A brief reminder: I’m about to head to Canberra for a couple of days. This morning I’ll be at the University of Canberra for the seminar Privacy and security in a connected world: anonymity, data loss, tracking and the social web, being organised by their new Centre for Internet Safety. And then tomorrow morning I’ll be at Parliament House for the Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum. I do have some free time in the afternoons if you want to catch up.
Iain Dale on politics, Twitter, radio and authenticity
Earlier this evening I recorded this interview with Iain Dale, who’s keynoting the Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum in Canberra on 1 June. He’s one of the UK’s leading political bloggers, a former Conservative Party politician, publisher of Total Politics magazine and host of the evening show on London’s LBC Radio — amongst other things.
I’d originally intended to use a slab of this in the Patch Monday podcast I do for ZDNet Australia, but it’s not really about technology. Our conversation did touch upon the way political parties use social media such as blogs and Twitter — or, really, why they don’t. But we also covered the attraction of broadcast radio as medium and why it’ll survive, authenticity and much more. So I decided to post the entire recording here as a podcast.
I began by asking Dale about a piece he wrote for The Guardian earlier this month, Is this really the death of political blogging? It turns out the headline is misleading.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:10 — 29.8MB)
For more on Iain Dale, read his Wikipedia entry or follow him on Twitter.
I’ve been thinking of doing a more podcasts of interviews along the lines of this one — not necessarily about politics or technology but whatever strikes my fancy. Indeed, I created the blog post category Conversations for this purpose, although so far I’ve only used it to post random audio I’ve been involved with. What do you think?
Weekly Wrap 51
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This week returned to something a little more normal after the crazy fortnight of travel and conference coverage.
Podcasts
- Patch Monday episode 89, “Stuxnet, routing hacks and a seized iPad”, based on material connected with the AusCERT Conference on information security. Security analyst Eric Byers warns of imminent Son of Stuxnet copycat malware. APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston warns of the security problem in the internet’s routing protocols. And a whole bunch of people talk about the demonstration of a Facebook hack that led, eventually, to the arrest of a journalist.
Articles
- NBN: ACCC wet dream, security nightmare, for ZDNet Australia. Network strategist Paul Brooks from Layer 10 reckons that consumers won’t know how to set up a home network in the NBN’s multi-provider world. I reckon he’s right.
- Harvey should have stayed at home, for Technology Spectator, being a rather scathing review of Harvey Norman’s BiG BUYS website.
- Facebook for under-13s? Who’s kidding whom here? for Crikey, responding to “outrage” that Facebook want to admit younger kids as users.
Media Appearances
- I was part of the first ZDNet Tough Talk panel discussion, recorded on video at the AusCERT information security conference, along with Longhaus and Business Aspect board member Sam Higgins, IBRS analyst James Turner, NetWitness chief security officer Eddie Schwartz and Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky. The moderator was ZDNet Australia’s editorial director Brian Haverty. The topic was: Is cloud secure enough for business? I still haven’t watched it yet. What do you think?
- On Wednesday I was interviewed by ABC Radio 891 Adelaide about changes to the internet’s top-level domain names. I can post the audio here should you care.
Corporate Largesse
- On Tuesday I attended a briefing on various information security issues hosted by Sourcefire. They served a light breakfast and handed out a notebook and a toy pig.
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.
Removing the “www” sub-domain in Apache
The consensus is clear. You don’t like websites that force you to use the “www” sub-domain, making everyone type www.example.com rather than just example.com. So how do you fix it? With Apache, the world’s most popular web server software, it’s easy.
There’s three things to do.
- Make sure you have DNS entries to provide an IP address for both the domain example.com itself and the www sub-domain.
- Make sure you have Apache configured to serve out your website to both of those domains.
- (Optional) Add a URL re-writing rule so that whichever way users type the website address, their browser will always display your preferred default, with or without the www.
Requiring the “www” sub-domain in 2011? Really?
I’m currently researching some websites for a story I’m writing, and I’m amazed that one of the sites requires you to specify the “www” sub-domain or it just won’t work. “WTF? It’s 2011,” I thought. But am I wrong?
I decided to ask on Twitter. “How would you describe a business whose website demands that you use the ‘www’ sub-domain or it won’t work?” Here’s the first responses I got.
Ignorant. Fucking idiots. Sub Standard? Lame. Misconfigured. My work place *sigh* Partying like it was 1999. In need of some DNS sysadmining? Antiquated. One that doesn’t know how to configure their services properly. Pedantic. Woefully Witless Website? DNS-illiterate? Paying for poor advice, choosing inadequate consultants. One that needs help addressing user behaviour.
Well that seems fairly clear…
I had to stop looking after that, my question generated far more responses that I’d expected and the consensus was obvious pretty damn fast.
One person described it as a cPanel-based business, but I disagree. I use the cPanel web hosting control panel at Prussia.Net, and by default it sets up websites to work both with and without the “www”.
Another said he was about to go on a rant about bom.gov.au but they’ve finally fixed it. As has Australia Post at austpost.com.au.
Are there any particularly annoying examples of this phenomenon?
Weekly Wrap 50
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This week was mostly about the AusCERT information security conference on the Gold Coast, although a few things relating to the previous week dribbled through.
Podcasts
- Patch Monday episode 88, “Social business + cloud != revolution”, based on material recorded at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference the previous week.
Articles
What a lot of articles we have this week! I was covering AusCERT as part of the ZDNet Australia team, and the Technology Spectator article was actually written the week before. There’ll be more AusCERT articles next week.
- AusCERT 2011: Firms ignore ID theft risk, for ZDNet Australia, which is based on some of Bennett Arron’s comments during the conference’s opening keynote.
- AusCERT 2011: Son of Stuxnet within a year: expert, ZDNet Australia. The source code for Stuxnet is out there. Security analyst Eric Byres reckons that’ll show everyone how to make sophisticated malware, and the “Russian business network” will be first off the rank.
- Privacy is a commodity, for Technology Spectator, in which I bite the hand that feeds me by criticising the comment they use.
- AusCERT 2011: Black hats and whitegoods, for ZDNet Australia. We’re creating the Internet of Things by turning everything into a network device. But when was the last time you heard an appliance manufacturer talking about network security? CBS Interactive’s Brian Haverty came up with the OARSUM headline.
- AusCERT 2011: Bank theft goes truly mobile, for ZDNet Australia.
- AusCERT 2011: Silent victims thwart cybercops: Qld Police, for ZDNet Australia.
- Qld cops denounce ‘ethical hacking’, for ZDNet Australia. This headline is a bit of a misdirection. Ethical hacking is generally when the target has given permission, such as when someone is hired to do penetration testing. The kind of hacking games at black hat conferences, which is what Detective Superintendent Brian Hay was talking about, probably don’t fit into this category.
Media Appearances
- I was asked to do a bit of trickery before Bennett Arron’s keynote at AusCERT. It didn’t go quite as planned. When Munir Kotadia produced the Day 1 Highlights video, he made sure that no-one forgot.
Corporate Largesse
- I travelled to the Gold Coast for the AusCERT Conference on information security. My air fares, accommodation and breakfast were covered by CBS Interactive, ZDNet Australia’s parent company, as is normal for freelancers so that doesn’t count as largesse. AusCERT provided free conference entry, as is normal for any media attending, and that included meals and drinks at the social events. In the goodie bag was: webroot Personal Security and Mobile Security for Android from, erm, webroot; notebooks from webroot and Juniper Networks; PostIt-style thingies from Symantec; pens from RSM Bird Cameron, Citrix, Netgear and M86 Security; a Rubik’s Cube from WatchGuard; 3D glasses from SecurityLab; a yoyo from McAfee; and, via a voucher, an AusCERT conference t-shirt. I’ll have more to say about this later. I was also given a t-shirt by Sophos and a stubbie holder from Splunk.
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: Sunrise over the Pacific, Surfer’s Paradise, taken from my room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in 17 May. I didn’t really bother trying to take a good photo, it’s just a snapshot from my phone. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.]
[Update 3 May 2013: Edited to fix broken link to Patch Monday podcast.]