am – Page 2 – Stilgherrian

ABC logo Of all the things I thought I’d be talking about last week, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wasn’t one of them. And yet I did end up talking about him — ever so briefly — on ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.

Why? Because there was massive media interest in Hadfield’s rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. That’s the video embedded above — and if that’s not working you can watch it on YouTube.

Journalist Martin Cuddihy recorded maybe five minutes with me via phone to San Jose, but just one sentence ended up in the final report:

Commander Hadfield has really brought space alive and made it more engaging to a new audience, far more than anyone has done in recent years.

I wrote back in 2006 why I thought that the US space program is shite. In 2007, I lamented the end of the Space Age, and again in 2008 with the death of Arthur C Clarke. And it’s two years since I wrote about my own memories of the Space Age, both real and imagined.

Perhaps I should write more about Space…

Anyway, here’s the full audio of the story from AM, and over at their website you can read the transcript.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.5MB)

ABC logo Following the announcement of a new Australian Cyber Security Centre, to be built by the end of 2013, I ended up being interviewed by ABC Radio’s AM program on 24 January — but it didn’t turn out so flash.

Journalist Peter Lloyd asked me about cybersecurity threats. I think I mentioned that at one end of the spectrum there’s serious nation-state espionage and sabotage, but at the other there’s all manner of low-end crime that probably doesn’t warrant a national centre — and I used ransomware as an example of that.

But in the finished story, somehow that example became the defining crime. Oops.

PETER LLOYD: So far cyber crime in Australia has largely been a new form of stand-over tactic. The online commentator and writer, Stilgherrian:

STILGHERRIAN: We’ve got the low level cyber crime operatives who are just trying to hack into small businesses, encrypt all their data, hold them to ransom. We’ve seen cases of that with victims in Alice Springs and the Gold Coast and elsewhere in Australia, that a business finds that all the data on their computer is unavailable until they send money of some thousands of dollars to have it unlocked for them.

Anyway, for posterity, here’s the audio of the piece.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.1MB)

Tag: am

Talking Chris Hadfield and space on ABC Radio’s “AM”

Talking cybersecurity bollocks on ABC Radio’s “AM”