Weekly Wrap 228: Snow, at least nearby, and privacy

A narrow-leafed drumstick (Isopogon anethifolius): click to embiggenMy week of Monday 13 to Sunday 19 October 2014 must have been influenced by the photo I posted last week, because it did end up snowing in the Blue Mountains — but no closer than 8km from me.

So, in the interests of triggering pleasant spring conditions for the week ahead, I’ve kicked off with another pleasant photo from my archives.

Articles

I’ve also written a second piece for ZDNet Australia, but it won’t appear until Monday.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

It’ll be a busy one. While I haven’t mapped out exactly what will happen each day — I can’t do so until a certain tardy clients pays me and I can lock in certain commitments — there’s plenty of media objects to make.

A new ZDNet Australia column and a new Corrupted Nerds podcast will appear on Monday, as I said. After that, I’ve got two ZDNet Australia pieces to write, and an episode of The 9pm Edict to produce. I also want to resurrect the 5at5 newsletter, but that has a lower priority.

The weekend is unplanned.

[Photo: Yellow, being a narrow-leafed drumstick (Isopogon anethifolius) photographed at Bunjaree Cottages on 1 November 2012.]

Talking Ello on ABC Gold Coast

ABC logoThis new social network Ello has been getting so much attention it’s… annoying. I was originally going to ignore it, but I got roped into this spot for ABC Gold Coast, and then Download This Show, so I decided to write about it for ZDNet Australia — that piece will appear on Tuesday.

But… This recording is the ABC radio spot, which aired on Tuesday morning with presenter Rebecca McLaren. I think I was in a bit of a cynical mood.

The audio is ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Talking Ello and ASIO on ABC Download This Show

Marc Fennell, Stilgherrian and Claire Reilly on Download This Show

ABC logoOn this week’s Download This Show on ABC Radio National, CNet news editor Claire Reilly and I joined Marc Fennell to discuss the new social network Ello and Australia’s latest national security laws.

The rise and rise of Call of Duty: It’s bigger than Harry Potter, bigger than James Bond: It’s the warfare video game Call of Duty. We step inside one of the studios responsible for building the biggest game on the planet to take the temperature of where blockbuster gaming is headed. And could the rising social network Ello be a viable alternative for the Facebook-weary? The four-thousand people signing up every hour apparently believe so. But are they being swindled? Plus #HeyASIO is perhaps the most popular Twitter hashtag in Australia. So just what do our new counter-terrorism laws really mean? We separate hyperbole from fact.

The audio is of course ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It’s served here directly from the ABC website.

As usual, one of the segments was also made into a video, and that’s over the fold, immediately below.

Continue reading “Talking Ello and ASIO on ABC Download This Show”

Talking the cult of Apple on ABC Gold Coast

ABC logoToday the iPhone 6 went on sale, and of course the Apple fanchildren went into their usual semi-crazed state waiting for the Apple Stores to open — even on the Gold Coast.

ABC Gold Coast morning presenter Nicole Dyer decided to give me a call to explain the phenomenon, and here’s the recording.

She asked me about Stephen Fry’s review of the iPhone 6 for The Guardian. I was not complimentary. I referred to it as “one of the most embarrassing pieces of technology writing in the history of electricity”.

The audio is ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Talking geoblocking and copyright on ABC Gold Coast

ABC logoThe government’s discussion paper on online copyright infringement came out just over a month ago, the submissions period closed on Monday, and now the debate is really kicking off — including on the complicated legal issue of geoblocking.

Now I’ve already given my opinion on the political spin in the discussion paper itself. But the specific issue of geoblocking came up on ABC Gold Coast, and this morning I spoke with breakfast presenter Bern Young.

Legally it’s a grey area. By signing up for a Netflix account from Australia, for example, you may be breaking the terms and conditions of their service. But you’re still paying for the content, and money is passed on the the actual producers.

The only people missing out are the local Australian distributors who’ve inserted themselves between the content producers and the audience. What value are they adding, exactly? The whole point of the internet is to enable people to connect globally.

CHOICE sees it as a consumer issue. Doesn’t geoblocking, the restriction of content availability by location, restrict competition? They’ve just launched a TV campaign making that point. Even the government’s own inquiry into IT pricing recommended that geoblocking be outlawed.

The audio is ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Talking the alleged Apple iCloud hack on ABC Radio AM

ABC logoA few minutes after doing the live spot on Nova 100, I recorded an interview on the alleged Apple iCloud hack for ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.

Reporter Emily Bourke would have gone away with a disjointed mess of soundbites, but the disjointedness isn’t so important when it’ll be edited into a multi-voice report.

I think this one quote best summarises my view of the compromise we enter into when using cloud services:

The big problem with creating massive online cloud storage systems — which is now the way we do things on the internet, whether it’s Apple or Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever — is that you create a vast honey pot of a target for the attackers.

Once you find one way to get in, you can potentially get access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people’s data.

The plus side is such concentrated services means they can hire some of the best security people they can find, putting brains onto the problem is obviously important. So at one level the cloud providers can, if they do it right, protect things far better than you or I could on computer systems under our own control.

The failures are therefore going to be far less frequent. It’s just that when the failures do happen they can be catastrophic.

Here’s the full story, served directly from the ABC website, where you can also read the transcript.

The audio is of course ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

A few sentences of my comments were also used in a later report on The World Today at lunchtime, which featured security researcher Troy Hunt.