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!
What a year! At the end of 2020 we can’t even gather people in a pub to talk about how terrible it was. Well we can. But we shouldn’t. So we didn’t. We did this instead.
Continue reading “The 9pm Year of Brain Worms, Drama, and Despair”
It’s hard to believe that the first episode of this podcast was recorded in 2010. Welcome to the Recycled Edict — the first of a few episodes gathering up some of the least-worst bits.
Continue reading “The 9pm Recycled Edict 1”
The week of Monday 9 to Sunday 15 October 2017 was quite productive, as you’ll see. Read on!
The first of these articles is the final one related to the launch by foreign minister Julie Bishop of Australia’s first International Cyber Engagement Strategy. See last week’s wrap for the first two.
On Tuesday, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) released its 2017 Threat Report. The next day, at the national conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA), an Australian Defence Signals (ASD) officer told us more about an incident in that ACSC report.
None by me, but…
Then the world decided to follow up my story on that Australian defence industry data breach.
It began in Australia and expanded from there, with stories in the Sydney Morning Herald (in the front page!); The Australian; ABC News; the Guardian; News.com.au; BuzzFeed; The Express in the UK; Voice of America; RT; Arab Times in Kuwait; via AAP to outlets including Sky News Australia; and via Reuters to others. If I tried to find them all, and link to them all, I’d be here all night.
I saw versions of the story in Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Indonesian. There were doubtless others. They’re just the ones I happened to see.
To quote ZDNet security editor Zack Whittaker in New York, it ran everywhere — and to be honest, that surprised me. I’ve covered cybersecurity, as we call it now, for a few years. This is a pretty ordinary event. It just happened to combine “mystery hacker”, with the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, with the authority of an ASD officer.
On Thursday, I did media appearances on ABC News24; ABC Radio’s The World Today; ABC TV’s 7.30; and Channel Ten’s The Project. On Friday, I appeared on BBC World’s Newsday.
I can’t possible list all of the follow-ups, but here’s a few that I’d like to mention:
The story also morphed as it was re-reported, sometimes drastically changing the meaning of the event. One publication, which I won’t name, even reported that the ASD had been hacked, at least until I contacted them. I hope to find the time to write up that evolution, but for now here’s a few tweets.
I’ll play it by ear. At this stage, there’s nothing special through to the end of the year, so now is your chance to fix that.
[Photo: Mountain Life, with Fog, The entry road to the Carrington Hotel, Katoomba, photographed through the evening fog on 10 October 2017.]
It’s September, and that means that here in the Southern Hemisphere, Spring has sprung. In the United States, there’s a thing called Spring Break. But in Australia, things didn’t quite break. It was more of a bruise, though a pretty bad one.
In this podcast there’s talk of Mark Zuckerberg, crime, science, journalism, bruising, the Sydney Push, and more.
Continue reading “The 9pm Spring Bruise”There’s a reason the list of most popular posts for 2015 was so disappointing. Take out the posts related to podcasts and crowdfunding, or were audio or video grabs from my media appearances, or were a Weekly Wrap, are you’re left with just two.
Obviously all my interesting writing is now elsewhere, at the mastheads that pay for it. But this fact has gotten me thinking. More on these thoughts soon.
This morning I delivered version six of my now-regular guest lecture to media students at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), “Algorithms and the Filter Bubble”. Here are the references and further reading.
The links over the fold start off with some background material that sets out my worldview, and then things are in roughly the same order as presented in the lecture — with the order becoming less coherent further down the page. There’s more material linked here than I mentioned in the lecture itself. Enjoy.
A recording of the lecture will be made available in roughly one week on Wednesday 23 September on Friday 25 September, as the change in Prime Minister has triggered the demand for some of my commentary. This page may be updated with further links at that time.
Continue reading “Algorithms and the Filter Bubble references for 2015”