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

• Blockbuster trial for a movie and TV industry in decline, ABC Drum Opinion, 23 April 2012.
• Security concerns over Australia’s e-health records, CSO Online, 23 April 2012.

Media Appearances

• On Wednesday I was interviewed about the cash for tweets demi-scandal by Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser and their website AdelaideNow. The cash for what? Well, ABC TV’s Media Watch covered it on Monday night. Basically the South Australian Department of Tourism paid “celebrities” $750 to tweet about Kangaroo Island — but the tweets weren’t disclosed as advertising.
• On Thursday I was interviewed by SBS News for the story Wi-Fi networks ‘too hackable’. Quotes from this article appeared in Your WiFi Used In Their Crimes at smarthouse.com.au, where I was billed as a “tech blogger”.
• On Friday I presented at the DigitalMe event in Perth. I’ll link to the video as soon as that’s posted. Meanwhile here’s Sara Culverhouse’s summary.
• Also on Friday I was interviewed on ABC 720 Perth about that DigitalMe presentation. Thanks to Perth’s endemic taxi shortage I ended up walking briskly to the ABC studios — but not briskly enough. I did the interview via phone from the street. That meant I couldn’t record it.
• And still on Friday I spoke about the Optus TV Now appeal on ABC Local Radio sort-of-nationally with Dom Knight, as well as some of the stuff I covered at DigitalMe.

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.

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.

No photo again this week because camera-dearth.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 134, “Avoiding your own Logies leak moment”. Web developer Dave Hall, principal engineer at Technocrat, explains how the Herald Sun might have used the robots exclusion standard to stop the world seeing its embargoed story about Gold Logie winner Hamish Blake — but read the first comment on the story for important additional information.

Articles

• AFACT’s appeal against iiNet decision dismissed — but just you wait, Crikey, 20 April 2012.

Media Appearances

• On Tuesday I was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax media outlets on that Logies oopsie by the Herald Sun.
• On Friday I spoke about the #iiTrial decision on ABC 702 Sydney.

Corporate Largesse

• On Tuesday night Samsung launched their new Smart TV range at Blue Hotel, Woolloomooloo. Apart from food and drink, we all got a goodie bag containing a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Cool Harvest 2011 Pinot Grigio (which was lovely); a Blu-Ray copy of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a double pass to see King of Devil’s Island at the cinema next weekend (when I’m in Perth), a 2-for-1 voucher to see Wish You Were Here at the cinema, all of which I’m giving to Richard Chirgwin; two 330ml cartons of Kokomo coconut water (do they mean “juice”? it tasted like juice), which is “powered by nature” (ugh!) and which I drank; three chocolates from Fardoulis Chocolates, which I ate in about 11 seconds; a 50ml thing of Schwarzkopf [3D]Mension hair and body shampoo (that’s what it says, apparently “body shampoo” is a thing); a 50ml can of Avène Thermal Spring Water, which “smooths and softens sensitive skin” (which sounds like quite a lot of bullshit to me), which I’ll investigate further with Science; and a voucher for Chi Spa at the Shangri-La Hotel to get a 90-minute “treatment” for the price of a 60-minute one, as long as it’s on a weekday, which I threw away because it’s bullshit.
• On Wednesday afternoon LG launched their own Cinema 3D range of smart TVs at Sydney’s newly-renovated Museum of Contemporary Art. Apart from food and drink, there was also a goodie bag — though I ended up not taking one because I was too busy gossiping with Paul Wallbank. Nevertheless, I came away with a voucher to get 40% off buying one of said TVs. Not that I will.

The Week Ahead

Busy. Monday morning you’ll see articles at ABC The Drum and CSO Online that I’ll have written overnight, as well as the Patch Monday podcast.

Then I’ll continue work on the feature story I’m writing for ZDNet Australia and my presentation that’ll be delivered at DigitalMe in Perth on Friday. You’ll be able to hear a preview of that on ABC 720 Perth on Thursday afternoon some time. And while in Perth I’ll be recording the following week’s Patch Monday podcast. Whew!

In terms of my movements, the new plan is that I’ll be in Sydney until I fly to Perth on Thursday, and then in Sydney overnight Sunday night upon my return.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

If you’re new to the story, well, there’s a summary and links in my post from Tuesday and my opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Last night I ended up talking about it on Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa. I held the slight fear that I’d be on a sports program as token representative of The Evil Internets. But as it happens, presenter Will Goodings took us through a rather balanced discussion.

As an aside, I was amused to see how an editorial in The Australian described the federal court decision.

Last week’s landmark Federal Court ruling that Optus can record and re-broadcast sporting events “near live” without breaching copyright…

The court decided no such thing. It decided that individuals could make their “private and domestic” recordings using Optus’ service rather than their own equipment. It certainly didn’t give Optus permission to “re-broadcast” anything, at least within any meaning of the word “broadcast” used by people on this planet.

Still, hats off to The Australian for a lovely bit of propaganda in support of their sporting interests. Remember who owns the National Rugby League…

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.

Last week federal court judge Justice Steven Rares ruled that Optus’ TV Now service, which allows customers to record free-to-air TV and have it streamed back to their smartphone, tablet or computer at a more convenient time, was a legal form of time-shifting under section 111 of the Copyright Act 1968.

Even if competing telco Telstra had a supposedly-exclusive deal with the Australian Football League (AFL) to stream live video coverage of matches to smartphones. Even if the delay between an Optus customer starting to record a game and playing it back was just two minutes.

Telstra is paying the AFL $153 million over five years for this now-not-so-exclusive streaming right. Optus pays the AFL nothing, because they’re just providing a technical service through which individual customers make their own “solely for private and domestic use” recordings.

Josh Taylor covered it for ZDNet Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald commissioned me to write an opinion piece that was published this morning, Sport has to think outside the box. Do please read it. It seem to have struck a chord, because I’ve received a lot of compliments.

Then the ABC’s Linda Mottram asked me to chat about the issues on 702 Sydney. And here’s the audio, along with her subsequent chat with a talkback caller on the same topic.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But these program items usually aren’t archived on their website so here it is. And I will of course suggest that you listen to Linda Mottram’s morning program regularly.

I’m thinking of writing up some of my thoughts on how future sporting coverage could be done technically. Meanwhile, do you feel as I do that the days of cashed-up major sporting codes are about to end?

[Update 8 February 2012, 1015: The Sydney Morning Herald has published a follow-up piece this morning by rugby legend Roy Masters. Court has gambled with codes' futures. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to draw me a diagram of what the fuck he's talking about.]

Interestingly, they chose to focus on the “liberation” of the credit card numbers and how it affected the Australian victims.

They didn’t use any of the material we recorded on who the various victims might be, what the still-to-come publication of some 2.7 million of Stratfor’s internal emails might reveal, and the effect that could have on both Stratfor and the individuals who’ve been feeding them information.

Indeed, this article by Barrett Brown makes it clear that those emails and other internal documents were the real target, not the credit card numbers. Anonymous is trying to give the impression that there’s some powerful stuff in there, but we’ll see.

I guess when you’ve only got six minutes and have to start with “Who is Anonymous?” and “Who is Stratfor?” then there’s not really enough time to get to “This is really a follow-up to Anonymous’ hack of HBGary Federal earlier in the year.”

Careful viewers will notice that reporter Sara Everingham described me as someone who “goes by the name Stilgherrian”, which is a bit of an oops but something that seemed to cause more distress to my Twitter followers than me.

Since some people have asked, I might as well tell you that the interview was shot in a spare office at the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters — rather different from the outdoor shot the last time I was on 7.30.

And despite the story being written and voiced by Sara Everingham, I was actually interviewed by Sarah Dingle. Ah, the Magic of Television!

The video in the story is Flash, so it won’t work on your iDevice. But there’s also an MP4 version of the video.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — leaving out all of the most important bits.

I can’t tell you about the highly personal things that happened last week, except to say that something which had been gnawing at the very core of my being has… changed. And my mind is still adjusting. As is my shoulder, which continues to misbehave. But codeine is dealing with that. Again.

The tooth situation is being resolved, though. Stage one of the root canal work has been performed.

I can also tell you about the nauseatingly young-and-in-love hipsters, pictured above, with their matching skateboards and matching sneakers. Well, that’s all I want to tell you about them, or I’ll get cranky.

So with the linkage…

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 108, “Adobe’s long battle with security flaws”. A conversation with Brad Arkin, Adobe’s head of product security and privacy.

Articles

• Flash Player 11: Adobe’s great security hope, CSO, 4 October 2011.
• iPhone release: no bunch of fives to the fore, but it’s OK, Crikey, 5 October 2011.
• Steve Jobs deserved his cult — you don’t even know how he influenced you, Crikey, 6 October 2011.
• Gillard and others honour Jobs’ memory (contributor only), ZDNet Australia, 6 October 2011.
• Global time zone database closed following legal threat, CSO, 7 October 2011.

Media Appearances

Every single media spot I did this week related to Apple and/or the death of Steve Jobs.

• On Wednesday I spoke with Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa about the iPhone 4S. But interest in the iPhone subsided when…
• … on Thursday the media spots about the death of Steve Jobs began. The first was with ABC Gold Coast.
• The second spot was with Triple J’s Hack.
• The third spot on Thursday was with ABC News24′s discussion program The Drum.
• And on Friday evening I spoke about the death of Steve Jobs on ABC 666 Canberra.
• On the weekend, I also provided some comments on Steve Jobs to the TECHGEEK Weekly podcast.

Corporate Largesse

• On Thursday lunch, snacks and coffee were provided to me as an attendee at the Digital Culture Public Sphere event in Sydney.

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: Matching skateboards and sneakers, a rather nauseating expression of young love spotted on King Street, Newtown, on Saturday night.]

It was my first time on the program. I think I did OK.

If you can’t see the embedded video, try watching it directly on YouTube.

This material is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here because you never know how long these things are going to stay online. Broadcast 6 October 2011.

That’s in addition to the pieces I did for Crikey:

• iPhone release: no bunch of fives to the fore, but it’s OK
• Steve Jobs deserved his cult — you don’t even know how he influenced you

Normal service, on a wider range of topics, will doubtless resume tomorrow. Or Monday. Or… somewhen.

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.

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.]

Amongst all the strange things that happened yesterday, one has stuck strangely in my mind even after sleeping and waking up strangely. A question. Could Stilgherrian Live return?

It’s almost two years since the last episode of my curious little live video webcast when, curiously enough given this week’s curious news about News, James Murdoch was voted “Cnut of the Week”. No, that’s not a typo, that’s what the segment was called.

Yesterday, within an hour of the moment of Full Moon, several different people suggested or even called for the program’s return — including two completely unrelated people who recently discovered the program archives, one who used to watch it every week back in 2008 and 2009, and one who thought… um, suggested… um, no… I can’t say any more. Bloody television.

So what do you think? Should the program remain a thing of its time, with the shows that were made sitting in the archive? Should Stilgherrian Live return? If it did return, which components should be continued? And when should it be produced?

My own thoughts are quite jumbled on this which is why I am asking you, Dear Reader…

Interestingly, most of the soundbites we recorded were about how easy it is to access someone’s voicemail, but the resulting story was more about whether something like the News of the World scandal could already be happening in Australia.

Recording this piece was a pleasant reminder of working in daily live radio. The pace is kinda fun. The ABC called me at 2.15pm, and arranged for the crew to meet me at 3.15pm. We drove to a nearby park and recorded the main interview as well as the cutaways in a total of 45 minutes. And that was in between the noise of aircraft taking off, motor cycles, and pedestrians and cyclists walking between me and the camera.

I’m shown using both laptop and phone. Does that put me into the category of mouse-using TV expert?