Tag: google

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Talking Google vs Facebook on ABC Gold Coast

I continue to be fascinated by what I get asked to talk about on the radio. Today it was news about Google, with an amused emphasis on the product names.

The station was ABC Gold Coast, the presenter was Bernadette Young, and producer Nicole Gundi had chosen two specific stories. The Australian’s coverage of the launch of Google+, the competitor to Facebook, and the Herald Sun’s story on the smartphone operating system wars.

Speaking live from the pub at fairly short notice, I managed to wrap a few facts and opinions into the 10-minute interview. And here’s a recording.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:10 — 4.5MB)

This material is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t post it and it’s a decent plug for them.

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Weekly Wrap 33

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. It’s already Monday, which makes this post late. You’ll cope. There isn’t a photo this week either. You’ll cope with that too.

Articles

Podcasts

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday I spoke with Liz Ellis, the former Australian netball captain and now radio presenter on ABC Radio 702 Sydney about the great work the Queensland Police did using their official Twitter and Facebook accounts during the recent floods.

Corporate Largesse

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.

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Data retention by ISPs: your comments?

Tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast will be about data retention for law enforcement. Specifically, internet service providers (ISPs) retaining the metadata of all your online communications, possibly for years. I’d like your comments.

Here in Australia, it was revealed in June that the Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) had been discussing these issues in secret with ISPs, law enforcement and other government agencies. I covered that in Patch Monday in July, Is Australia’s data retention idea that scary?

Since the AGD activities were revealed, and following the Google Wi-Fi sniffing incident, the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts has been running an inquiry into The adequacy of protections for the privacy of Australians online.

On Friday the committee heard evidence, and late in the afternoon the discussions turned to ISP data retention. Delimiter has published a summary, and a story explaining that the Privacy Commissioner won’t talk about those AGD discussions. ZDNet.com.au stories say the Privacy Commissioner is against the idea although Neil Gaughan, Assistant Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police reckon it’s really just the status quo translated to the new medium.

Here’s a recording of Friday’s Senate hearing, starting from when the AGD’s Catherine Smith introduced the topic. She’s Assistant Secretary, in charge of the Telecommunications and Surveillance Law Branch.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:46 — 22.8MB)

This was recorded off the internet, so there are some gaps where the audio stream re-buffered. I have cleaned up the sound but it’s otherwise unedited. I’m compiling a 10- or 15-minute summary for Patch Monday. This is really only for the political tragics — or those who simply can’t wait to hear the persistent questioning by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam.

If you’d like to provide an audio comment on this issue for Patch Monday, Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733 and leave a voicemail. The deadline is 8.30am Monday morning, Sydney time. The podcast is now online, but you cal still leave an audio comment for next week’s episode.

[Photo: SATA beehive data storage, adapted from an original photograph by Konstantinos Koukopoulos, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Audio: Many thanks to journalist Josh Taylor for providing the audio recording.]

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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.

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Crikey: Microsoft, Startpage, Facebook and Israel

Crikey logo

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.

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?

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Patch Monday: Google versus Groggle

ZDNet Australia logo: click for Patch Monday episode 39

Google, one of the world’s largest corporations, is in a trademark dispute with Australian web start-up Groggle. What’s the law here?

Groggle, based in Brisbane, is a “location-driven alcohol price comparison service”. It says its name is a play on words around the traditional Aussie slang “grog” for alcohol. But Google’s lawyers reckon their name infringes Google’s trademarks. Unless they reach an agreement by tomorrow it’ll end up being heard by IP Australia.

In the Patch Monday podcast this week, I chat with Cameron Collie, one of Groggle’s founders, and Kimberlee Weatherall, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.