Starting today, each Saturday or Sunday I’ll post a list of the stuff that I’ve had published elsewhere in the previous week.
- Patch Monday podcast #44: Microsoft versus the cybercriminals. A look at some of the less-well-known work Microsoft is doing in this field — including Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit sponsoring a pop song in Nigeria, a legal tactic for taking down botnets, and how they identify malware through reputation analysis.
- How evil is Google, exactly? for ABC Unleashed. My argument is that Google’s collection of random Wi-Fi data isn’t the massive privacy breach some people are making out, but that it does raise serious questions about whether Google can be trusted. The comment stream is fascinating.
- Turks hack Israeli Facebook accounts over Gaza blockade incident for Crikey. This appears to be the first time that individual Facebook users’ accounts have been the target of political hacking, as opposed to those taking an active part in the propaganda war.
I also did a radio spot on 891 ABC Adelaide early on Monday morning, but I wasn’t quite awake and I forgot to record it. If I recall correctly, I spoke about my visit to Microsoft’s Redmond campus.
If you’re still short of reading for this long weekend, you can always dig back further into my media output.
While I think the Google thing should be investigated, the reaction is an overblown tragedy. I am one who worries about Google’s power, but only from the point of market manipulation. I can understand that to any who feel powerless and overwhelmed it would appear that what has happened is of major concern, but the regulators and government should know better. Their reaction is actually the cause for the most concern. Witch hunts belong in the past. They are charged with acting in a sensible and sane fashion, not an emotional one.
Calling the Google thing a storm in a teacup would require only one thing: acknowledgement that Stephen Conroy can cause crockery-focused meteorological phenomena. Otherwise, it’s not even that.
But the idea that anything like half the wifi points are unsecured is ridiculous. I’ve met some truly thick-as-two-planks individuals in the world, and sure a disproportionate number of them hail from Queensland, the Alabama of the Antipodes, but I still have trouble believing the number could be as high as 5%, let alone 50%. That’s utter bullshit.
@Eric TF Bat: The figure for Wi-Fi access points being unsecured comes from Detective Superintendent Brian Hay of the Queensland Police, based on their own wardriving sorties. Or rather, it’s based on media reports of D S Hay’s comments at the recent AusCERT 2010 conference, so therefore come caveats might have been left out.
Personally, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it were that high in some areas, particularly in a tourist area like the Gold Coast, simply because there’ll be so many open hotspots at bars and cafés.
I have his contact details, I’ll pop the question to him at some point.