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Talking AusCERT 2012 and cyberwar on ABC Local Radio

19 May 2012 in Conversations, Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

My full output from the AusCERT 2012 information security conference has yet to appear. Stand by. But last night I did a half-hour conference wrap with Dom Knight on ABC Local Radio.

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.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:41 — 15.5MB)

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

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

Talking Facebook pay-for-highlighting on ABC 702 Sydney

14 May 2012 in Conversations, Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | No comments

While the Facebook IPO Roadshow rolls on, the company is trying a bunch of experiments — both to search for new revenue streams and to maintain the buzz. One of them is paying $2 to have your post highlighted.

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.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:04 — 4.7MB)

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

Weekly Wrap 99: Perth, privacy and poor photographs

29 April 2012 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | No comments

My week from Monday 23 to Sunday 29 April 2012 covered the entire continent from Sydney to Perth and (at least later today) back again.

That’s Perth in the photo, with the Swan River just visible between the apartment buildings of East Perth. The photo was taken with my bashed-up HTC Desire phone and processed through Instagram.

Heck, if Zuckerberg reckons it’s worth a billion dollars I might as well have a look, right?

I’ll comment on Instagram itself later, and figure out a better way to integrate the photos into this website. Meanwhile, here’s a gallery of my Instagram photos, updated automatically.

And now on with the show…

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 135, “iiNet wards off AFACT, but what next?” A summary of the High Court’s decision in Roadshow Films and others versus iiNet Limited, the initial reactions, and a wide-ranging discussion with Dr Rebecca Giblin, a copyright academic and geek from Monash University’s law school, who literally wrote the book on this subject: Code Wars: 10 Years of P2P Software Litigation. Keywords for the other things we mention are SOPA/PIPA, peer-to-peer production,

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • I wasn’t paid to present at DigitalMe, they did cover travel from Sydney to Perth and one night’s accommodation at Aarons Hotel including breakfast. Wine by Brad provided booze for the welcome drinks, as well as a bottle to take home. Food was supplied by Sorrento Restaurant, Northbridge.

The Week Ahead

A busy week of writing lies ahead, including a story for CSO Online and my presentation for the Saasu Cloud Conference the following week. I’ll also continue work on the feature story I’m writing for ZDNet Australia

I believe I’ll be back in Wentworth Falls for most of the week, but this could change at short notice. The Dopplr widget on the left-hand side of every page of my website is usually updated within an hour of plans changing, so always check there first — but bear in mind it has odd ideas of what day it is.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

Talking the Optus TV Now appeal on ABC Local Radio

28 April 2012 in Conversations, Internet, Media, Privacy by Stilgherrian | No comments

In February the Federal Court ruled that Optus TV Now, which recorded free-to-air TV on behalf of customers for more convenient playback later, was legitimate personal timeshifting as allowed under section 111 of the Copyright Act 1968. Yesterday the Full Federal Court overturned that decision.

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.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:54 — 9.9MB)

[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.

Talking the #iiTrial decision on ABC 702 Sydney

20 April 2012 in Conversations, Internet, Media by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

The big internet-related story in Australia today was the High Court’s decision in the so-called #iiTrial. I wrote the lead story in Crikey — read that now for the facts and my analysis — and just spoke about it on ABC 702 Sydney.

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.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:34 — 13.1MB)

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.

Weekly Wrap 97: Facebook, Instagram and emergency duck

17 April 2012 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | No comments

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 9 to Sunday 15 April 2012 — another short week in terms of writing and media production, thanks to the 4-day work week after Easter.

There’s no photo this week because I lost my camera — though it has since been found in the Blue Mountains taxi where I dropped it. I’ll be collecting it on Sunday, probably.

There was also quite a bit of disruption thanks to the need to perform some emergency geekery. I may or may not write about that another time.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 133, “OS X botnet: disaster or speed bump?”. A chat about the Flashback botnet with Chris Gatford, director of penetration testing firm Hacklabs, and applications architect Benno Rice.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m in Sydney all this week too, before returning to Wentworth Falls on Sunday afternoon. My main task is to complete a feature story for ZDNet Australia and an opinion piece for CSO Online. I’m also attending two launch events for new “smart TVs”, one for Samsung and one for LG. And apart from that I’ll be attempting to avoid the seasonal affective disorder that usually strikes at this time of the year.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

Talking Instagram and Facebook on ABC Media Report

16 April 2012 in Conversations, Internet by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

The biggest media story last week was the billion-dollar purchase of photo-sharing service Instagram by Facebook — and I ended up talking about it on ABC Radio National’s Media Report on Friday.

If you’d like to explore further than my comments to presenter Richard Aedy, you might like the Wired analysis of the numbers compared with other internet startup buyouts, Paul Wallbank’s refutation of that analysis, and a witty piece in NYMag — as well as my own piece for Crikey.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:18 — 4.3MB)

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

Weekly Wrap 95: Speaking of chainsaws…

01 April 2012 in Weekly Wrap by Stilgherrian | No comments

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 26 March to Sunday 1 April 2012.

Not so much media output this week, ‘cos I was dealing with a web development matter for a long-standing client, I researched one story that turned out to be a fizzer, and yesterday I got caught up in a cleaning the hackers out of a website. Plus I recorded tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast early. Plus it hit the end of the month and I reckon my editors’ freelancer budgets had run out.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 131, “Your word is your log-in, literally”. Dr Clive Summerfield, chief executive of Australian company Auraya, talks about the state of the art in voice biometric authentication. Fascinating stuff from a great explainer.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I won’t be able to lock in the week ahead until I talk to some people on Monday morning. However there’s a technical briefing on the NBN rollout in Sydney on Monday that might be useful to attend, and I’m thinking of sitting in with a team participating in the Cyber Defence University Challenge and turning that into a podcast. But, as I say, I’ll work that out tomorrow.

Friday, of course, is Good Friday, and I’ll be moving down to Sydney for a couple weeks while Bunjaree Cottages enjoys the busy time of school holidays.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Chirgwin with Chainsaw: Bunjaree Cottages proprietor Richard Chirgwin observes all safety precautions — although technically this photograph, actually a frame grab from a video, belongs to last week as it was taken on 25 March.]

Talking NBN rollout on ABC Local Radio

29 March 2012 in Conversations, Internet, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

NBNCo announced the three-year rollout plan for Australia’s National Broadband Network today, explaining when (roughly) they’ll lay fibre or make fixed wireless available to 3.5 million out of the country’s 10 million premises.

So far there’s really only just been time for straight reportage from the launch and set-piece criticism from the opposition. It’ll take a few days at least, perhaps even a week, before analysts have done real analysis on who’s getting the network when and whether that’s been decided by politics rather than practicalities.

(Of course one way around that would have been far greater transparency from NBNCo, including putting their raw data and the software they used online for all to see and cross-check. But like that’ll ever happen.)

I daresay I’ll end up writing more about this over coming weeks. Meanwhile here’s an interview I just did on ABC 702 Sydney and ABC Regional Radio around NSW with Dom Knight.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:52 — 8.3MB)

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But these program items usually aren’t archived on their website so here it is.

The 9pm Edict #20

21 March 2012 in The 9pm Edict by Stilgherrian | 5 comments

Margaret Whitlam is dead. Tony Abbott picks up her still-warm corpse and uses it to thump her grieving husband. British comedian Bill Bailey says what I think about classical music. And we top the party goat for Harmony Day.

In this episode of the Edict, you’ll hear how Harmony Day is just made up by the Australian government — and you can check out the material at the official website. I’ll introduce you to the joys of 3 Word Quotes. The ABC TV broadcast of Last Night of the Proms inspires me to quote Bill Bailey from British TV program TV Heaven Telly Hell. And I reflect upon Tony Abbott’s lame tribute to Margaret Whitlam.

You can listen to the podcast below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:20 — 19.2MB)

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733. Not that anyone ever does.

[Update 22 March 2012: While I did mention it in the podcast, I forgot to mention here that because this is episode 20 it brings us to the end of series 1 of The 9pm Edict. It's time for a rethink. That rethink also includes a bit of a think about Stilgherrian Live, the live video program I used to do. Some people want the Edict to continue. Some want Live to return. I'll write more about this soon.]

[Credits: Margaret Whitlam tributes by Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott from ABC News. Last Night of the Proms from ABC TV. TV Heaven Telly Hell via YouTube. Beep sound by junggle via Freesound.org, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]

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