Category: Weekly Wrap

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

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Weekly Wrap 96: Plenty of chaos and a mysterious pump

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 2 to Sunday 8 April 2012.

T’was a short week in terms of writing and media production because it was the 4-day work week prior to Easter, I spend about 10 hours judging entries in the Lizzies, the Australian IT journalism awards — the finalists have now been announced, and the awards night is on 20 April — three and a half hours troubleshooting the ADSL connection at Bunjaree Cottages, and two hours restoring a website that a new developer had accidentally taken offline.

There was also a mysterious pump.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 132, “Cyberwar: don’t believe the hype”. Thomas Rid, reader in war studies at King’s College London, destroys some myths. I found this to be one of the more fascinating podcasts I’ve ever done.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday I was quoted in Harrison Polites’ story at Technology Spectator, A storm in a postbox, on the Australia Post’s new Digital Mail service and a similar product from Computershare. “I already have a ‘digital mailbox’. It’s called email,” was one of the things I said. “Why on earth would I want yet another information silo to check for so-called ‘important’ mail — by which they seem to mean bills and bank statements?” Plus some stuff about encrypted email.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m in Sydney all this week, and the main blocks of work are a Patch Monday podcast to be posted on Tuesday and a 2000-word feature for ZDNet Australia. I daresay other stuff will turn up as well, but let’s focus on one stressor at a time.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), a daily visitor to Rosella Cottage but a bugger to photograph because they move so fast.]

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Weekly Wrap 95: Speaking of chainsaws…

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 26 March to Sunday 1 April 2012.

Not so much media output this week, ‘cos I was dealing with a web development matter for a long-standing client, I researched one story that turned out to be a fizzer, and yesterday I got caught up in a cleaning the hackers out of a website. Plus I recorded tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast early. Plus it hit the end of the month and I reckon my editors’ freelancer budgets had run out.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 131, “Your word is your log-in, literally”. Dr Clive Summerfield, chief executive of Australian company Auraya, talks about the state of the art in voice biometric authentication. Fascinating stuff from a great explainer.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I won’t be able to lock in the week ahead until I talk to some people on Monday morning. However there’s a technical briefing on the NBN rollout in Sydney on Monday that might be useful to attend, and I’m thinking of sitting in with a team participating in the Cyber Defence University Challenge and turning that into a podcast. But, as I say, I’ll work that out tomorrow.

Friday, of course, is Good Friday, and I’ll be moving down to Sydney for a couple weeks while Bunjaree Cottages enjoys the busy time of school holidays.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Chirgwin with Chainsaw: Bunjaree Cottages proprietor Richard Chirgwin observes all safety precautions — although technically this photograph, actually a frame grab from a video, belongs to last week as it was taken on 25 March.]

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Weekly Wrap 94: Identity, privacy, fog and a lyrebird

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 19 to Sunday 25 March 2012.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 130, “Yellow alert! Windows RDP flaw explained”. Casey Ellis from Tall Poppy Group and HackLabs proprietor Chris Gatford explain all the things.
  • The 9pm Edict episode 20, which covers Tony Abbott’s tribute to Margaret Whitlam, comedian Bill Bailey’s thoughts on classical music, Harmony Day and more.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I attended the iappANZ workshop on Identity and Privacy as the guest of the Lockstep Group.
  • Also on Thursday, I met with Oliver Friedrichs from Sourcefire, and they bought me a beer.

The Week Ahead

Nothing of specific note has been locked in yet.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Bunjaree Track with Fog, photographed at Bunjaree Cottages on the morning I finally saw the lyrebird.]

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Weekly Wrap 93: Sex, security and heartburn

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 12 to Sunday 18 March 2012 — posted late thanks to the worst heartburn I’ve ever experienced destroying an entire night’s sleep.

I’ve added a new section, “The Week Ahead”, listing any events that I’ll be attending. While I often post about future events individually, and my schedule does change at short notice, this will at least help plug a few events that until now I’ve only mentioned on Twitter.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 129, “Future security: big data or Big Brother?” A lunchtime conversation with RSA executive chairman Art Coviello, including a discussion of the boundaries between reasonable data analysis and unreasonable surveillance, and a serve for the media failing to report the good news following RSA’s security breach last year, when the loss of information on their SecurID log-in tokens was later used in an attack on defence contractor Lockheed Martin.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Wednesday there was free food and drink to be had at the launch of Sexpo.

The Week Ahead

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Gang-Gang Cockatoo, one of the more unusual avian visitors to Bunjaree Cottages. Do note that I resisted the temptation to combine “sex” and “gang-gang” in the headline.]

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Weekly Wrap 92: Rosella invasion!

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 5 to Sunday 11 March 2012.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 128, “Cybercrime and the Russian mob”. Stephen McCombie, lecturer at the Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism at Macquarie University, explains why Eastern Europe is the perfect breeding-ground for online crime. And Chris Gatford, proprietor of Hacklabs, says that organisations’ networks are showing the same vulnerabilities as a decade ago. We’re not learning. And the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) has failed us too.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Monday, RSA paid for lunch at The Summit Restaurant. From the rather lovely menu I selected the campechana of ocean trout, school prawns, Pacific oyster and crab in a wet tomato lime ceviche, followed by the dry aged Angus beef cheek and loin noisettes with Jerusalem artichoke, grapes and majoram — along with some of the double cream and butter mashed potato, and the crisp garden leaves and cress salad with chardonnay dressing. I forgot to write down what the wines were, sorry, but I can show you the view in directions one, two and three.
  • Also on Monday, I had coffee with Brad Arkin from Adobe, and they paid. I didn’t see the need to take a photograph.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Rosella in da House. Technically this is being posted in the wrong week because it’s from 4 March, but it accurately summarises the mood of this week I think. Some of the local avian wildlife at Bunjaree Cottages has started to get a little more friendly.]

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Weekly Wrap 91: Information goes in, but doesn’t come out

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 27 February to Sunday 4 March 2012. Busy busy busy!

So busy, in fact, that this wrap is being posted a week late! That’s what I get for deciding at the last minute to insert a two-day cybercrime conference into my schedule. I did fit, but it was a bit tight. Shoosh.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 127, “Radiation, nanodiamonds and traffic lights”. From NICTA’s Techfest 2012, researchers explain how to protect their bionic eye circuitry with nanodiamonds, design radiation detectors for ports and airports, and update 40-year-old traffic control algorithms.

Articles

Not a single one. Strange week.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • In the first part of the week I was at the Kickstart Forum. This meant airfares, accommodation at Hyatt Regency Sanctuary Cove and various meals paid for by Media Connect with the funds obviously coming from their corporate sponsors. Also, AVG gave us a small magnifying glass. Ninefold handed out t-shirts, plus I’ve got a hoodie on the way. Symantec gave us a three-PC license for Norton 360 version 6 and a single-Mac license for Norton Internet Security for Macintosh. And CA gave us men a Windsor shaving kit with mirror, brush etc. I don’t know what they gave the women.
  • On Thursday and Friday I attended the inaugural Cyber Crime Symposium, with food and drink provided by the Marriott Sydney Harbour thanks to the conference organisers.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Clear Blue Sky. The sky meets the distant Pacific Ocean, with the horizon an indistinct blur. This photo was taken from a Jetstar Airbus A321 somewhere over northern NSW.]

[Update 0900: Added in the corporate largesse from Australian cloud provider Ninefold, which I’d accidentally left out.]