gaza – Stilgherrian

12 June 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 1

Starting today, each Saturday or Sunday I’ll post a list of the stuff that I’ve had published elsewhere in the previous week.

Patch Monday podcast #44: Microsoft versus the cybercriminals. A look at some of the less-well-known work Microsoft is doing in this field — including Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit sponsoring a pop song in Nigeria, a legal tactic for taking down botnets, and how they identify malware through reputation analysis.
How evil is Google, exactly? for ABC Unleashed. My argument is that Google’s collection of random Wi-Fi data isn’t the massive privacy breach some people are making out, but that it does raise serious questions about whether Google can be trusted. The comment stream is fascinating.
Turks hack Israeli Facebook accounts over Gaza blockade incident for Crikey. This appears to be the first time that individual Facebook users’ accounts have been the target of political hacking, as opposed to those taking an active part in the propaganda war.

I also did a radio spot on 891 ABC Adelaide early on Monday morning, but I wasn’t quite awake and I forgot to record it. If I recall correctly, I spoke about my visit to Microsoft’s Redmond campus.

If you’re still short of reading for this long weekend, you can always dig back further into my media output.

06 June 201006 June 2010

Crikey: Microsoft, Startpage, Facebook and Israel

Despite having an appalling cold for the last ten days, I managed to knock off four articles for Crikey this week. I haven’t been linking to them in individual posts here — should I? — but here they are now.

Letter from Redmond, Washington: inside Microsoft HQ is a colour piece about my visit to the world’s second-biggest tech company. “What a waste of electrons,” said the only commenter. Oh well, can’t please everyone.
Startpage: a ‘private’ search engine, but who’ll care? looks at a metasearch engine — that is, a search engine that really just compiles results from other “real” search engines — whose key selling point is that they don’t log what you do. Startpage is an interesting idea, but I suspect Australians are not yet sufficiently distrustful of Google for this to fly here.
Crikey Clarifier: Why Facebook users are quitting, including me is a quick guide to the Facebook privacy issues which triggered my own departure from Facebook.
Mavi Marmari photos faked by Israel? Probably not is an attempt to debunk a conspiracy theory that certain photos posted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs are not really of weapons seized aboard the MV Mavi Marmari but were taken some years previously. What fascinates me about the comment stream for this story is that some people so want to believe in the fakery that they simple cannot accept the far simpler explanation that the cameras’ clocks were set wrong.

If any of the stories are currently behind Crikey‘s paywall, you can either sign up for a free 3-week trial or wait until they emerge from the paywall two weeks after their original publication date.

Now as I say, I haven’t been creating a post here for every Crikey article of every Patch Monday podcast. I figure that if you’re interested you’ll subscribe directly to those RSS feeds, and in any event I always mention them in my Twitter stream. But what you you prefer? A brief mention here and a link to the piece, as individual posts? An end-of-week summary like this? Some sort of “Stilgherrian master feed” that combines everything from here, my new Posterous stream and my Flickr photos? What say you?

18 November 200918 November 2009

Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009:

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

Continue reading “Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009”