Weekly Wrap 181: The Productivity Fairy strikes!

Wentworth Falls in the fog: click to embiggenMy week Monday 18 to Sunday 24 November 2013 was… well, let’s just say that everything went to plan.

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

It’s a busy one. My writing schedule includes a feature and two columns for ZDNet Australia and a couple stories for CSO Online, plus in theory a piece for Corrupted Nerds.

On top of that, there’s the Internet Industry Association’s Nautical Policy event on Wednesday — look alright, it’s a cruise on Sydney Harbour with alcohol — and perhaps one other Christmas event too.

Wish me luck.

I plan to be in Sydney all week.

[Photo: Wentworth Falls in the fog, photographed on 19 November 2013.]

Weekly Wrap 180: Nothing happened, with arsehats

Crossing the Nepean, 12 November 2013: click to embiggenMy week Monday 11 to Sunday 17 November 2013 was completely unproductive, for reasons which shall be explained in the next five paragraphs.

At the tail end of the previous week’s trip to Canberra, I changed my medication for depression — something that I’d discussed with my doctor beforehand, of course, but there were side effects nevertheless.

My sleep patterns took several days to readjust, and during that time I was more susceptible to the depression being exacerbated by the kind of arsehat events that the universe throws at us from time to time.

One such arsehat event happened. Or didn’t happen. A key invoice didn’t get paid when it was expected to be paid. Cashflow stress ensued, and that arsehat was the straw that broke the camel’s back, turning it into a black dog. Stay with me now, OK.

My mood wasn’t exactly improved by the fact that it rained for almost the entire week. There’s a strong seasonal aspect to my depression. And that rain was just a cruel twist, given that only the week before we’d been worried about everything being incinerated in bushfires.

This is a stupid planet, and humans are a stupid, badly-designed species.

I did catch up on a lot of reading, however.

Podcasts

None.

Articles

None.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday, after I crowdsourced a few beers and ciders in Sydney because the aforementioned cashflow stress made the concept of paying for my own drinks problematic, I ended up being invited to dinner at Kobe Jones’ Wharf Teppanyaki at Sydney’s King Street Wharf, courtesy of Enex Testlab. There is evidence to suggest that I was provided with an ample sufficiency of sake.

The Week Ahead

Well it’s half finished already, innit. But it began on a positive note. The cashflow constipation was uncorked on Monday, so I could start living again.

On Tuesday I came down to Sydney to take lunch with the boss-blokes from Sophos, the British-American information security firm, and deal with a whole bunch of errands.

Wednesday was a day of resetting all the things.

Thursday — that is to say, today — I’ll be starting work on a 2000-word feature story for ZDNet Australia that has to be finished by the end of next week, as well as participating in a discussion which will Rearrange Certain Aspects of Reality. That will all become less cryptic in due course. Or not.

Friday is a day of writing, with columns for both ZDNet Australia and CSO Online, and over the weekend I’ll be writing something for Corrupted Nerds.

In fact, the next three weeks will be quite busy, because I have to generate some catch-up revenue to replace last week’s steaming pile of fail, as well as make sure there’s enough revenue coming in to cover the time of year that freelancers fear most: Christmas.

“Holidays” is a synonym for “poverty” rather than “tequila”. It’s enough to make Baby Jesus cry.

[Photo: Crossing the Nepean, 12 November 2013, a dark, moody image that seems to capture the depressing nature of the week.]

Weekly Wrap 179: A very Kaspersky Canberra, with stress

Canberra sunrise: click to embiggenMy week Monday 4 to Sunday 10 November 2013 was another busy one, but I survived.

Once more the Weekly Wrap has been hideously delayed, so it’ll just be the facts.

A key part of the week was my trip to Canberra, mainly to cover the speech by Eugene Kaspersky to the National Press Club, but also to squeeze in some meetings with other people while I was there. Kaspersky seems to have dominated my media output for the week.

Podcasts

  • Corrupted Nerds: Conversations 8, being a chat about electronic voting with Dr Vanessa Teague from the University of Melbourne. If you think e-voting is the cure for electoral fraud and mistakes, you’d better listen.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I went to the National Press Cub in Canberra to hear Eugene Kaspersky’s address. I was a guest at the Kaspersky Lab table, and they paid for my flights from Sydney. I paid for my own accommodation because the Kaspersky thing itself could have been a day trip.

[Photo: Canberra sunrise, photographed from Rydges Lakeside Canberra hotel on 7 November 2013.]

“Corrupted Nerds” covers electronic voting

Cover art for Corrupted Nerds episode 8: click for podcast pageI’ve just posted the first full-length podcast of material recorded on my Melbourne trip, this one being a chat with Dr Vanessa Teague about electronic voting.

Now I’ve always thought that the whole idea of electronic voting is a bit dodgy. You get a little bit of convenience, sure, but you get a whole lot more attack surface for the bad guys to hit — especially if you open up that whole can of worms of internet voting — and you make it almost impossible for anyone but a specialist digital forensics team to confirm that everything was legitimate.

I was willing to have my mind changed, but in fact the opposite happened. I now think more than ever that electronic voting opens up all manner of avenues for attack that would never have been possible before, with little benefit for most people. And it’d cost a squillion.

“There isn’t a secure solution for voting over the internet. There isn’t a good way of authenticating voters, that is, making sure that the person at the other end of the connection is the eligible voter they say they are. There isn’t an easy, usable way of helping voters to make sure that the vote they send is the vote they wanted, even if their PC is infected with malware or administered by somebody who wants to vote differently,” Teague said.

“And although there are some techniques for providing evidence that encrypted votes have been properly decrypted and tallied, it’s hard to scale those techniques to large Australian elections.”

As I said in September, give me my trusty pencil of democracy.

This was also my first podcast with a specific commercial sponsor.

Corrupted Nerds is available via iTunes and now SoundCloud.

Weekly Wrap 178: Food, fever, bandwidth and boats

Carnival Spirit: click to embiggenMy 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

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

Senator Scott Ludlam on “Corrupted Nerds”

Cover art for Corrupted Nerds: Conversations episode 7: click for podcast pageToday 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.