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Hillary’s mangoes, no NSA involved

[I was in a bit of a mood on Thursday, so when The Guardian broke the news that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of American citizens, my tolerance for political arsehattery was nonexistent. Calls for street protests? Bah! My countermove was to tweet a bunch of nonsense, which is posted here as prose.]

Mangoes by umstwitMaybe if we all run around like headless chooks, Mr Obama will say “Oh, sorry” and disband the NSA. And then Mr Obama will mount his trusty cyberpig and fly to the Moon, leaving behind a chemtrail of glitter and Bitcoins.

But look, headless chooks are the important bit. The more rushing around and screeching you can manage, the sooner the cyberpig lifts off. And quite frankly, Obama’s first term was a big disappointment as far as glitter showers go.

By comparison, I imagine that on weekends Hillary Clinton pumps out a steady stream of glitter. Like a Queen Ant, kinda.

Nyan Cat was DARPA’s prototype for that. DARPA’s main challenge was making it come out as glitter. When Hillary gets steam up, there’s no telling what it’ll be. Hummus, sometimes. Whipped cream.

One day it was just mangoes. Whole mangoes. Three a second, hour after hour. Secret Service guys took the whole weekend to clear the mess.

Then they had to figure out a cover story. Why were there mangoes smeared all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue? Eventually they decided just to tell everyone it was Madeleine Albright’s fault, so the press corps obviously bought that.

There’s a reason trams never took off in Washington.

[Photo: Mangoes by Flickr user umstwit, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]

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Weekly Wrap 156: An excess of Sydney, with smog

Night falls over Sydney: click to embiggenMy week Monday 27 May to Sunday 2 June 2013 was rather different from how I first imagined it.

I ended up spending much of it in Sydney, covering the CeBit Cyber Security conference and recording all manner of conversations — the results of the latter to appear over the coming weeks.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I covered the CeBit Cyber Security conference, so as usual with such things there was food and drink.
  • On Wednesday I had lunch at the Customs House Bar with some folks from Sourcefire, and they paid.
  • On Wednesday night I was a guest of Kaspersky Lab at their dinner with Eugene Kaspersky at Aqua at Milsons Point. There was fine food and drink, a water taxi there and a Cabcharge voucher for the ride back.

The Week Ahead

Since it’s already quite late on Wednesday afternoon, all I’ll say is that I plan to head down to Sydney tomorrow, Thursday, for an interview recording — at least once I’ve got my ZDNet Australia column out of the way — and what happens for the rest of the week and the annoyingly-positioned long weekend will then depend upon circumstances.

And that’s not all I’m annoyed about.

[Photo: Night falls over Sydney, looking towards the CBD from Camperdown on 29 May 2013.]

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Weekly Wrap 155: Chemtrails, elitism and much thinking

How they make chemtrails: click to embiggenMy week Monday 20 to Sunday 26 May 2013 was spent returning from The America, and then reading, writing, planning and generally trying to focus on the future.

If that sounds vague, it’s because it was vague. And it felt vague. It was all very, very vague. But the next week will be less vague. By at least fifteen percent.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None, which I suppose counterbalances last week.

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’m doing the day trip to Sydney to catch up with Peter Coffee, Salesforce.com VP and head of platform research, for a chat about The Future. This is, I think, our fourth attempt at meeting up since we met at the Dreamforce event two years ago, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Tuesday is mostly a day of writing and research back at Wentworth Falls, although it kicks off with at spot on Radio Adelaide talking about the differences between the broadband policies of Labor and the Coalition. That’s at 0745 ACST / 0815 AEST.

Wednesday sees me heading into Sydney again, for interviews with Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky Lab and Chris Wood from Sourcefire, and then in the evening a long dinner and drinks event with Mr Kaspersky. I suspect I’ll be staying overnight in Sydney that night. If I survive the experience at all.

And then the rest of the week is about writing and podcast production. Probably. You known how my weeks go. Disorganisedly.

[Photo: How they make chemtrails, photographed at dusk over San Francisco International Airport. They’re just so blatant about it these days. While this photograph was taken on the evening of Sunday 19 May 2013 local time, it was already Monday 20 May Australian time, so I’m allowing myself to use this photo this week.]

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Infosec at AusCERT 2013: the media coverage

AusCERT 2013 conference banner: click for conference websiteHere’s a list of the news stories I’ve found this morning that have been written about the AusCERT 2013 information security conference.

The theme for this year’s conference was “This time it’s personal”:

[The theme reflects] the growth in attacks and unauthorised disclosures of online personal information. Motivated by illicit financial gain, cyber criminals obtain unauthorised access to personal information, but more and more, we are seeing data disclosures being posted publicly by attackers for political motives, rather than financial gain.

Hence the theme will resonate within the information security community and remind us that the online environment provides opportunities galore to capture personal information; of the impact these breaches can have on the lives of individuals; and the importance of information security to prevent these attacks. AusCERT2013 will explore these issues and bring experts from Australia and around the world to provide insight and solutions to deal with these challenges.

Items are arranged alphabetically by masthead and then chronologically. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know. Indeed, I daresay that some more articles will be published on Monday or Tuesday, so if that happens I’ll update this post appropriately.

There’s a lot here for me to read, so if I’m going to write a reaction piece some time then it’ll be… later.

Continue reading “Infosec at AusCERT 2013: the media coverage”

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AusCERT 2012 and the militarisation of cyberspace

AusCERT 2012 logo: click for conference websiteI didn’t make it to information security conference AusCERT 2013 this year. I’m about to read what’s been written and compile a list — but first, a reflection on what happened in 2012.

When I look back two years to what I wrote from AusCERT 2011, I’m reminded that we were just getting our head around the implications of the Stuxnet worm. Not only was malware being written by organised criminals, and we were facing an explosion of anti-banking malware and mobile malware, and looking ahead to when an angry child might deploy malware against their neighbours — we were now made well aware that malware was also being written by nation states with budgets in the millions of dollars and beyond.

But looking through the list (below) for AusCERT 2012, what jumps out is the emphasis on the militarisation of information security, as well as the emphasis in the scale of criminal activities. I won’t expand on that, because the conversation with AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram speaks for itself.

Articles from AusCERT 2012

Podcasts from AusCERT 2012

  • Patch Monday episode 139, “War talk dominates AusCERT 2012”, the first of two episodes based on material recorded at the information security conference. The overall theme is that infosec is becoming militarised. We no longer talk about “information assurance” but “defensive cyber operations”. Click through for the full list of speakers.
  • Patch Monday episode 140, “Cybercrime: it’s just too easy”, the second of two episodes based on material recorded at the AusCERT 2012 information security conference. AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram explains why cybercrime is here to stay, and F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen details a complex transnational criminal operation that saw goods bought fraudulently in Denmark being resold in Moscow, as well giving his views on hacktivism and the level to which antivirus companies should cooperate with governments.

Bonus Extra Video

After the conference, my flight back to Sydney was delayed. With the need to kill some time, this video was the result.

My compilation of reports from AusCERT 2013 will be posted later today. My compilation of reports from AusCERT 2013 is now online.