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!
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. It was another massive week of writing this week, including a trip to Melbourne.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 60: Media whoredom continues”
On Wednesday afternoon, LulzSec and Anonymous joined forces to encourage people to boycott PayPal by withdrawing their money and closing their accounts.
The back story is that PayPal has cut off WikiLeaks’ account, meaning that people could no longer donate money to WikiLeaks via PayPal. Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal. Last week the FBI and others arrested people alleged to have been responsible for those attacks. So this week, the boycott of PayPal.
The joint statement by LulzSec and Anonymous makes for interesting reading. It describes DDoS attacks as “ethical, modern cyber operations”. Such things are actually a criminal act, despite what Anonymous may imagine the law to be. “Law enforcement continues to push its ridiculous rules upon us,” they write, when it’s not law enforcement who makes the laws, but governments.
The call for the boycott was unfolding as Triple J’s current affairs program Hack was going to air, and I phoned in a report. Here’s the audio.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)
I found it interesting that presenter Tom Tilley responded to my comment that DDoS is a crime by saying “Yeah I imagine there’d be people with lots of different points of view about what they’re doing and whether it’s indeed lawful.”. Personally I reckon the law in this is pretty clear. Pandering to their audience?
The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It has been extracted from the full program audio [MP3].
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. While Sydney dealt with its wettest July since 1950, I was at the Bunjaree Cottages in Wentworth Falls, writing and writing and writing and writing. And talking on the radio.
“Make hay while the sun shines,” goes the old saying. But for a writer, it’s about making paragraphs while the rain pours. Being stuck indoors with a magnificent view really helps.
None. But there’ll be plenty next week. I’ll tell you more about that later this morning.
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. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
[Photo: Potholes on Frenchmans Road, Wentworth Falls, photographed on 20 July 2011. This is a slightly modified version, here’s the original.]
Yesterday the Tasmanian government was hit by a hacker.
Sp1d3r from the hacking crew S4t4n1c_s0uls got into a Debian Linux box and inserted his graphic into an email sent to state’s media.
I reported this for CSO Online.
S4t4n1c_s0uls has claimed responsibility for almost 100 website defacements this month, including sites in Brazil, Jamaica, China, India and the Philippines. Five Chinese government websites were hit, and one in the Philippines.
I spoke about the hack with Louise Saunders on ABC 936 Hobart, and here’s the audio.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.9MB)
The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but it hasn’t been posted on their website so here it is. In return, I reckon you might choose to listen to Louise Saunders’ drive program some time soon.
While I was busy writing an op-ed on the LulzSec vs Murdoch saga this morning — and I’ll post more about that momentarily — I got a phone call from ABC Radio’s lunchtime current affairs program The World Today to comment on the FBI’s arrest of alleged Anonymous-connected hackers overnight.
The story is TransAtlantic arrests target hackers, and if you click through you’ll get both transcript and audio. You’ll hear me, as well as Patrick Gray, presenter of the Risky Business podcast on information security. The reporter is Sarah Dingle.
I’d be interested to know what you think of these arrests.
Patrick reckons they arrested nobodies.
This current batch of arrests will “bring to justice” a bunch of people who made no attempt to conceal their actions because they’re either technically useless or just didn’t care.
They’re “low hanging anons”.
But that won’t stop the mainstream media from portraying this as the establishment striking back at online troublemakers.
I reckon that while that may or may not be true, the computers the FBI has just seized will be handy evidence when it comes to tracking down other culprits. After all, their operational security has hardly been world class.
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Most of it seemed to be about Google+.
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. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
[Photo: Kent Street, Sydney, photographed on Friday 15 July 2011.]
[Update 7pm: I didn’t think that last article for CSO would be posted today, but it was, so I’ve added it to the “Articles” list.]