Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
Here’s everything from the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference on one place. All of my coverage, plus that of Angus Kidman for Lifehacker and Sam Gentle.
This will be a boring post for anyone not interested in Linux, so I’ll put the content after the jump.
So Radio 2UE must’ve been happy with the spot I did a fortnight ago, because they asked me back again today to talk about cyberbullying and trolling.
Well, that was the plan. But time constraints limited our conversation to just one topic: Rose Smith’s suggestion that children should be made to surrender their mobile phones at night in a bid to stop the “devastating effects” of bullying.
Smith has run a free anti-bullying camp on Sydney’s northern beaches for the past 15 years, and reckons children needed to learn to “disconnect”. She believes that parents should take their children’s phones when they went to bed and return them in the morning in order to give them some time off.
So presenter Tim Webster and regular guest Trevor Long got to hear my well-informed opinion.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:52 — 2.2MB)
The audio is ©2012 Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd, of course, but as usual I’m posting it here in case they don’t post it at their own website.
The lack of posts since 15 January — including still not posting last week’s Weekly Wrap — is the direct result of me spending the entire week covering the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference in Ballarat. I’m exhausted. And today there’s still the War on the Internet forum to cover in Melbourne.
I’m exhausted. So it might be another day or two before I catch up with everything here. As usual, the best way to stay in touch with what I’m doing is my high-volume Twitter stream.
Well, this is a roundabout thing. On Saturday afternoons Trevor Long does a regular radio spot on 2UE 954 with presenter Tim Webster. This week Paul Wallbank was going to fill in but then it turned out that he couldn’t. So I ended up doing it.
The topics we discussed included the online extortion attempt against Sydney businessmen Sulieman Ravell and his firm Funds Focus; scams relating to London 2012 Olympics tickets, and other scams that Paul Wallbank had identified, as well as his tips for avoiding scams.
We also mentioned the new top-level internet domains.
Trevor Long, meanwhile, talked about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and what caught his eye there.
Here’s the audio, including the far-too-many mobile phone dropouts — which Tim Webster handled with aplomb — and a little bleep every time I skip over other segments like the sport and traffic reports. In fact I’ve left in Mr Webster’s handling of these glitches precisely because it shows his professionalism.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:07 — 9.4MB)
The audio is ©2012 Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd, of course, but as usual I’m posting it here in case they don’t post it at their own website. The little beep sound is by junggle via Freesound.org, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Actually, this message about cybersecurity being a serious emerging theme for 2012 seems to be getting more mainstream coverage than I thought it would. I was part of a cybersecurity panel discussion that was broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Breakfast this morning.
Also taking part were Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest in Detroit (I spoke with him about Anonymous and Stratfor on this week’s Patch Monday podcast), and Sean Kopelke, director of security and compliance solutions at Symantec Australia. The host was Jonathan Green, who is usually editor of ABC The Drum.
Over at the ABC’s website you can find the program audio and (perhaps, eventually) transcript. But I’m also including the audio below, just in case their systems fail.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:35 — 9.5MB)
This audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, of course. Even though we don’t get paid.
The Australian Federal Police were talking up the risk of “cyber threats” in the Fairfax news yesterday morning, so I ended up talking about it on ABC NewsRadio.
Now the AFP was bouncing off a report from McAfee, which from the title I assume is yet another of those “The internet is dangerous, m’kay?” fear pieces. 2012 Threats Predictions. I won’t bother linking, because all these reports from the major infosec vendors are much the same, jumbling together everything from minor vandalism to “cyberterrorism” — whatever the fuck that is — with little critical analysis.
But I suppose it is actually getting this stuff onto the agenda.
Slowly.
For six minutes.
At this point I reckon I should re-link to two of my pieces from the eCrime Symposium held in Canberra in November 2011. eCrime Symposium: Harden up, warns Aussie crime fighter and eCrime Symposium wrap: Satisfaction tinged with frustration.
The presenter was Cathy Bell (who seems to be missing from the station’s page of presenters), the producer Jared Reed.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:31 — 3.1MB)
The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. While the audio was posted shortly after broadcast at the ABC NewsRadio website, I’m going to post it here anyway. It’s easier for me than trawling their automated daily audio archive.
This is being posted a full day after the actual radio appearance, even though the post was ready within an hour of the broadcast. Why? Because I didn’t want it on the website before I’d posted last week’s Weekly Wrap. Is that good editorial judgement? Or just a little bit too anally-retentive?