Month: June 2014

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Weekly Wrap 209: Nostalgia as winter falls, with Apple

St Stephens Anglican Church, Newtown: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 2 to Sunday 8 June 2014, at least beyond immediate work commitments, was somewhat limited by certain cashflow issues, but that seems to always happen when there’s a long weekend early in the month.

Still, the ebook project progressed nicely — and that will be announced properly in approximately a week. It’s not that exciting, though, trust me.

Articles

Oddly enough, both of these were triggered by the announcements at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). I found it quite funny that some people, even some alleged technology journalists, said there was nothing interesting to report because there wasn’t any new hardware.

There’s also the blog posts I wrote for Blogjune, which you may find interesting. Or not.

Media Appearances

5at5

Not quite a full week this week, though Friday’s was a bumper edition to make up for the gap. Why don’t you subscribe to 5at5?

Geekery

Corporate Largesse

  • On Friday I caught up with Michael McKinnon from AVG Technologies AU. We spoke about many interesting things, and he bought a couple of beers and dinner.

The Week Ahead

Monday is a public holiday for the Queen’s Birthday, but since she has neglected to invite me to her party — an administrative oversight I can accept, because she is a busy woman — I will be catching up with a friend instead. And then I shall return to Wentworth Falls.

Tuesday is a day of research and planning, unless a writing commission comes up. Wednesday is a day trip to Sydney for a lunchtime briefing by Brocade. Thursday is a day of writing. Wednesday and Thursday are days of writing. Friday onwards has yet to be allocated.

[Photo: St Stephens Anglican Church, Newtown, photographed from Camperdown Memorial Rest Park on 21 June 2003. I’ve decided that if I haven’t taken any decent photographs in the week covered by the Wrap, I’ll pick something from the same month in the past.]

[Update 10 June 2014, 1515 AEST: The Week Ahead edited to reflect a change of plans for Wednesday.]

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Operation Sovereign Borders, sinister and banal [blogjune05]

An Australian bureaucrat reacts to allegations that Operation Sovereign Borders removes safety gear from lifeboats: click to embiggenThis man’s name is Mick Kinley, and he’s shrugging with indifference at allegations that safety equipment is deliberately removed from the lifeboats used to return asylum seekers to Indonesia. But that OK, he’s the acting chief executive officer of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA).

I’ve never met Kinley. I know nothing of his work apart from this incident. But do we really need any further context? The bureaucrat in charge of maritime safety is challenged over what sounds like a breach of maritime safety, but, you know, “Whatever.”

I believe this is what’s called the banality of evil.

Hang on, I’d better scroll back a bit…

Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) is the Australian government’s grand-sounding name for the grubby process of intercepting any boats at sea that contain asylum seekers and returning them to Indonesia. They’re put into standard orange lifeboats towed behind our ships, and once they’re within a certain distance of Indonesia they’re cast off and left to find their own way hone.

But as The Guardian’s Paul Farrell reported on 7 May, safety equipment is removed from those lifeboats beforehand — ropes, scissors, knives, a mirror, fishing line and even buckets.

On 27 May, Kinley was questioned about this in the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee by Senator Stephen Conroy, who was clearly unimpressed. You can read the transcript — the relevant exchange starts on page 86 — but you should really watch the video to see the body language for yourself.

Actually, it’s worth picking up the story a little before that video starts, on page 84…

Continue reading “Operation Sovereign Borders, sinister and banal [blogjune05]”

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Talking swatting on Sydney radio 2UE, again

2UE logoFollowing on from Wednesday’s conversation about swatting on 2UE’s afternoon program, I spoke about the topic again on Thursday’s drive-time program, because they had more to discuss.

First, they’d been contacted by a listener named Greg, who a couple months back had been a victim of swatting — or at least his son had — with the result that a dozen police cars were outside his house for a “friendly chat”. The swatter had told them that three people were being held hostage in the house.

Second, they’d wondered whether that meant that a more elaborately crafted swatting attempt couldn’t cause much more disruption. Short answer, yes it could.

This is the full conversation with presenter Justin Smith.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.1MB)

This audio is ©2014 Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd.

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Guilty of being a teenager in a public place [blogjune04]

Police news clipping, click to embiggenEarlier this evening, Channel TEN journalist Hayden Nelson tweeted this news clipping, and oh how we laughed. But beyond the laughter, there’s something quite sinister here.

This item appears to be from one of the Murdochland local suburban papers, and it reads:

Mosman police were patrolling Rawson Park on Friday night, May 30, when they spotted two teenage males standing in the darkness at about 10.30pm. Police deemed it to be suspicious and thought they may have been there to consume alcohol or drugs. The 18-year-olds stated that they were just hanging out and eating lollies. After a search nothing was found but red frogs in their pockets. The pair were moved on from the area by the officers.

I know that the Sydney North Shore suburb of Mosman is a separate planet from the rest of human society, but I seem to recall that when I was 18 years old, some time shortly before the last of the mammoths died out, the local park was about the only place you could go for a private conversation with your mates about… well, life.

Home was obviously out, because your parents were there. Shopping malls were closing, and in any event you can’t just hang around in the mall without buying something. The same goes for pubs and cafés. Not everyone can afford to buy endless beverages, even in Mosman.

The increasing privatisation of public space is a problem. You can’t just walk around the Sydney Harbour Foreshore, for example, without coming under the management of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and their arbitrary rules enforced by private security guards.

The privatisation of public space even has its own story category at The Guardian.

The roads have been turned over to traffic, not people. What seats you can find to sit on are part of JCDecaux’s advertising empire masquerading as bus shelters, sited right at the edge of the road where their hoardings can be seen, rather than set back from the kerb so you can hear yourself think.

No, the local park is the place for a quiet chat about the hell of growing into adulthood.

“Hanging around” is precisely what public parks are for — and if that’s “in the darkness” it’s because the local council is either stingy with the lighting budget, or understands that it’s not actually healthy for the night to be lit up like a football stadium.

Actually no. It’s “in the darkness” because, der, that’s what happens at nighttime.

Maybe there’s more to this story than meets the eye. But as it’s reported, it seems like these two lads were “deemed to be suspicious” simply because they were teenagers outside after dark, and were asked to move on for no valid reason whatsoever, other than to cover the police officers’ embarrassment with having interfered with people going about their lawful business. And that’s wrong.

[Update 5 June 2014, 0805 AEST: In a comment below I’ve written about the law that apparently applies in this situation. It reinforces my view that what happened here was just plain wrong.]

[This is one of 30 daily posts I’m writing during Blogjune. See them all under the tag blogjune, or subscribe to the RSS feed.]

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Talking swatting on Sydney radio 2UE

2UE logoThis morning a Sydney teenager was arrested over a supposed hostage drama which is now being reported as an alleged swatting attack — a false report to police in the hope they’d respond in force. Which they did.

As The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Police descended on the Arncliffe home just after 4.40am on Wednesday after emergency services received a report that the 18-year-old had tied up his father and a friend and was planning to shoot them because they had sexually assaulted his mother…

The teenager surrendered to police without incident.

The teenager’s mother claimed that his laptop was hacked and that he had told her he was the victim of “swatting”.

Sydney’s Radio 2UE picked up the story this afternoon, with Ian ‘Dicko” Dickson and Sarah Morice speaking first to their police reporter Michelle Taverniti, then me, then a 97-year-old caller recalling a different meaning of “swatting”.

Taverniti said that the teenager told his mother that he’d been visiting Hack Forums to trade Bitcoin. But as I said on-air, that’s what the lad told his mother told the police told the police reporter. We shall see.

“Three laptop computers and a smart phone were found at the house and these will be forensically examined by police,” says the NSW Police media release, so I daresay we’ll find out more in a couple of days.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.3MB)

This audio is ©2014 Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd.