Be afraid. Be very afraid. I have taken over ZDNet Australia‘s podcast Patch Monday.
In this week’s episode, Cyberwar. What is Australia’s place in the world of digital warfare? What are the implications for the NBN? Tom Worthington, a computer scientist who’s been watching how Australia’s defence forces use IT, helps separate the myth from reality.
We also look at the Australia Council’s innovative “Geek in Residence” program, helping bring arts organisations into the 21st Century. Applications close 9 December.
You can listen to my first episode, which is Patch Monday episode 20, below. But it’s even better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.
Please, let me know what you think. Feedback very, very welcome. And do let me know if there’s any topics I should cover, or guests we should interview.
And yes, I know it’s Friday, not Monday. Shoosh. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
I saw this on zdnet & I’m shocked! :-p cyber war makes me think of Estonia and georgia. If I think of something I’ll get back to you.
I like the improvement in sound quality this is almost respectable medai, what are you doing?!?
I think that when the military talk of cyber warfare they are talking about battlefield communications rather than war waged over the internet. It is about robots and satellites gathering situational data in real time and distributing it to units that can carry out the necessary task of killing and blowing things up…
@yewenyi: If I can’t produce decent audio quality after a decade and a half working in radio then something’s wrong, I’d say!
Yes, the military’s idea of cyberwar is rather different from the action-movie plots. It’s more about warfare using or targeted at the information infrastructure.
But in the modern networked armed forces, infantry can call in an air strike using a satellite phone, and a cruising command aircraft relays that request to a waiting fighter-bomber which then launches a missile which might be guided by someone else again. The other side will want to disrupt that process, or at least detect when it’s happening and take countermeasures.
I’ll be fascinated to know more about this so-called cyber war. The mainstream media just give out little tidbits. I hope the boffins in the government know what’s going on.
@Paul: Mainstream media usually frames anything “cyber” as “something weird for the geeks” and the stories doesn’t make it into the main news bulletins. I suspect this is because so many decision-makers in news organisations are still well behind the curve when it comes to understanding this stuff.
That, and there are very few geeks capable of explaining any of this quickly to a non-technical audience.
The government’s boffins do understand this stuff very well. But again, it’s a matter of the decision-makers — in this case the politicians, and especially government Ministers — having insufficient knowledge to make effective decisions based on the boffins’ advice, or even to give it the priority it deserves.
I’ve written about that previously in Are clueless politicians holding IT back?
Hah! ZDNet Australia has just re-worked the Patch Monday website to brand the podcast specifically “mine” rather than “ZDNet Australia staff”.
“Nobody’s safe”? Does that count as a license to kill?