortly before I settle down to work.

Thu plan: Bump out Waratah Cottage; 1032 train to Sydney; lunch (where?); errand Newtown/Enmore; write something; evening TBA.

Later in the morning I mentioned that I’d be catching a later train. And then, just as I left the house:

Mobile: Cab, shortly, to Wentworth Falls; 1132 train to Sydney Central; train to Town Hall station; 1335 walk to SEKRIT hotel and check in.

Clearly the fear being expressed is that by knowing my movements some bad person could more easily do me harm. But let’s do a proper risk assessment. You start one of those by enumerating the risks, and then you look at how this additional information might change those risks.

As I see it, my “personal safety” risks are someone deliberately wishing to do me harm, accidentally injury by something external to myself, or a medical emergency that isn’t triggered by anything external.

I’ll dispose of the last two first. Whether accident or medical emergency, nothing in my tweets will cause or stoop that happening. But if the world knows where I am then my safety is increased. If I can only fire off a tweet or SMS that says “I’ve been stabbed” of “chest pain” then emergency services have more information to go on. If I fire off no message at all and simply go missing, well again my steps can be retraced and I’m likely to be found more quickly.

The one people fear most is the violent assailant. An assailant will either know me and wish to harm me because of that association, or they’ll be a random.

If the assailant wants to harm me because they know me, then they’ll be motivated and put some effort into it. Given that my work, phone number, email address and plenty of photos are already online, they could easily find me by other means and follow me until I was somewhere alone.

They could even just contact me and arrange a meeting. Heck, I cover information security issues: they could just pretend to be a confidential source and ask to meet me somewhere and “tell no-one”.

Similarly for anyone else, it’s pretty easy to find out where they live or work, and just start a surveillance operation from there.

If this assailant is an amateur, they’ll have likely already drawn attention to themselves through some angry or threatening communication. I’ll already be taking steps to avoid them. If they’re a professional, well I’m screwed no matter what because they’re far better at this game than I am.

At the risk of over-stressing this point, if someone wants to do me harm because I’m me, then that’s unlikely to become more of a risk because they know which train I’m on. “Oh, Stilgherrian’s train arrives not long after mine. I think I’ll stab him then.” No, I don’t think that’s how things work.

If the assailant doesn’t know me, then why would they be wanting to harm me? Well now we’re talking something like mugging me for my wallet or phone, or getting into a fight somewhere. In which case the fact that I’ve told the internet where I am doesn’t change that risk. The risk is about where I am, who else is there — along in a dark alley while drunk is obviously bad here.

Twitter is a remarkably apt name for this social messaging service, because we can use it to maintain a continual ambient awareness of each other’s state of being regardless of location.

Against this negligible or perhaps even zero increase in risk, tweeting my movements provides remarkable utility.

Friends and colleagues can coordinate with me with minimal effort. Far more than once I’ve had someone join me for a meeting or a drink because the chance presented itself. PR minions — if they bother to look! — know when not to call me because I’m on a train. And so on. People have volunteered restaurant recommendations or travel tips.

I should say, though, that the risk profile might not be the same for everyone. These are the choices I’ve made with open eyes.

To understand these issues better, I can thoroughly recommend the work of Bruce Schneier, and in particular his book Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World. Indeed, every politician should read that book before opening their mouth about anything related to risk and security.

In 2008 I criticised Rudd’s slow digital revolution.

Dig into Budget Paper No. 2 and there’s a frustrating lack of detail and commitment.

Of $4.7b promised for the National Broadband Network [this was the original 12Mbps fibre to the node policy], only 0.16% has been committed: $2.1m this financial year and $5.2m next for “establishment and implementation”. The remaining 99.84% — you know, actually building the thing — is all “nfp”. Not for publication. We’ll get back to you…

The rest? All. Too. Slow. And. Vague.

In 2009 I complained that the machinery of Australian government is as outdated as the steam locomotive and the electric telegraph in The Budget? How quaint! They’re just made-up, you know.

Here we imagine that once a year we can produce a Big List of Numbers that’ll cover everything our “modern” nation-state will need to deal with for the next 365 days.

We proclaim it Good or Bad for this or that self-interested sector of the community on the basis of a quick glance, a gut reaction, and the need to create a narrative that’ll attract an audience or justify a pre-existing political zealotry.

We pretend to believe numbers like “$20 million over four years” when only a tiny part of that might be committed in the coming financial year and the rest, still to be confirmed in the next Budget, is therefore nothing but wishful thinking.

The reality, of course, is that the world moves faster than this. We experience a sudden global financial crisis, and must immediately tighten our belts by … um … giving away $900 cash to everyone.

In 2010 I complained of More NBN vagueness, border control and cyber-safety re-allocation. It’s not a bad read, but I’ll leave you to click through to that one.

And by 2011 I was clearly over the whole thing, writing Ritual shenanigans, but hey, this is government.

Riddle me this. What is the actual point of the federal budget process and all the lock-up shenanigans that go with it when the biggest bucket of money related to the technology sector by far, that National Broadband Network thing, isn’t even on the books?

What is the point when the way that NBN money is being spent – and is it $26 billion or $36 billion or $43 billion or that $50 billion scare-number that Malcolm Turnbull pulled out of some random orifice and keeps repeating unchallenged? – it is all SEKRIT thanks to those magic words “commercial confidentiality”…

What is the point of this annual ritual – built on the assumption that we can publish a set of numbers in May that will, in this complex and rapidly changing world, still be meaningful six months down the track – when the government has to respond to changing circumstances? Such as urgently building a fibre-to-the-premises network? Or responding to a global financial crisis? Or starting a land war in Asia? Or handing to every taxpayer $900 because, um, oh, shut up stop asking questions and buy a new TV.

I went on about “$20 million in suck-up-to-Tasmania funding” and “Labor’s half-arsed internet ‘filtering’ policy” and “loud-mouthed entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan” and noted:

Just be aware that all of this could be changed in an instant, budget process or not, if a minister gets on a plane with the Ranga-in-Chief with a few numbers scribbled on the back of an envelope.

So, what the fuck will I end up writing once the budget papers drop onto government websites tonight? Especially given that my shoulder is “out” and I won’t be able to get it fixed until tomorrow afternoon — my birthday! — and I’m scoffing codeine? Suggestions please!

Here’s the audio, and I reckon you can hear very clearly that I had a very bad cold.

The audio is ©2012 dmgRadio Australia, but here it is ‘cos it hasn’t been posted on the radio station’s website. Besides, this is a reasonable plug.

This case has interesting implications. Originally, Justice Steve Rares said, effectively, that someone using a recorder-in-the cloud was still making a personal copy for domestic purposes. The fact that they’re using a recording device that’s provided as a service rather than sitting on the shelf under their television is irrelevant. The Full Court is saying, effectively, that the cloud provider is complicity in the action, which means it’s no longer personal, and in some cases may even be the sole actor.

This interpretation could have massive implications for providers of other cloud services. Could they be found to be copying data that they’re not entitled to? I’m no lawyer, so don’t ask me. But I can at least see that the law is having to deal with situations that are very different from the circumstances imagined when it was written.

Paragraph 100 of the Full Court’s decisions does say:

We should emphasise that our concerns here have been limited to the particular service provider-subscriber relationship of Optus and its subscribers to the TV Now Service and to the nature and operation of the particular technology used to provide the service in question. We accept that different relationships and differing technologies may well yield different conclusions to the “who makes the copy” question.

Will this decision be appealed? You bet.

Last night I spoke about the decision and its implications with Dom Knight on ABC Local Radio nationally — well, except for the analog transmitters that were broadcasting the cricket. I also spoke about the material I presented yesterday at DigitalMe in Perth.

[Update: I just noticed that there's a couple of little audio gaps. I was recording off the stream, y'see. I'll fix them later.]

Personally, I stand by what I said in the opinion piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald in February: Sport has to think outside the box.

If you’re in Perth today, the DigitalFamily event starts at 1000 local time at Northbridge Piazza. It’s free.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

I’m not sure who @fivewalls is, but he asked: “You’re not hanging out at hellfire again are you?” That’s the column on the right, people who mention me or direct their conversation towards me.

@hyper_mpesce, which is a robot that repeats things Mark Pesce says, rearranging and making everything hyper, said: “hyper-If hyper-you hyper-even hyper-if hyper-you hyper-read hyper-the hyper-Hellfire hyper-Club. hyper-” hyper-#DISCONNECT.” As one would. That’s the column on the left, which is everyone I follow.

I can think of no explanation for this coincidence.

Here’s what I said, unedited. Well, except for fixing a few obvious mistakes.

Hi REDACTED,

I’m always happy to help on student projects. Let’s see where we go with these questions at the end of a long week.

The first thing I’ll say is that I’ll be putting my answers on my own website too — perhaps an edited version — though I won’t mention your name or even your gender or the university you attend.

It’s taken a good three hours to think about this stuff. Your questions were very open-ended and do not have simple one-par answers. I suspect that’s what you’re meant to be doing in this exercise — digging deeper into the issues rather than just assembling the responses from the panel.

There didn’t seem to be any sign in your questions that you’d read any of what I’ve already written on these subjects, particularly on the nature of journalism?

Anyway, to get more value for the world out of my time I’ll post this online and see what responses it gets. That in turn may be useful for you.

The second thing I’ll say is that everything is a dialog, and list-of-questions leading to list-of-answers will lead to a stilted view. I don’t know what the important aspects of your questions might be. You’ll need to think about your own interpretation of this conversation and draw your own conclusions.

If you did this again, I’d strongly suggest doing what other students have done: book an hour of my time for a chat, either over coffee or a beer or via Skype, and have a conversation to explore the issues.

The third thing I’ll say is that my responses probably reflect my specific preoccupations this week and may well change over time.

Oh, and how did you select me for this panel? I’m curious, ‘cos I also saw (obviously) who else you tweeted.

1. Could you please explain what you currently do and how you got there?

• About Stilgherrian

I’m a word-whore. I write for mastheads that might be interested in my take on subject areas that they think I’m qualified to write about, and where they know I can deliver the product on time.

Some people call that “freelance journalism”. I really don’t care what it’s called. The fact of the matter is that editors have a product to deliver and they engage people who can deliver that product. That product might be a 500-word straight news story, or it might be a 900-word op-ed (which means “entertain the punters and stir them into posting comments”), or it might be a 2000-word feature on a specific topic. Or it might be a video or audio piece.

I do this shit for (currently) ZDNet Australia, CSO Online, Sydney Morning Herald, Crikey, Technology Spectator, ABC The Drum and whoever else wants to call and offer money. I do a weekly podcast for ZDNet and an occasional one for myself.

As a supposedly-specialist I end up being a go-to person for comment in other media too.

I also have some legacy technical clients for whom I manage websites or solve network problems. That’s a far better hourly rate but not as much fun.

How did I get here? I’ve been fascinated by language and writing since I was a six-year-old, when I asked for a typewriter as a birthday present. When I got to university I studied computing science and linguistics, but also edited newsletters. When I was maybe 21 I dumped a perfectly good job and volunteered for a community radio station and learnt the craft of broadcasting — and a couple of years later I got a job as a producer for ABC Radio.

The rest is history. See my LinkedIn profile.

2. What is journalism to you? …

• Senate to re-open Bloggers versus Journalists
• Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!
• When is a journalist not a journalist?

Above all it’s storytelling. Telling stories that help people explain to each other the world around them.

There’s a lot of pious bullshit talked about journalism, about uncovering the Truth. But at its heart it’s storytelling and entertainment — a core human need.

In all this “journalism is dying” rubbish there’s a core issue that’s forgotten: the vast majority of journalists are factory workers, producing media objects for industrial-age media factories, and they’re just shit-scared about their job security.

3. In a survey in 1991 Public Relations Practitioners believed that 40% of output was based on Public Relations. Editors in contracts estimated it to be an average of 20%. Around what percentage of the news that you produce would you say is sourced from PR? When it comes to working with PR on some articles, how vital is the information that they give you?

20%? 40%? Hahahahahahahahaha! Check out the Crikey/UTS analysis done the other year. It’s WAY over 50% and tech journalism was the worst with 78% of news stories being the direct result of PR placement.

I’ve just counted my own output for the last few months and maybe it’s only 1/3 with some PR input, and perhaps a third of those are little more than straight rewrites of PR material. But then the bulk of my work is analysis and commentary, not daily news cycle reportage.

What’s your count of my work? It’s all listed on my website…

How do you measure this? A government minister announces a new policy and their PR people send the documents. You report what the minister says, read the reports, write some analysis. Was that story PR-driven?

How vital the PR input is to the story depends wildly upon the story itself and what the PR input actually is. Something that might have been seen as important — a company’s view on some aspect of the industry — might be sought and yet comes back as a bland, cliche-filled piece of overly-legalled corporate speak. So it gets dropped.

4. How do you decide if something is news worthy? …

How close are we to deadline?

That’s actually serious. If we’re running out of time then things that might not have seemed newsworthy three hours ago can suddenly look appealing.

If I have to write down words then I’ll end up listing all the standard stuff you see in journalism textbooks. Is it new? Interesting? Surprising? Affects lots of people? Represents danger or excitement or a change of worldview? is there human drama such as a power struggle? Is something being exposed that was otherwise hidden?

But really, this stuff is really decided by a gut emotional reaction. You either know what’s news or you don’t.

Or: Is it the sort of thing that’s going to get people talking to each other about it?

… Is there anything PR practitioners can do to persuade you to place their news over another more notable article?

Of course not. Notability or newsworthiness is the determining factor in editorial. Why on earth would any ethical journalist run a less-newsworthy story as lead?

I believe what you’re referring to is called “advertising placement”.

5. Between Journalists and PR practitioners, who do you believe holds more control and why?

Control of what? Of what the audience sees? The journalist. Always. They choose what they write and the manner in which it’s written — well, in conjunction with their editor. Whether they choose to be responsible and ethical and take control is another question.

As soon as you hear a PR person thank a journalist for their “support”, you know that that journalist has failed. They’ve put the needs of someone else ahead of the needs of their audience.

If PR people want more control, then again I believe that’s called “advertising”.

6. What are some strategies that are or could be implemented so that gatekeepers and PR firms can build a strong relationship which allows a win-win situation?

Well, I don’t think of this in terms of wins and losses. But to answer more broadly I think this is less about cultivating relationships with journalists — I mean, by all means buy me lunch or a drink, but that’s just basic courtesy and what you’re buying is the lunch or the drink, not the story — and more about cultivating an acceptable, rational, honest public face for the organisation you represent.

You’ll hear journalists talk about “PR droids” and “minions”. They’re the ones who only ever contact you when they have something to sell, never go beyond the specific line they’re currently pushing, and never seem to think about what kind or work you actually do. They’re the ones who, when asked if there’s a comment on some topic, copy and paste some crap we’ve all seen before, Yawn.

Good PR people develop a a human face for the organisation. Real people saying things they’d say to other real people.

• Why all corporate PR droids should be shot

7. Could you please describe a relationship that you have with a Public Relations Practitioner, how that relationship started and what it’s like now?

I try not to be too close to PR people. Better objectivity comes from maintaining a bit of professional distance.

That’s not the answer you wanted, I know, but I’m on deadline now — a story that was commissioned two hours ago. And to be honest the question feels like you’re asking “How do you get along with the people you encounter?” Every one is different.

I’m about to flip over to the 1000 #iiTrial decision in the High Court and I have to file by midday. If you do have suitable timelines maybe we can come back to that.

Hope this helps. Do feel free to come back to me.

Cheers,

Stil

So, um, what do you think? Have I given this poor student a hard time? Is there anything I should’ve added?

Oh. And I asked them to set me a deadline and they said midday Friday so I sent it by like before 10am but they still haven’t acknowledged receiving it so I reckon they just made some shit up for the deadline.

The High Court decided, as outlined in its summary [PDF], that internet service provider iiNet was not responsible for the copyright-infringing acts of its customers. But as explained in their full decision, that decision was based on “all the facts of the case”. That is, things might have turned out differently had the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) or iiNet handled things differently. We’ll never know.

Since I wrote for Crikey, my ZDNet Australia colleague Josh Taylor has been tracking the reactions. I daresay there’ll be more to come across the weekend.

Now when I spoke to the ABC’s Richard Glover just after the 4pm news this afternoon — that’s the audio you’ll hear here — the scene was set first by Glover’s slightly-misleading introduction involving pubs and then AFACT’s managing director Neil Gane. So I was working within that framing. I’m not sure how well I did.

Obviously time was limited. Had I had more time to speak, I would have said:

• We do keep talking about the experience of the music industry, but that’s because they’re further down the path of replacing traditional distribution mechanisms with the internet. It might be worth the film and TV industries having a look at that and seeing what they can learn, rather than just being in denial.
• Yes, the economics of making a big blockbuster movie are very different from making a music album. But the film industry decided to take the blockbuster path with all the expensive hangers-on that that business model entails. No-one is forcing them to do it that way.
• With distribution costs tending to zero, those who run the traditional distribution models need one heck of a lot better argument to justify the amount of money they charge than “Oh no, it’s all different now”.
• They talk about the industry being in decline, but that’s because they only count themselves. As a totality, people probably spend more on entertainment than they ever have done. It’s like the Myer and David Jones and Harvey Norman stores whinging about the decline of retail. No, retail overall is doing just fine. The bit that’s failing is them — the people doing things the same old way and not adapting to the change.
• No business model has a right to exist. Maybe the age of big movies and big TV productions is over. It wouldn’t be the first time a form of entertainment had died because it was no longer viable, and it wouldn’t be the last.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

Or more precisely, that Benford’s Law is followed by the distribution of the number of Twitter followers that each of my Twitter followers has in turn.

“Benford’s Law of Anomalous Numbers states that for many datasets, the proportion of data points with leading digit n will be approximated by log₁₀(n+1) – log₁₀(n),” says Carmody with a straight face.

So, if you look at the chart, you’ll see that there’s more followers with a follower count starting with a “1″ (so 1, 11-19, 100-199, 1000-1999 etc) than with a “2″ (2, 20-29, 200-299, 2000-2999 etc) than with a “3″ (3, 30-39, 300-399, 3000-3999 etc) and so on.

He does note in another chart that there seems to be a spike of followers with just one follower each. I’m wondering whether that’s about spammers.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and there’s a version at the ABC website.