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!
Something different to kick off the mid-2026 series. Just two days ago, on the 8th of May, Sir David Attenborough celebrated his 100th birthday. As it happens, way back in 1984, I interviewed him when he was just Mr Attenborough, and here is that interview.
Continue reading “The 9pm David Attenborough from 1984”
Monday 10 to Sunday 16 April 2023 contained less weird fatigue, at least towards the end, so I think whatever was causing it has now stopped. Productivity is slowly returning. Meanwhile, there’s the fox…
Continue reading “Weekly wrap 672: A sunny afternoon reveals a silly street sign, and the world improves”
“The BBC is preparing to shut down its traditional television and radio broadcasts as it becomes an online-only service over the next decade, according to its director general, Tim Davie,” reported the Guardian. That caught the ear of ABC Adelaide.
Continue reading “Talking an online-only BBC and ABC on ABC Adelaide”
Australia’s treasurer Joe Hockey exudes love and understanding. We take the train to Cronulla to find out exactly what makes this southern Sydney suburb so great. And there are shellfish, damn fine shellfish.
Continue reading “The 9pm Shire”
Monday night’s Four Corners episode claimed, amongst other thing, that Chinese hackers had stolen the plans to the new headquarters of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). It made global news, and as a result, I ended up being interviewed on the BBC World Service program World Have Your Say.
The 15-minute live panel discussion also included Four Corners journalist Andrew Fowler, one of the BBC’s journalists based in China, and a journalist from The New York Times.
I quite enjoyed the chat, but it also showed how new all this stuff is to a mainstream audience.
Here’s the audio of the full 30-minute program. It starts off with a discussion of the current situation in Syria, and then we start at about the 14-minute mark.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.3MB)
The audio is of course ©2013 British Broadcasting Corporation. The audio player is linked directly to the BBC’s copy of the MP3 file. If that ever breaks, let me know and I’ll post my copy.
A strange thing happened yesterday. A distributed denial service (DDoS) attack, a big one, got reported in the mainstream media as having somehow all but crippled the internet — despite all the journalists presumably continuing to use the internet as usual.
“The internet around the world has been slowed down,” reported the BBC. Um, no.
Now I won’t go through all the details here, because eventually they were properly reported elsewhere and I’m writing it up for Technology Spectator in a piece to be published Tuesday morning. The short version is that a nuanced report on Kaspersky Lab’s Threatpost lost its nuance in the mainstream media, a process helped along by a data-plotting error in early reports. People like Gizmodo hosed down the bulldust.
However I was interviewed by ABC TV’s The Business yesterday, along with Patrick Gray of the Risky Business information security podcast and Ty Miller from penetration testing firm Pure Hacking.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.0MB)
If the embedded video doesn’t work, try the version at the ABC’s website. In both cases the video is ©2013 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
I’ll also be talking about this DDoS attack on ABC News24 tomorrow morning at 1010 AEDT — and after both of those I’ll ponder the way the media handled this whole thing.