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

• Patch Monday episode 97, “Amazon’s Vogels: cloud, start-ups, treadmills” My guest is Amazon’s chief technology officer, Dr Werner Vogels. A fascinating conversation, I found.

Articles

• LulzSec hacks UK’s “The Sun”, News International, CSO, 19 July 2011.
• LulzSec 1, Murdoch 0: News Int, the hacker, becomes the hacked, Crikey, 19 July 2011.
• NEXTDC leases secure Canberra data centre, CSO, 19 July 2011.
• Child exploitation material filters… same policy, different activities, Crikey, 20 July 2011. It’s perhaps not obvious from the headline, but this is about the “voluntary” blocking of child abuse material by Australian internet service providers.
• Four lessons from LulzSec vs Murdoch, CSO, 20 July 2011. I argue that despite the hacking of The Sun having such a high profile, nothing will actually change.
• Australia to consider right-to-privacy law, CSO, 21 July 2011.
• Watchdogs welcome Australia’s right-to-privacy move , CSO, 21 July 2011.
• Hackers target Tasmanian government website, CSO, 21 July 2011.
• Guardian tech editor leaking information, claims LulzSec, CSO, 22 July 2011.
• In IT’s dance of the inflating elephants, Microsoft is stumbling, Crikey, 22 July 2011.
• DSD: Four mitigation strategies prevent 85% of intrusions, CSO, 23 July 2011.

Media Appearances

• On Tuesday I spoke about LulzSec vs Murdoch on ABC 774 Melbourne.
• On Wednesday I spoke with ABC Radio’s national lunchtime current affairs program The World Today about the FBI’s arrest allegedly Anonymous-connected hackers.
• On Thursday I spoke with Louise Saunders on ABC 936 Hobart about the hack of a Tasmanian government web server.

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.]

The cloud has levelled the playing field for business, says Amazon’s chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels. Ten years ago, a start-up needed $5 million. Now, Vogels says, it’s “just $50,000 and a coffee shop around the corner”.

Vogels was in Sydney last week for a promotional event for the cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS). In a wide-ranging interview for this week’s Patch Monday podcast he discussed the cloud from both a business and a technical perspective, and responded to reports that Amazon may soon open an Australian datacentre and that the Sony PlayStation Network hack was launched from AWS servers.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

There is a slight audio problem for the first few minutes of the interview, but it’s worth persisting.

(The conference room tables were rubbing against each other as Vogels moved his hands, elbows on table. It wasn’t very noticeable in the room, but the sound was transmitted mechanically up into the recorder via the tripod it was sitting on. I did notice after a few minutes and fixed things, so you won’t have to endure it for long.)

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Most of it seemed to be about Google+.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 96, “Can Google+ kill Facebook? Twitter?” My guests were social computing and business futures consultant Kate Carruthers, Digital Citizens founder James Fridley, and freelance journalist and blogger Neerav Bhatt.

Articles

• There’s no way I’m handing over data to Google+, for Crikey.
• Online crime under-reported, under-researched, for CSO.
• Amazon AWS algorithms watch for cloud-based hacks, for CSO, which includes material from my interview with Amazon’s chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels.
• Why rush? Let others find the Google+ privacy landmines, for ABC Drum Opinion.
• Quintet nations agree on cybercrime action plan, for CSO. It seems the same five Anglosphere nations that have been sharing intelligence since WWII still consider themselves a unit.

Media Appearances

• On Tuesday I was interviewed by ABC TV’s 7.30 for their story on voicemail hacking at News of the World. I wrote about that already.
• On Friday I was interviewed on the same topic by Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa.

Corporate Largesse

• While attending the AWS Cloud Tour 2011 on Thursday, I received ample food and drink at Amazon’s expense.
• On Friday I met with analyst Arun Chandrasekaran from Frost & Sullivan. He paid for the coffee and juice.
• On Friday I had another extremely long lunch with those unnamed people about that unnamed media project, but this time I managed to find my way back to where I was meant to be spending the night.

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: Kent Street, Sydney, photographed on Friday 15 July 2011.]

[Update 7pm: I didn't think that last article for CSO would be posted today, but it was, so I've added it to the "Articles" list.]

Last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live is now online for your viewing pleasure.

After some excellent nominations for “Cnut of the Week” — which I failed to list in full on the program, sorry — I chose the usual shortlist of four.

Poor former NSW Liberals leader Peter Debnam only scored one vote (6%), coming in 4th place. Amazon.com came in 3rd (17%) for their deletion of George Orwell’s books from people’s Kindles. And in 2nd place (33%) were the critics of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who won’t leave the man have his sex life in peace, or something.

But the clear winner of “Cnut of the Week” was the oldest member of Australia’s House of Representatives, Wilson “Ironbar” Tuckey (44%), who throughout the program was represented by a photo of Treasurer Wayne Swan. Don’t ask.

Now, the prize draw…

Mark Pesce was drawn first from the Cocktail Shaker of Integrity, but he’d already gone to bed. Someone summoned him via SMS, but deliberately gave him the wrong codeword. So, Mark dutifully emailed me “pineapple” when I was after “elephant”. They’re so easy to confuse!

DAemon was drawn next, but he wasn’t watching.

The t-shirt from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing went to Woolly Mittens. Enjoy!

Stilgherrian Live will return next Thursday night at 9.30pm Sydney time. Unless I tell you it doesn’t. It’s not the same without the live chat amongst the audience, so watch it live. No, really.

While the music and movie companies rail against BitTorrent, Norwegian broadcaster NRK recently used the torrent’s capabilities to distribute a HD TV program to 80,000 people for just $350 total in storage and bandwidth.

[P]roject manager Eirik Solheim… estimated that the bandwidth bill would have been roughly $8000 had NRK chosen a more traditional delivery method…

All the HD video files were stored and delivered using Amazon’s S3 data service, which has optional bittorrent capabilities. NRK syndicated the .torrent episodes over an RSS feed, which allowed the program to work something like a podcast.

NRK recommends that people use Miro to subscribe: it’s the easiest way for folks to use BitTorrent and it fits their public-interest mission. The estimate that a high percentage of their downloaders (50% or more) are using Miro.

[...] Technically, the cost to the producer for distributing to a handful of viewers, say 300, is basically the same as doing so for 1,000,000 people. This is because after a point, distribution is handled by the viewers themselves; as the number of viewers rises, the work that NRK does stays constant.

I think I should be playing with Miro more…