abs – Page 2 – Stilgherrian

13 October 201315 October 2013

Weekly Wrap 175: Lots of security, lots of productivity

[Update 14 October 2013, 0800 AEDT: As foreshadowed, “The Week Ahead” has been fleshed out with the current version of The Plan. However there’s evidence to suggest that this might change again later today. Update 15 October 2013, 1915 AEDT: The plan has changed again.]

My week Monday 7 to Sunday 13 October 2013 was relatively busy, although more on the research and information-gathering side rather than the final output side.

Podcasts

Corrupted Nerds: Conversations 6, being a chat with Michael Smith, head of Akamai Technologies’ computer security incident response team (CSIRT) about distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Articles

Tech boom? Innovation drives Newcastle’s (slow) renewal, Crikey, 7 October 2013, being my write-up of the DiG Festival.
Internet use: we’re more mobile, but we still need a cable, Crikey, 9 October 2013, being my response to the latest internet usage figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABC).

I also wrote my usual column for ZDNet Australia, The Full Tilt, but we’re currently waiting on a decision as to whether the planned headline is, um, pushing the boundaries.

Media Appearances

On Monday I spoke about Tor and Silk Road on ABC Local Radio across New South Wales.
On Sunday, I was a guest for the recording of this week’s Reckoner podcast.

Corporate Largesse

On Wednesday I went to a lunchtime briefing by Unisys at Wolfies Restaurant at Circular Quay — apparently it doesn’t have an apostrophe — where the food was lovely and the weather was gorgeous. They paid, of course.
On Thursday I went to the annual conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA) at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, where I was fed and watered. Check Point Software Technologies Ltd gave me a branded shirt. Watchguard Technologies Inc gave me a novelty USB memory device (4GB) packed with PR material.

The Week Ahead

~~The exact shape of the week will depend upon news arriving overnight, so I’ll add in the details tomorrow morning.~~

On Monday I’ll be mapping out the coming three weeks or so, including preparing some of plan for getting to Melbourne for the Breakpoint and Ruxcon hacker conferences. On Tuesday I’ll be continuing that work towards Melbourne and writing a piece for Technology Spectator that’ll due to be published on ~~Thursday~~ Friday.

~~On Wednesday I’ll be setting up the framework for another Technology Spectator yarn, as well as writing my ZDNet Australia column for Thursday.~~

On Wednesday I’ll be heading to Sydney for a lunchtime briefing by Dasault SystÃ¨mes about their new SolidWorks thingo, setting up the frameworks for Technology Spectator and ZDNet Australia stories en route. I may stay in Sydney overnight, depending on several factors. If I don’t…

On Thursday itself, I’ll be heading to Sydney again for a lunchtime briefing by NEC and Telsyte, staying overnight until Friday for a tour of the Pacnet data centre and some personal stuff.

There’s more in the schedule than that, of course, but they’re the relatively fixed pegs upon which the rest of the schedule hangs.

The weekend is currently unplanned.

[Photo: Not the ASD, photographed at the annual conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA) in Sydney on 10 October 2013. The signage for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), seems to have gone astray…]

03 July 201103 July 2011

Weekly Wrap 56

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Last week was busy enough, but this week was even busier. Something’s gotta give.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 94, “ISP filtering goes ‘voluntary'”. Even though Australia’s controversial mandatory internet filtering program is at least two years away from being implemented, internet service providers will soon start filtering child exploitation material on a voluntary basis. My guests are Peter Black, who teaches internet and media law at the Queensland University of Technology; Network engineer Mark Newton; Lyle Shelton, chief of staff of the Australian Christian Lobby.

Articles

The only NBN monopoly seems to be on ignorance, for ABC Drum Opinion. My response to opponents of the National Broadband Network claiming that it’ll destroy competition in the telecommunications industry.
Internet filtering isnâ€™t compulsory, but everyone will volunteer, for Crikey, covering the recent news the “voluntary” of filtering of the internet will soon begin in Australia, covering child exploitation material only.
Voluntary filtering removes the controversy, for CSO. In this op-ed I explain how the voluntary filtering makes sense technically and politically, if not necessarily for effective child protection.
Drug spam rules, thanks to WikiPharmacy: Symantec, for CSO. It’s a shame I didn’t notice that my headline is a crash blossom.
If Facebook killed Myspace will Google+ kill THE social network? Crikey. At rather short notice, when I’d already been up very early to wrote two other articles, I was asked to write a piece covering the news of both Google launching Google+ and Myspace being sold for UD 35 million and how that’d affect Facebook. This is what resulted.
Interpol blacklist goes live in Canberra, for ZDNet Australia. “Voluntary” internet filtering started on Friday.

Media Appearances

Two radio spots this week, and a guest appearance on someone else’s podcast.

On Wednesday I spoke with ABC Gold Coast about Google+ and how it’ll affect Facebook. There’s audio at the link.
On Thursday I was talking about information security for business on Phil Dobbie’s BTalk podcast.
On Friday I was talking about Myspace, Google+ and Facebook on ABC 774 Melbourne. Again, there’s audio at the link.

Corporate Largesse

None. I am reliably informed that the drought will be broken next week.

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. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: A misty dawn at Bunjaree Cottages, 1 July 2011. This is the view from Roselle Cottage, not normally rented to the punters. The much-battered camera in my phone does not do this scene justice.]

25 September 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 16

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Well, the bits I’m going to talk about publicly.

Articles

Wireless on the rise, but fixed broadband still does the work, for Crikey. An attempt to head off misuse of the latest internet activity report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The “wireless will solve everything” meme is strong.
NBN: too bold for timid Australia? for ABC Unleashed. I’d noticed that amongst the much-needed legitimate criticism of the National Broadband Network there’s also a sense of “We’ll make do” and “No-one else is doing this so why should Australia?” Has Australia lost its nerve? Needless to say, most commenters miss the point I’m making about the bigger picture and just re-bleat their views about the NBN. The party-hack trolls are remarkably obvious.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 58, “For efficiency, send your workers home!”. My guest is Jacob Murray-White, general manager of Salmat At Home. They run a virtual call centre with staff scattered across Australia. He gets quite excited. I’d never realised that call centres could be so interesting, although cartoonist First Dog on the Moon used to manage a call centre. That means something.

Geekery

I still spend roughly a third of my time doing random “geek for hire” stuff with a few long-standing clients. I reckon I might as well list any significant moments.

I still provide internet hosting for approximately 110 domains for around 40 clients, including my own activities such as this website. I’m right in the middle of migrating all that to a new server. Indeed, this site is now running on that server. It’s another dedicated Linux box at ServePath in San Francisco, although they seem to be emphasising their GoGrid branding these days. I’m thrilled to discover that just packaging and migrating the data will take 14 hours, and my planned process won’t work. A busy weekend ahead. Sigh.

Elsewhere

[Photo: The view from Beverly Hills Hotel, Sydney, which is a substantially less glamorous view than last week’s photo.]

04 April 201003 December 2011

The 9pm Edict #10

The media totally misrepresents the real risks to our lives. Senator Conroy totally misrepresents the facts. Again. And the government literally makes my life more painful.

Here is episode 10 of The 9pm Edict.

You can listen to this episode below. But if you want them all, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:00 — 7.2MB)

For more information about the topics covered in this episode, check out Australia’s Standard for the Uniform Scheduling of Drugs and Poisons, the National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee’s (NDPSC) decision on codeine, especially the NDPSC record of reasons, 56th meeting 16-17 June 2009, the ABC News story on same, and some background on codeine; the Marketplace story Big companies are hoarding cash; ABC News stories about the Pope’s Easter service being clouded by the sex abuse scandal and Jews upset that the Vatican compares criticism of the Pope to the Holocaust; and Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 3303.0 — Causes of Death, Australia.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project, as were the other sound effects. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]

26 August 200926 August 2009

Links for 16 August 2009 through 26 August 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 16 August 2009 through 26 August 2009:

Academic Earth: “Video lectures from the world’s top scholars”, it says. Provided they’re American. The universities included so far are Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA and Yale.
[Air-L] Trivial tweeting: Another viewpoint on the “Twitter is pointless babble” rubbish, this time from Cornelius Puschmann, PhD, in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of DÃ¼sseldorf.
Power of Information | UK Cabinet Office: The February 2009 report from the UK government’s taskforce on Government 2.0.
My #blogpostfriday post | Scripting News: Dave Winer is worried about the cloud. “We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they’re public companies, it’s very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.”
8129.0 – Business Use of Information Technology, 2007-08 | Australian Bureau of Statistics: Detailed indicators on the incidence of use of information technology in Australian business, as collected by the 2007-08 Business Characteristics Survey (BCS).
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | Wikipedia: Someone — I forget who — told me to read this 1935 essay by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. It’s been influential in the fields of cultural studies and media theory. It was produced, Benjamin wrote, in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art&”. “In the absence of any traditional, ritualistic value, art in the age of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based on the practice of politics. It is the most frequently cited of Benjamin’s essays”, says Wikipedia. Sounds like I should indeed read it.
How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government | ReadWriteWeb: Tim O’Reilly posits “government as platform”, where the government would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of. That’s the writer’s version. Does this fit with the Rudd government’s idea of the government as an enabler, as outlined in their Digital Economy Future Directions paper?
CHART OF THE DAY: Smartphone Sales To Beat PC Sales By 2011 | Silican Valley Insider: This is based on worldwide sales figures, and it makes sense. The Third World could really use a low-power, rugged smartphone at a sensible price, rather than a laptop or even a netbook to lug around.
News Corp pushing to create an online news consortium | latimes.com: By “consortium” they mean “cartel”, right? “Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has positioned News Corp as a logical leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which boasts more than 1 million paying subscribers. He is believed to have met with major news publishers including New York Times Co, Washington Post Co, Hearst Corp and Tribune Co, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.”
Us Now : watch the film: “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?” This entire film can be watched online.
Morons with mobiles sour the tweet life | theage.com.au: Jacqui Bunting writes some of the dumbest words about Twitter which have ever been written. Note to editors: Anyone who starts from the premise that Twitter is meant to be a “commentary on life” needs to be taken out the back and slapped around a bit. It’s 2009. Please catch up.
The Conversation | Now That I Have Your Attention: The creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan, also has a few words on Pear Analytics’ cod research on Twitter. He makes the point that for the first time we’re truly having a global conversation.
Pointless babble | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: The redoubtable Stephen Fry rips into that Pear Analytics research on Twitter, with more brevity and wit than I did the other day. Well said, Sir!
Top 100 Aussie Web Startups – August 09 | TechNation Australia: The latest league table of Australian web businesses, for those who like to have winners and losers in clearly-defined categories.
Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule | Flickr: Proof that you don’t need the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology to be boringly anal-retentive about your scheduling.
Bruce Schneier: Facebook should compete on privacy, not hide it away | The Guardian: Another thought-provoking essay by Bruce Schneier.
Hype Cycle Book | Gartner: Mastering the Hype Cycle is the book explaining Gartner’s regular Hype Cycle reports.
How It All Ends | YouTube: A follow-up to the video The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See, which presented a risk analysis showing that we cannot afford to ignore the potential risk of climate change, even if it all turns out to be wrong. This version skips over the main argument and addresses the potential objections.
Climate change cage match | Crikey: A delightful comment from a Crikey reader, Stephen Morris, who likens the tactics of climate change denialist Tamas Calderwood to the mating habits of the Satin Bowerbird, which is totally obsessed by the colour blue. “It will actively search through a wide variety of brightly coloured objects that might suitably decorate its bower, but the only colour that interests it and it wants to collect are those coloured blue. Tamas in his scientific objectivity (and unfortunately often his logic) is very Satin bowerbird like. It doesn’t matter what large amounts of available data says about global warming, the only titbits of data of interest to Tamas, are those that can be seen to indicate cooling. Once a data set loses its blueness (or coolness), it seems interest in it is lost and other blue data sets are sought.”
Senator Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative | Net Traveller: A ten minute video in which Senator Kate Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative, made for students at ANU studying Information Technology in Electronic Commerce COMP3410.
AP contradiction: Move forward but restore | Pursuing the Complete Community Connection: Steve Buttry points out the problem with Associated Press’ content protection plan: How can you “move forward” and “restore the past” at the same time?

03 March 200803 March 2008

SHM gets broadband figures wrong

Don’t newspapers fact-check any more? In the Sydney Morning Herald, Jason Koutsoukis reckons most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second. And yet, as Richard Chirgwin points out, last year’s ABS figures were that 22% of subscribers had up to 256kbps and 45% had more than 256kbps. “Since when is around 1/3 of the broadband population equal to ‘most’ users?”