Category: Politics

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Crikey: China isn’t our biggest hacker threat

Crikey logo

Despite all the news about Google being, it is alleged, hacked by attackers in China, from an Australian perspective China probably isn’t our main problem.

I made this point in Crikey‘s lead story yesterday, quoting a security consultant at a leading outsourcing firm.

Australian attacks targeting the private sector have come from other so-called ‘friendly countries’. Which country is a problem closely correlates with business competition in the particular sector…

You could pick any one of our major trading partners and I could tell you a story about a sophisticated and well-executed attack sourced from that country. Examples at the top of my mind include Japan, Canada, US, India and France.

The story is free to read. Do click through.

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Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?

British Airways Corcorde G-BOAC at Manchester Aviation Park. Photo by Ian Britton, © FreeFoto.com.

Do we really think we can just bolt some sort of “government 2.0 module” onto steam-era bureaucracies and magically bring them into the 21st Century?

Sure, our governments served us fairly well in the 20th Century, at least in the West. They beat the bad guys in WWII, brought us through the scary Cold War and delivered health and prosperity our grandparents would have found unimaginable.

Not to mention Windows ME.

But times are changing. We’re starting to notice that things don’t work as well as they used to. We’re spending taxpayers’ money bailing out economies only to have bankers suck out more bonuses anyway. Conferences intended to agree on Climate Change action produce… well… nothing concrete. Sydney’s suburban railway network is slower than in the 1920s!

Having invested so much time and money on these institutions, though, we’re reluctant to let them go.

This is the sunk cost fallacy.

Concorde is the classic example. Long after it must have been clear to the French and British governments that no-one was going to buy this aircraft, they continued investing in it simply because they’d already spent so much and didn’t want to lose those “sunk costs”. Yet those costs were gone, no matter what. To continue spending was irrational.

The same happened in the Vietnam War, where US President Lyndon Johnson kept committing thousands of troops after he’d realised the cause was hopeless and America could not win.

Afghanistan, anyone?

I’ve written before, in Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!, that change is being held back by, well, fear and paranoia. But this morning I stumbled across Umair Haque’s The Builders’ Manifesto. He’s got it in one.

20th century leadership is what’s stopping 21st century prosperity.

Continue reading “Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?”
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Sea Shepherd whaling discussion kicks off

Needless to say, since I posted yesterday about the collision between Sea Shepherd’s Ady Gil and Japanese security ship Shonen Maru 2, the hard of thinking have confused me being anti-Sea Shepherd with being pro-whaling. Just to make it abundantly clear, I’ve written a long comment over on my original post.

[Update 11am: Simon Rumble has complained about me turning off comments on this post. Sorry, I should have said that comments are open over at my January 2008 post. I wanted to keep all the comments related to Sea Shepherd in one place.]

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Sea Shepherd? Gave my opinion 2 years ago

Self-appointed whale-defender media whores Sea Shepherd always provide great photos of their “direct action”, so it’s no surprise that when their boat Ady Gil was damaged by Japanese security ship Shonan Maru 2 yesterday it looked spectacular.

Sea Shepherd of course claim it was a deliberate attack. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Thing is though, guys, if you don’t want to be involved in a collision at sea, don’t fucking well deliberately put your boat so close to another.

I won’t say any more about this specific incident today. I have other things to do, and I’ve already written about my opinion of Sea Shepherd two years ago — along with plenty of references to material which points out that things are all much murkier than Sea Shepherd makes out.

If you’d like to comment on this issue, do please do so after reading the material over at my original post. I’m very interested in separating out the emotion-laden rhetoric and the zealotry surrounding whaling from the practical environmental and legal issues, and I think Sea Shepherd are a noisy distraction.

So, I’ll close comments on this post, and you can comment over there.

As an aside, the life and beliefs of Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson make for an interesting read too.

[Update 8 January 2010: To clarify, yes, comments are closed on this post — not to limit the discussion, but to ensure that all comments relating to Sea Shepherd are collected over on my January 2008 post. Sorry if there’s been any confusion.]

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My dreams for 2010 (speaking formally)

ABC Unleased asked me think about what I want for 2010, in the context of my writing about the Internet and suchlike. My comments didn’t get a run in their piece My dreams for 2010 today, so here they are for you now, Gentle Readers.

From the government, I’d like more openness and the active inclusion of citizens in decision-making from the beginning. We’re not just an audience to be sold a policy cooked up with noisy lobby groups and the big end of town. The Government 2.0 Taskforce recommended a declaration of open government and, amongst other things, making all public sector information free and freely reusable by default, easily discoverable, and published in machine-readable formats to open standards. Let’s start seeing some of that — and not stuff at the edges like the public toilet database but big slabs of core government information.

From media magnates, less whinging about new competitors “stealing” your audience — we’re not your property! — and a lot more about making yourselves relevant to our new needs. We’ve got so many ways of informing and entertaining ourselves now, so do take that on board. Also, sourcing a comment to a random person on Twitter is not journalism. Find out who and where they are and give a bit of background.

And from the Twitterverse, quite a bit less self-congratulation and a quite a lot more practical work. Turning your avatar green or red or black changes nothing. “But I’m raising awareness” it not a valid explanation, either, because chances are your friends already agree with you. Open communication with someone well outside your normal circle and make a difference. Please.

The ABC piece is worth reading too, with contributions from editor Jonathan Green, Sophie Cunningham from Meanjin, comedian John Safran, opposition leader Tony Abbott, refugee and human rights activist Pamela Curr, futurist Mark Pesce, researcher and author Chris Berg, Julian Morrow of The Chaser fame, Robert Manne, Catherine Deveny, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, artist Gerard Oosterman, scientist Julian Cribb, journalist and former writer for The Chaser Gregor Stronach, and Keysar Trad from the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

I haven’t had a chance to think about what I want personally. I was working on some urgent, stressful documents right up until close of business on New Year’s Eve, and went to bed early, exhausted. Maybe today’s beautiful showery day in Sydney, or tomorrow’s thunderstorms, will provide that inspiration.

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Fine posts for 2009

Since the most popular posts for 2009 were pretty disappointing, I reckon, here’s my personal selection of my thirteen best, more timeless posts for 2009. Happy reading!

[Update 29 December 2009: In case it isn’t obvious, these are in order of writing through the year, not of merit or anything else.]

  1. Jim Wallace’s pro-censorship lies and distortions (26 January) It disgusts me that someone claiming to speak on behalf of “moral” Christianity deliberately distorts the evidence and misrepresents his opponents. It’s the most appalling hypocrisy. While this piece relates to specific events in the news, the explanation of his dirty tricks stands the test of time, methinks.
  2. “Clive Hamilton, you’re really starting to shit me!” (16 February) Wallace’s compatriot Clive Hamilton is equally guilty of dodgy rhetoric and straight-up misrepresentation. Again, some useful lessons about political messaging.
  3. Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting” (1 March) This was the most popular post too. Perhaps this is my true legacy from 2009?
  4. Pia Waugh: An interview for Ada Lovelace Day 2009 (24 March) This video interview was recorded before Pia started working for Senator Kate Lundy. An interesting backgrounder.
  5. Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice (25 April) Anzac Day always brings out my reflective nature — though perhaps only I would start an Anzac piece with cat vomit.
  6. Look, about that damn topless gnome… (27 May) I’m annoyed that a tangential discussion about a $3.50 garden gnome soaked up so much time which should have been spent on the real purpose of Project TOTO. Nevertheless, it gave me a chance to make some points about independence and how organisations can get trapped in their own worldview.
  7. The Poverty Web (3 July) The only lengthy Project TOTO piece to be written while I was actually in Tanzania, and still perhaps the best — though more will emerge. Eventually.
  8. The really real revolutionary revolution of the Internet (23 July) I posit that things like the many Government 2.0 initiatives are still only nibbling around the edges.
  9. Conversations are not markets, people! (26 July) This one was popular. I’ve noticed that this year I’ve been increasingly concerned about the focus on markets and business at the neglect of other aspects of our society.
  10. Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People! (27 September) Penny Sharpe MLC asked me to say something controversial at her NSW Sphere event on 4 September. Here it is. The full video and transcript of my somewhat rambling discussion of the challenges facing the Government 2.0 revolution.
  11. Letter from Newcastle (8 October) I wrote so very few “observational essays” in 2009. This is the best, I reckon.
  12. Media140: What do journos do better, exactly? (5 November) My presentation to Media140 Sydney was widely misunderstood. I was posing a question, a challenge, not saying that journalists have no purpose. What I was trying to say was that in a rapidly-changing media landscape, employee-journalists need to be able to answer this question.
  13. Virgin Blue’s mistake reveals countless selfish whingers (15 November) Apart from all my writing about Internet censorship, the other prominent theme does seem to be a certain dissatisfaction with selfishness and consumerism. What struck me most about the comments on this piece was that those who disagreed took it all so very personally.

One thing this list doesn’t reflect is that so much of my writing was elsewhere this year. My plan to do more paid media work and less geek-for-hire did actually unfold reasonably well.

I’ve been very happy with some of the pieces I wrote for Crikey, newmatilda.com, ZDNet.com.au and ABC Online, and the work I did on the podcasts A Series of Tubes and Patch Monday, and even the various radio and TV interviews that were linked to as the year progressed.

Most of the written material is linked from my Media Output page. I encourage you to explore — if only for your children’s sake.

You might also like to check out my personal favourites from 2008.