Category: Internet

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Visiting Las Vegas for McAfee Focus 11 security conference

Four weeks from now I’m flying to Las Vegas for McAfee’s Focus 11 security conference, 18 to 20 October 2011. On their tab, obviously.

Vendor conferences must have a keynote speaker that has nothing to do with the industry. Focus 11 is no exception. We have… Richard Branson. WTF?

At this stage the plan is that I’m heading to San Francisco first, since McAfee want me to visit their corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley before heading to Vegas. Then once the conference is over I intend to spend a couple more days in Vegas and do the day trip to the Hoover Dam and perhaps the Grand Canyon, and then spend Saturday night in Los Angeles since the only part of that city I’ve seen is the airport.

Mind you, I’m told that Los Angeles is shit.

Any other suggestions for things to see and do near Las Vegas?

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No Canberra for cyberwar after all

As it happens, I didn’t end up going to the 2nd National Cyber Warfare Conference in Canberra this week. The conference sessions weren’t open to the media, and I decided that it wasn’t worth the trip if we’d have to rely on second-hand information.

That said, we did manage to get a recording of the over-dinner speech by David Irvine, the director-general of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which Liam Tung turned into the story “Insidious” cyber chaos too fast for ASIO. It also served as part of the inspiration for my story Yet another free pass for Aussie spooks.

Who wants to go to Canberra anyway?

However SC Magazine did send Darren Pauli and John Hilvert, and their stories were:

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Weekly Wrap 66: Kuala Lumpur: haze, hackers, food aplenty

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Most of the week was spent in Kuala Lumpur, my first visit. I’ll write more about that anon.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 104, “Can security ever beat PEBKAC?”. A conversation with Paul Ducklin, head of technology for the Asia-Pacific region with Sophos, and Chris Gatford, proprietor of Hack Labs, a specialist in penetration testing.

Articles

Further material from the Kaspersky Lab event is appearing from today.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I had lunch at Ocean Restaurant, Cockle Bay Wharf, thanks to Check Point. There’s some material from the conversations there that will appear in the next few days.
  • On Tuesday night I travelled to Kuala Lumpur thanks to Kasperky Lab. Their largesse included flights and airport transfers; meals and accommodation at Le Meridien; an evening sightseeing trip to Putrajaya including dinner on a cruise boat; a Kaspersky-branded leather document case, rather nice actually; Kaspersky-branded USB-powered speakers; and a t-shirt. I declined the offer of an all-day sightseeing tour on Friday because I had work to do.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Kuala Lumpur skyline, shrouded in haze, photographed with my battered HTC Desire from the 14th floor of Le Meridien, KL Sentral. It’s like this pretty much all day, what with the Indonesians burning down the rainforests and all. The photo doesn’t do the scene justice. I have since obtained a decent camera.]

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Weekly Wrap 65: Better late than never, perhaps

A supposedly-weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers Monday 29 August to Sunday 4 September 2011, a week during which I was so mentally exhausted I needed to take a bit of a break — hence the relatively low level of media output.

I also did about a day’s worth of geek-for-hire stuff for some long-standing clients. That was primarily web development, not the sort of thing I detail here unless there’s something interesting to show you.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 103, “Google’s real names a real disaster”. A conversation with Kirrily “Skud” Robert, about which I have already written stuff.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

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Metronidazole and Kuala Lumpur

OK, so I haven’t even posted a Weekly Wrap and it’s already Tuesday night. However the abscess on my left jaw flared up again on the weekend, and I’ve been put on more serious antibiotics, including the rather nasty metronidazole (pictured).

So, as I write this, I’m about to board Malaysia Airlines flight MH140 to Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days of Kaspersky Lab’s reportedly-generous hospitality — and I can’t have a single drop of alcohol lest I become immediately and seriously ill. Look it up. It’s true.

Bugger, eh?

More news once I touch down in KL…

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Crikey: Google+ is a goddam Trojan horse

So, there’s a reason Google is being so stubborn over this “real names” policy. Google+ isn’t a social network at all, despite the fact that it looks like one. It’s actually the core of an identity service.

I wrote about this for Crikey today, a piece that includes Google chair Eric Schmidt’s confirmation of that plan and some observations that suggest Google+ is failing to reach critical mass.

The continuing bad press over what’s been dubbed #nymwars won’t help. Yet I suspect that Google’s need and desire to prevent Facebook Connect becoming the planet’s default identity service will override most concerns.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Schmidt has always been the go-for-profits guy. Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is reportedly aware of the problem, although an informative post by Stephen R van den Berg says it’s unclear whether he’s being properly informed about the criticism. That post was written a week ago, however, so I daresay Page has seen at least some of the news reports since. And the other co-founder, Sergey Brin, has been notably silent.

It feels like things have come a long way since my original expletive-filled rant.

Oh, and thank you to everyone who said they liked the Patch Monday podcast on this topic. That’s especially pleasant given my fears over the rushed recording.