Tag: apple

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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”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.2MB)

The audio is ©2014 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Talking the alleged Apple iCloud hack on 1395 FIVEaa

FIVEaa logoThe third and final of today’s radio spots about the alleged hack of Apple’s iCloud service was at lunchtime, so I’d had time to wake up and gather my thoughts — as well as see how the infosec community was reacting.

The afternoon presenter on 1395 FIVEaa in Adelaide, Will Goodings, gave it plenty of time too, some 14 minutes, so we covered quite a few issues — including the privacy implications of cloud technology generally.

I sound a bit tired or something, though. Possibly because I was tired.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.6MB)

The audio is ©2014 dmgRadio Australia.

Today’s previous two radio spots were for Nova 100 Melbourne and ABC Radio’s AM.

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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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.7MB)

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.

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Talking the alleged Apple iCloud hack on Nova 100

Nova logoIt’s starting to look like an alleged hack of Apple’s iCloud service was the source of a series of nude photos of female celebrities that has appeared online. That news led to a series of radio appearances for me today. Starting with this one.

The story itself has already been widely reported, and I won’t go into any detail about the victims of this invasion of privacy. One good place to start is this summary at The Guardian, and there’s more technical details at TUAW. These blog posts will simply present the media spots that I did.

First up was Nova 100 in Melbourne. This was done live with breakfast presenters Meshel and Tommy at 0720, and my coffee hadn’t kicked in yet. That’s why I screwed up my first, embarrassingly-wrong go at the explanation — at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.2MB)

It seems Meshel was quite taken with my name. That’s so sweet.

The audio is ©2014 dmgRadio Australia.

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Talking Facebook app privacy on 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide

FIVEaa logo“Facebook Messenger app has permission to spy on your phone,” screeched a headline on 9 News today. “The new Facebook Messenger app has permission to take pictures and videos without your confirmation and to call numbers without intervention, causing unexpected charges.”

This story caught the attention of 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide afternoon presenter Will Goodings. As you’ll hear, I talked him out of some of the scarier ideas, but did mention the issues of granularity in smartphone app permissions that I’ve written about before.

Here’s the full interview, plus a little end note about what we might do with Adelaide’s Festival Plaza. I present a modest proposal, as does a listener.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.7MB)

The audio is ©2014 dmgRadio Australia.

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Weekly Wrap 209: Nostalgia as winter falls, with Apple

St Stephens Anglican Church, Newtown: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 2 to Sunday 8 June 2014, at least beyond immediate work commitments, was somewhat limited by certain cashflow issues, but that seems to always happen when there’s a long weekend early in the month.

Still, the ebook project progressed nicely — and that will be announced properly in approximately a week. It’s not that exciting, though, trust me.

Articles

Oddly enough, both of these were triggered by the announcements at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). I found it quite funny that some people, even some alleged technology journalists, said there was nothing interesting to report because there wasn’t any new hardware.

There’s also the blog posts I wrote for Blogjune, which you may find interesting. Or not.

Media Appearances

5at5

Not quite a full week this week, though Friday’s was a bumper edition to make up for the gap. Why don’t you subscribe to 5at5?

Geekery

Corporate Largesse

  • On Friday I caught up with Michael McKinnon from AVG Technologies AU. We spoke about many interesting things, and he bought a couple of beers and dinner.

The Week Ahead

Monday is a public holiday for the Queen’s Birthday, but since she has neglected to invite me to her party — an administrative oversight I can accept, because she is a busy woman — I will be catching up with a friend instead. And then I shall return to Wentworth Falls.

Tuesday is a day of research and planning, unless a writing commission comes up. Wednesday is a day trip to Sydney for a lunchtime briefing by Brocade. Thursday is a day of writing. Wednesday and Thursday are days of writing. Friday onwards has yet to be allocated.

[Photo: St Stephens Anglican Church, Newtown, photographed from Camperdown Memorial Rest Park on 21 June 2003. I’ve decided that if I haven’t taken any decent photographs in the week covered by the Wrap, I’ll pick something from the same month in the past.]

[Update 10 June 2014, 1515 AEST: The Week Ahead edited to reflect a change of plans for Wednesday.]