As it happens, it’s worth updating this story. Yes, Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter and we’ve been analysing every single tweet as if it’s being delivered on a stone tablet. But while that was happening, Twitter decided to verify not only Murdoch’s Twitter account but the one belonging to his wife Wendi Deng.

Except they verified the wrong one. @Wendi_Deng was a spoof account set up by a chap in London. Business Insider ran a transcript of the fake Deng coming clean, and questions were asked about Twitter’s still-secret verification process.

It should’ve been @wendideng, without the underscore, although as I write this the real account has been taken offline.

Mathew Ingram’s piece at GigaOM summed it up nicely: Why Twitter’s “verified account” failure matters. It’s about trust.

Anyway the ABC Radio conversation wandered well into other matters and hardly touched upon Rupert and Wendi. The pace of news. The appropriateness of Twitter marketing. Potential revenue streams for Twitter. And so on. And so forth.

The Sundays presenter was Jennifer Fleming, who’s filling in for James O’Loghlin over summer. The producer was Siobhan Moylan.

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Apparently Sundays is usually podcast, but I’m going to post my interview here anyway.

For some reason the audio quality on these recordings is rubbish. I’ll let you know if better versions are ever posted.

The keynote was given by leading UK political blogger Iain Dale. The other panellists were Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister; Joe Hockey MP, Shadow Treasurer; Dr Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Microsoft’s Gianpaolo Carraro; and yours truly. The moderator was Mark Pesce.

You can also listen to my interview with Iain Dale, should you be so inclined.

Previous Microsoft Politics & Technology Forums

The first Forum was in 2008. Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.

During this first event, I provided commentary via Twitter and was, um, generally helpful to the discussion from the audience. My most important outburst is during the first panel discussion, though I can be heard but not seen. I have yet to dig the tweets out of Twitter’s archive.

The second Forum was in 2009, with the theme “Campaigning Online”. I did a live blog, and later turned my notes of Joe Trippi’s keynote address into the post Notes on Obama’s election campaign.

I daresay there are videos somewhere, but I couldn’t be arsed looking for them just now.

And in the lead-up and especially on the day, you’ll be able to follow everyone’s tweets using the hashtag #poltech.

I’ve attended the previous two Microsoft Politics & Technology Forums in Canberra as their guest, but this year there’s a difference. I’ll be on stage. The date is 1 June 2011. The venue is the Parliament House Theatrette. And it’s free.

The theme is Do we trust the internet? That’s all about openness and transparency in politics.

Technology and politics is more interwoven than ever before.

We’ve seen sensitive government information being revealed on Wikileaks, and mobilisation of communities across the Middle East using social media resulting in regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and unrest in Libya and Bahrain.

The first social media election in the UK saw an incoming Conservative Coalition government, overturning 13 years of Labor rule. David Cameron’s Conservative party trumped other parties in social media campaigning.

The Australian Government has its own Declaration of Open Government, a central recommendation of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. The declaration promotes “greater participation in Australia’s democracy, and is committed to open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.”

This and much more will be discussed when UK’s leading political blogger Iain Dale (pictured) will be addressing Microsoft’s 3rd Politics and Technology Forum: Openness and Transparency in Politics. The Forum is supported by Open Forum.

Iain Dale will then participate in a panel discussion of distinguished speakers including Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister; Joe Hockey MP, Shadow Treasurer; Stilgherrian; and Microsoft’s Gianpaolo Carraro. The event MC is Mark Pesce.

I’m particularly amused by the facts that I’m “distinguished” and that I’m not explained by any job title or description. I am self-explanatory. Or possibly indescribable.

It’ll cost you nothing to register for this free event, but you’ll need to use the SEKRIT ticket code. Which is “dale”.

Previous Microsoft Politics & Technology Forums

The first Forum was in 2008. Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.

During this first event, I provided commentary via Twitter and was, um, generally helpful to the discussion from the audience. My most important outburst is during the first panel discussion, though I can be heard but not seen. I have yet to dig the tweets out of Twitter’s archive.

The second Forum was in 2009, with the theme “Campaigning Online”. I did a live blog, and later turned my notes of Joe Trippi’s keynote address into the post Notes on Obama’s election campaign.

I daresay there are videos somewhere, but I couldn’t be arsed looking for them just now.

Speaking at the AusCERT conference on Monday, Ivan Krstic, director of security architecture for the One Laptop per Child project, says the computing industry relies on “utterly obsolete concepts and assumptions” and has “massively failed when it comes to desktop security”.

The way modern desktop security works is by relying on the user to make informed and sensible choices on things they don’t understand.

The early personal firewall software was a classic example:

A dialogue would pop up and say ‘Hi, we’ve intercepted this packet with this TCP sequence number and these flags set, and SYN and FIN are both on, and here are the destination ports and the source ports and here is a hex dump of the packet. Allow or deny? What do you think?’. Who is that protecting? It’s protecting me, but I don’t need that kind of protection in the first place.

The Apple Blog was sarcastic when they reported Krstic’s speech — I suspect because arrogant OS X users think security issues don’t apply to them — so I posted a response…

Despite your sarcasm, when you ask…

So does that mean ‘there is nothing in place to say that’ OS X’s Chess game cannot format my hard drive or turn over control of my Mac to third parties?

… yes, you’re right on the money. Krstic is absolutely correct. This is exactly the “trust model” of every desktop operating system currently in use.

Software like Minesweeper in Windows, Chess in OS X or whatever — everything from Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office to that cute little widget you just downloaded from… who? — are supplied as pre-compiled binary programs. Unless you reverse-engineer them and do a complete audit, you have no way of knowing for sure what they do. Not 100%.

Even then you have to be really good at software auditing to know you’re not overlooking some trick. And you have to audit every software library they call. And, if you want to be completely sure, audit the microcode on the processor chip while you’re at it.

When you run any software, you’re trusting the author to do only what they claim they will do.

There is no global auditing program to ensure software does what it says and only what it says. In any event, how can you know whether the file you just downloaded is the same one that was audited?

And, despite the “I’m more secure than you” arrogance shown by so many OS X users, there’s nothing about OS X that makes it any different to Windows in this regard: run a program, and it runs with the same privileges as you have.

At this point open-source advocates will say that they have the source code so they’re OK — but honestly, when was the last time you read through the source code before compiling and running a program?

The full report on this prank shows how the store management couldn’t cope — they didn’t like it, and people get nervous when confronted with something “different”.

It’s also interesting reading the comments on Bruce Schneier’s write-up of this event, where so many commenters fail to see the difference between a “threat to the store” and a “threat to the perceived authority of the store managers”.