akamai – Stilgherrian

02 February 2014

Weekly Wrap 191: Loving the bomb and Bitcoin, with trees

My week of Monday 27 January to Sunday 2 February 2014 was, as I’d suspected it would be, the clear beginning of the start of the working year.

OK, the week hasn’t quite finished yet. It’s still relatively early on Sunday. But the day will be spent pottering around various work-related things, so I feel confident about that opening paragraph.

It’s pretty much an Australian tradition that the media silly season ends on Australia Day — although I did see someone suggest that in Sydney the summer holiday season runs from the Queen’s Birthday long weekend in early October through to the Mardi Gras parade at the cusp of February-March. We are a proud nation.

Articles

It’s strange, but we never really had to learn to love the bomb, Crikey, 29 January 2014. It’s a reflection on the Cold War on the 50th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Akamai’s HTTPS fail sets a bad example, ZDNet Australia, 29 January 2014.
Can Startupland bridge the smartphone generation gap?, ZDNet Australia, 31 January 2014.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday I spoke about Bitcoin, in the light of the arrests of a Bitcoin evangelist and a currency trader on money laundering charges, on ABC Radio’s The World Today.

Corporate Largesse

None. I’m clearly doing this wrong.

The Week Ahead

I’ll be in the Blue Mountains until Friday, in all likelihood. It’s the first week of a new month, so I daresay I’ll be keeping a low profile because none of those bastard clients have paid their invoices yet.

My writing slate includes two columns for ZDNet Australia, one for Corrupted Nerds — that’s one of the two pieces I still owe my Pozible supporters — and probably one for CSO Online.

I’m also doing the research and scripting for a panel discussion I’m moderating the week after — that’s due to be announced on Monday.

[Photo: Eucalypt Bark , photographed on 27 January 2014 at Bunjaree Cottages near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.]

13 October 2013

Sixth “Corrupted Nerds” posted, on SoundCloud too

Yes, I’m working through the backlog. Another Corrupted Nerds podcast has just been posted.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are cheap and easy to do. It’s just a matter of overwhelming the target site with a flood of internet traffic. According to Michael Smith, head of Akamai Technologies’ computer security incident response team (CSIRT), such attacks will only get worse as we roll out faster broadband infrastructure.

“That increases the amount of bandwidth available to the home, but that also increases that amount of bandwidth that a bunch of computers at the home can throw at a target site,” Smith says.

That’s not the only reason that DDoS is becoming more challenging to defend against — but you’ll need to click through to the podcast to hear why.

Corrupted Nerds is also available via iTunes, and now also on SoundCloud. So you’ve really got no excuse not to listen. Well, unless you’re deaf. But that’s different.

07 October 2012

Weekly Wrap 122: Fatigue and a helpful waratah

My week Monday 1 to Sunday 7 October 2012 was a reminder that travel and on-stage performances can be more exhausting than it feels at the time. Especially when you’re working while everyone else has a public holiday.

Out of curiosity, I just scrolled back through my calendar to find the last week when I hadn’t been working in some way or other. I scrolled back more than four years without finding such a week. I decided to stop before it all become too depressing.

That said, I know the answer. It was nearly five years, when I spent some time in Bangkok.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 157, “DDoS attacks: 150Gb per second and rising”. Guests are Alex Caro, Akamai Technologies’ chief technology officer and vice-president of services for Asia Pacific and Japan, and Tal Be’ery, web security research team leader at Imperva, who also spoke with Patch Monday in May about his counter-intelligence work against Anonymous. Further reading: Imperva’s Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trend Report #12 (PDF).

Articles

Forget government data retention, Google has you wired, Crikey, 2 October 2012. While the headline draws specific attention to Google, it’s really a general critique (if that’s not too grand a word) of data retention in the private sector.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

So far I know that Monday will be spent producing the Patch Monday podcast, and on Tuesday I’ll head into Sydney for a media lunch with NetSuite boss Zach Nelson.

I’ll stay in Sydney overnight so that on Wednesday I can meet Allison Cerra, author of Identity Shift: Where Identity Meets Technology in the Networked-Community Age. I’m sure you can guess why.

The rest is a bit disorganised. There’s an Internet Governance Forum in Canberra on Thursday and Friday, though no-one’s asked me to go yet. Yes, that’s a hint. But I also seem to have less commissioned writing locked in for this month than I thought I did a week ago. I should probably do something about that.

[Photo: Waratah near Bunjaree, which I believe is a specimen of Telopea speciosissima, photographed near Bunjaree Cottages earlier today. Despite living in New South Wales for something approaching two decades, this is the first time I’ve seen the state flower in its native habitat.]