Tag: broadband

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Weekly Wrap 15

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 57, “CCTV surveillance: reality versus myth”. My guest is Professor Brian Lovell from NICTA’s Queensland Research Lab.

[Photo: Circular Quay station at dusk, showing how us Sydney residents tend to take the magnificent views for granted.]

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Weekly Wrap 13 and 14

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, once again done fortnightly because I forgot to do it last weekend. Suffer.

Articles

  • Nile’s porn excuse doesn’t hold water, for Crikey. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph alleged that various NSW politicians had been using their parliamentary computers to access pornography, and that anti-sex-industry campaigner and Christian Democrats leader Reverend Fred Nile was the worst culprit. He denied it, but as the story stood on 2 September 2010 I didn’t believe him.
  • NSW Parliament’s flawed porn hunt, for Crikey. By the following day, it was clear that the “audit” of parliamentary web browsing was deeply flawed.
  • What the NBN will deliver to Windsor’s mob, for Crikey. Independent MP Tony Windsor said that the National Broadband Network was a major factor in him choosing to support Labor over the Liberal-National Coalition.
  • ACMA and Nine demonstrate Australia’s institutionalised racism, for ABC Unleashed. Sam Newman’s continued low-brow bigotry on The AFL Footy Show gets “punished” with a slap on the wrist. Again. It took only six comments before someone accused me of political correctness gone mad and compared Australian with North Korea. And another commenter said that I “looked like a potato that had been boiled too far”. The standard of discussion at ABC Online isn’t all that flash.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 55, “BYO computers: cloud security risk?”.
  • Patch Monday episode 56, “Parliament’s poor porn probe exposed”. If ZDNet allowed longer headlines and more robust language in their stories, I’d have entitled this podcast “Pollies’ piss poor Parly porn probe exposed”. Poetry.

Media Appearances

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 eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Enmore Village on a Spring evening, taken from one of my favourite afternoon working spots at the Warren View Hotel, corner of Stanmore and Enmore Roads. Compare it with the photo in this post, My village really is home.]

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Weekly Wrap 12

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Not so much media work this week, but what I did do related to the hung parliament and the importance of broadband to the independent MPs who hold the balance of power.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 54, “Broadband election’s harsh come-down”, which explains the issues as they stood on Monday 23 August 2010, plus a repeat of my conversation from earlier this year with Jan Meijer of Norway’s UNINETT explaining why online voting is a lot trickier than might seem.

Media Appearances

None. I was surprised by this. But then again everyone wanted to talk to the “block of three” independent MPs, not me.

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.

  • Cleaned up the home page for Fender Australia. They’ve been a client for a decade now, and the guts of the website includes hundreds of manually-maintained pages which date back to 2001. The red and black design was a quick re-skin back in 2007. This week’s work was simply to tidy up a layout which had become messy since then. Yes, it will become a database-driven website soon. We’ve also been saying that for at least two years.

Elsewhere

I should also mention that 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 eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Modern Living in Enmore, a shop window full of wigs on dummies’ heads, Enmore Road.]

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Weekly Wrap 10 and 11

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Well, a fortnightly summary today, because I forgot to do a post like this last week. Sigh.

Actually, a lot of this relates to the federal election here in Australia, so you’d better digest it all now before you vote today. Hurry up!

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 52, “Media laws dying for digital update” with guest Peter Black from the Queensland University of Technology.
  • Patch Monday episode 53, “Understanding the broadband election” with guest Narelle Clark, a network engineering consultant who’s most recent gig was as research director of the CSIRO’s Networking Technologies Laboratory. She’s also vice-president of the Internet Society of Australia and on the board of trustees for the Internet Society globally.
  • A Series of Tubes episode 115. Host Richard Chirgwin talks with Anup Changaroth of Ciena Networks about gigabit fibre networks, the product life cycle, and the value of Layer 2 carrier networks, and me about broadband policy.

Media Appearances

[Photo: Tights are not pants, Enmore Road. Further proof, Ladies, that tights are indeed not pants. Not even if you’re also wearing heels.]

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ICT Election Forum: what questions?

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) is once more holding a Federal Election Forum on ICT issues, with the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Conroy, his Coalition counterpart Tony Smith MP, and The Greens’ spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam.

As you can see from the photos, Australia’s political diversity is once more represented by a bunch of middle-aged men in dark suits.

When I wrote about the equivalent event in 2007, I noted that the Minster at the time, Liberal Senator Helen Coonan, looked rattled and scored a few own goals. Conroy, by comparison, was alert and scored some sharp political points. And Democrat leader Senator Lyn Allison — remember the Democrats? — was quietly confident.

Labor’s broadband promise was a Fibre to the Node network with a “guaranteed” minimum speed of 12Mb/sec to 98% of Australians, costing $4.7 billion. The Liberals were promising WiMaX through the OPEL consortium. From memory, mandatory internet censorship didn’t even get a mention, as both parties only added that little gem to their agendas after the official campaign period had started.

How times have changed…

This year’s moderator is Sky News political editor, David Speers. An odd choice, I must say. Sure, he has the profile and Sky News Business is the host broadcaster. But wouldn’t it have been better to have someone with a better technical knowledge of the portfolio, rather than a general political news reporter? My worry is that it’ll degenerate into political point-scoring rather than analysing competing policies.

So let’s help out Mr Speers. What are the issues this year, do you think? What questions should he ask?

I think we can take a question or two about internet censorship for granted. Please try to think beyond the obvious indignation du jour.

The Federal Election Forum is next Tuesday 10 August 2010 at the National Press Club in Canberra. The debate starts at 1pm Canberra time and will be broadcast on Sky News Business and possibly ABC News 24. [Update 3pm: The Forum will also be streamed live at YouTube’s Australia Votes channel.]

[Photo credits: Stephen Conroy via Wikimedia Commons. Tony Smith via Office of Tony Smith MP. Scott Ludlam via The Greens. This composite image is licensed for re-use under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0 license.]

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Weekly Wrap 8

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 50, “Security lessons from Adobe Reader” with guest Brad Arkin, who heads up security and privacy at Adobe. The next version of Adobe Reader for Windows to be released later this year will include a “sandbox”, making it much more resistant to certain kinds of attacks.

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday afternoon I did a quick spot on ABC Radio Statewide NSW with Paul Turton, talking about, of all things, running out of IP addresses, DNSSEC and this mangled story about the seven secret people who can reboot the internet. Alas, this isn’t podcast anywhere.
  • On Friday I recorded an interview with ABC Radio National’s Future Tense which will be broadcast next Thursday.

[Photo: Circular Quay viewed from the railway station, photographed on 27 July 2010. We really do take this view for granted.]