fiveaa – Page 5 – Stilgherrian

30 October 201130 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 73: The Mysteries of the Desert

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — finally posted on Sunday like it’s meant to be.

On a personal note, it was great to finally get the dental work done so that my jaw is no longer infected. Now, to wait for my shoulder to heal…

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 111, “Cybercrime 2016: a view of the future”. Recorded in Las Vegas, it’s mainly Michael Fey’s view of 2016. He’s McAfee’s worldwide senior vice president of advanced technologies and field engineering. Also, an explanation of how advanced persistent threats are a three-stage attack, and a chat with the bloke who taught me how to create malware and construct botnets in just one hour.

Articles

Hybrid clouds the eventual reality for risk management, CSO, 26 October 2011. And according to the Gartner Hype Cycle, mainstream businesses will start to achieve the benefits of cloud computing in two to five years.
DSD wins US Cybersecurity Innovation Award, CSO, 26 October 2011. DSD provided real-world evidence on how best to defeat the bad guys — and it’s cheap and simple.
Patching the price of security, Technology Spectator, 28 October 2011. While DSD provides simple, effective countermeasures, the big infosec vendors try to sell us ever-more-complex software.

I wrote another two stories apart from these, one for CSO and one for ZDNet Australia, but they won’t be published until Monday.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday morning I spoke about the iPod’s tenth birthday on Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa.

Corporate Largesse

On Tuesday I covered the ISACA conference in Sydney, so of course I got free food and drink.
On Friday I went to the launch of Intel’s Ultrabook standard for laptops at BAR100, The Rocks in Sydney, so naturally there was more free food and drink. They also gave me an Air-Tech Turbo Blimp radio-controlled indoor airship, which I gave away — to someone who then discovered that the blimp itself wasn’t in the box.

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 also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: A mysterious oval-shaped object in the desert somewhere between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This might be in Death Valley, but more likely somewhere else. I wasn’t paying much attention until I saw this. Any idea what it is? You can click to embiggen. Oh, and yes this photo was taken last week, not this week, but I’m sure you can live with that.]

26 October 201129 October 2011

Talking iPod and iTunes on 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide

This week is the 10th birthday of Apple’s iPod and the sixth anniversary of the launch of Apple’s iTunes store in Australia. Yesterday morning I spoke about those things with Keith Conlon and John Kenneally on Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa.

I’ve also included the talkback caller they had just before speaking to me, since I refer to his comments.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.6MB)

08 October 2011

Talking iPhone 4S on 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide

I’d originally planned to ignore the iPhone 4S news this week, but early Wednesday morning I got an SMS from Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa and… well… here it is. My chat with Keith Conlon, John Kenneally and Jane Doyle.

What’s embarrassing listening back to it today is that I’d completely missed the significance of Siri, the combination of voice recognition and artificial intelligence that creates personal assistant far more sophisticated than mere voice-control of the phone.

Oops.

My excuse? My entire research time was about seven minutes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.0MB)

28 August 2011

Talking 20 years of the Web on 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide

August 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the first web page going online. My former ABC Radio colleagues Keith Conlon and John Kenneally, now with FIVEaa Adelaide, wanted to have a chat.

I hadn’t been awake very long when I did this live radio piece. At the time I thought it was a bit all over the place, because I simply talked about whatever came into me head. But listening back today, I think it’s actually OK. What do you think?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.8MB)

The audio is Â©2011 dmgRadio Australia, but since they donâ€™t post many of their live interviews I’m doing their job for them. Besides, it’s not as if I get paid, and it’s not as if this ain’t a decent plug for them.

17 July 201117 July 2011

Weekly Wrap 58

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Most of it seemed to be about Google+.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 96, “Can Google+ kill Facebook? Twitter?” My guests were social computing and business futures consultant Kate Carruthers, Digital Citizens founder James Fridley, and freelance journalist and blogger Neerav Bhatt.

Articles

There’s no way I’m handing over data to Google+, for Crikey.
Online crime under-reported, under-researched, for CSO.
Amazon AWS algorithms watch for cloud-based hacks, for CSO, which includes material from my interview with Amazon’s chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels.
Why rush? Let others find the Google+ privacy landmines, for ABC Drum Opinion.
Quintet nations agree on cybercrime action plan, for CSO. It seems the same five Anglosphere nations that have been sharing intelligence since WWII still consider themselves a unit.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday I was interviewed by ABC TV’s 7.30 for their story on voicemail hacking at News of the World. I wrote about that already.
On Friday I was interviewed on the same topic by Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa.

Corporate Largesse

While attending the AWS Cloud Tour 2011 on Thursday, I received ample food and drink at Amazon’s expense.
On Friday I met with analyst Arun Chandrasekaran from Frost & Sullivan. He paid for the coffee and juice.
On Friday I had another extremely long lunch with those unnamed people about that unnamed media project, but this time I managed to find my way back to where I was meant to be spending the night.

Elsewhere

[Photo: Kent Street, Sydney, photographed on Friday 15 July 2011.]

[Update 7pm: I didn’t think that last article for CSO would be posted today, but it was, so I’ve added it to the “Articles” list.]

15 July 201115 July 2011

Talking voicemail hacking on 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide

It seems that awareness of the News of the World voicemail hacking scandal is starting to spread from media-about-the-media like Crikey through the mainstream current affairs programs to, well, mainstream talk radio.

Earlier this morning I was interviewed on the topic by Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa, and here’s the audio.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.6MB)

It was kinda fun to be interviewed by presenters Keith Conlon and John Kenneally. Keith taught me how to do radio when I started in that medium and he was station manager at what is now Radio Adelaide. I later worked with him and with John at the ABC. And the newsreader I heard just before our interview, Jane Doyle, was at the ABC at that time too. Small world.

The audio is Â©2011 dmgRadio Australia, but since they don’t post many of their live interviews I’m doing their job for them. Besides, it’s not as if I get paid, and it’s not as if this ain’t a decent plug for them.