November 2013 – Page 2

03 November 201304 November 2013

Weekly Wrap 178: Food, fever, bandwidth and boats

My week Monday 28 October to Sunday 3 November 2013 was another busy one, but I survived.

I did spend one night and one day with a little too much number seven on the Bristol Stool Scale and a fever, but it’d be a really lame joke to say that I caught a virus at the hacker conference, so I’ll skip over that. Just the list tonight.

Podcasts

Corrupted Nerds: Conversations 7, being a chat with Senator Scott Ludlam of the Australian Greens about new attorney-general Senator George Brandis’ appointment of a former ASIO director-general as his chief of staff, and my commentary on related matters.

Articles

Breakpoint Day 2: Cars, drives and BIOS hacks, Corrupted Nerds, 28 October 2013.
Broadband innovation needs cooperation, not endless fibre talk, ZDNet Australia, 31 October 2013.
To prevent phishing, punch your employees in the face, CSO Online, 1 November 2013.

Media Appearances

On Thursday I spoke about the NSA and data mining and privacy on ABC NSW Statewide Afternoons, but there’s no recording because there was no digital stream to record from.
I spoke about crowdfunding and many other things on this week’s Download This Show on ABC Radio National.

Corporate Largesse

On Tuesday I went to NetSuite’s annual media lunch at Aria Restaurant in Sydney, where the food and wine was, as always, superb. Not only did NetSuite pick up the tab, but they gave everyone a gift bag (another excellent RuMe tote bag) containing a NetSuite-branded notebook and pen, an eWAY-branded pen — plus and GoPro HERO3 White Edition wireless video camera and a SanDisk Ultra 8GB micro-SD memory card.
On Wednesday I went to the launch of ng Connect Australia and New Zealand, which led to the broadband story listed above. There was food and drink.

The Week Ahead

It’s yet another busy one. On Monday and Tuesday I’ll be wrapping up a Corrupted Nerds podcast, starting work on another, and writing up a 1000-word piece about hardware hacking.

On Wednesday, following a routine medical appointment in Sydney, I’m flying to Canberra for a meeting or three, before covering Eugene Kaspersky’s address to the National Press Club for ZDNet Australia on Thursday. I’ll be in Canberra until Friday afternoon.

The weekend is unplanned, but after the last few weeks I reckon it’ll be a lazy one. Fingers are crossed.

[Photo: Carnival Spirit, photoographed in Sydney Harbour on 29 October 2013 using a Nokia Lumia 1020. I had been sceptical of the whole idea of a 42-megapixel camera in a phone, but it allows you to crop in very, very tightly. Below is such a crop from the same image as at the head of this post. Some of the lack of sharpness will be due to the hazy weather, some to the fact that the photo was hand-held and I didn’t take much care. More about this camera soon.]

Carnival Spirit, tightly cropped

03 November 201305 November 2013

Senator Scott Ludlam on “Corrupted Nerds”

Today I posted the first of three podcasts that will emerge from my coverage of the Breakpoint and Ruxcon conferences in Melbourne recently.

I managed to catch Greens Senator Scott Ludlam for a few minutes in between his session on the Ruxcon panel and whatever his next function was, and we spoke about the new attorney-general Senator George Brandis’ appointment of a former ASIO director-general as his chief of staff.

By the time I added the introduction and theme music and the like, all of those format elements ended up being longer than the interview itself, so I decided to add my own opinion. That means it’s a bit different from how Corrupted Nerds: Conversations normally works, but I’m hoping it’s interesting nonetheless.

In the next few days there’ll be two further, full-length podcasts. One is about electronic voting and why voting on the internet is a bad idea. The other covers how people have been discovering all sorts of things about North Korea using free and commercially-available satellite imagery to do their own intelligence work. Stay tuned.

Corrupted Nerds is available via iTunes and now SoundCloud.

03 November 201303 November 2013

Visiting Canberra to hear Eugene Kaspersky

I’m headed to Canberra this week to hear Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive officer and chairman of Kaspersky Lab, speak at the National Press Club on Thursday 7 November.

It’ll be an interesting event.

When I last spoke with Kaspersky in May — you can listen to that conversation now, because it became the first episode of the Corrupted Nerds: Conversations podcast — it was before Edward Snowden’s revelations began. Before “all of the cybers” changed from being something of interest only to a few specialist technology and national security writers into front page news around the world.

Actually, I’ll embed it here so you don’t even have to click through.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115103814″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

I suspect that the kinds of questions asked by the insular and largely Canberra-bound press gallery journalists will be as revealing of the state of play as the words of the Russian information security star himself — and he knows how to work the media.

Kaspersky is speaking at the NPC at lunchtime on Thursday, immediately after which I’ll be reporting on it for ZDNet Australia. But I’ll be in Canberra from early Wednesday afternoon through until Friday afternoon, so if you want or need to catch up, do let me know.

Disclosure: I am travelling to Canberra as the guest of Kaspersky Lab.

[Photo: Eugene Kaspersky speaking at CeBIT Australia 2012. Original photo by CeBIT Australia, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY) license. Digital manipulation by Stilgherrian.]

01 November 2013

Talking crowdfunding etc on ABC Download This Show

ABC logo After a six-month gap caused by the failure of our schedules to cooperate, I was finally a guest once more on Marc Fennell’s Download This Show this week, which we recorded this morning.

Online crowd funding: Whether it’s a brand new gadget or a bouncing baby, you can crowd fund anything these days? But which online service is the most likely to get your project to its funding target? Plus, want to know what the internet feels like in an oppressive regime? Google has helped build a site that will show you what it feels like and it’ll help internet users in those countries as well. And is it a phone or is it Lego? The modular phone you can rebuild and reshape as you see fit.

My fellow panellist was Janet Carr. And here’s the full audio. I talk about breast enhancement, amongst other things.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.4MB)