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!
Monday 22 to Sunday 28 April 2019 was another short working week thanks to Easter Monday and Anzac Day, but it served as a launchpad for things to come — including some stupid podcast ideas.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 465: Short week with cybers and jerkbirds”
Another fortnight passes. Half of my time from Monday 14 to Sunday 27 May 2018 was spent on my sick bed. I don’t have much to show for it, apart from a better understanding of intestinal parasites and how to kill them. Probably. That’s still in progress.
The coming week will be hectic. Let’s focus on that, eh?
None. I’m particularly irritated that I didn’t manage an episode of The 9pm Edict as planned, but I’ll address that in the coming days. Stand by for details.
The week begins in Wentworth Falls, continues through Sydney to the Gold Coast, and ends up in Brisbane.
Monday and Tuesday are about writing, mostly for the not-SEKRIT project with Crikey. But I’m also doing two radio spots on Monday. I’m on ABC Darwin at 0915 ACST / 0945 AEST talking about Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And I’m on ABC Melbourne after 2100 AEST talking about the legacy data you might be leaving lying around.
On Wednesday afternoon I fly to the Gold Coast to cover the AusCERT Cyber Security Conference. Expect stories at ZDNet.
I’m spending the weekend in Brisbane. While there won’t be a Public House Forum episode of the Edict, I hope to record some bits and pieces.
I’m staying on in Brisbane for a couple more days, during which I’ll be recoding an episode of The 9pm Probe with author and columnist John Birmingham.
Things I’ve pencilled in after that:
[Photo: Laneway Nostalgia. Someone has been doing paste-ups of old family photos in Froma Lane, Katoomba. Here’s a sample, photographed on 24 May 2018.]
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.]
My week of Monday 22 to Sunday 28 May 2017 wasn’t special in any way whatsoever. Why should it be? All this carry-on about magical lives is a bunch of middle-class smugness that should be erased from the earth.
Did I tell you I broke my glasses on Wednesday? That event shaped the latter part of the week, because I’m struggling a bit to organise replacements. That’s under way now, thanks to the generosity of friends, and I’ll tell you more over the next few days.
For now, on with the show…
None, but I did write a piece for ZDNet that’ll appear in the next few days, and podcast plans are detailed below.
Like last week, this week I plan to do a solid amount of work on the SEKRIT editorial project; write a thing or two for ZDNet, plus, I guess, a bunch of other things, like organise new glasses. I won’t assign specific tasks to specific days, because as I explained last week, that tends to jinx things.
The next episode of The 9pm Edict podcast will be recorded and streamed live on Tuesday 30 May Thursday 1 June from stilgherrian.com/edict/live/, starting at 2100 AEST. You still have time to support this podcast with a one-off contribution.
(For those of you who’ve been asking about ongoing contributions, yes, I still intend to set up a better system for that. That won’t be finalised for a while, though, so one-off contributions are very welcome.)
I’m covering 5th International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensics (ICCCF) on the Gold Coast from 16 to 18 July, I hope; and the national conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA) in Sydney on 10 to 12 October.
If there’s anything I should add in there, please let me know.
I also plan to produce a short series of podcasts which will be conversations with people I don’t necessarily agree with. These might be public figures — I hope to speak with One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts, for example — or people who simply represent a different point of view. In June, I’ll record a pilot episode, kicking off with an easy question: Is there a God?
[Photo: The Library a la Jeffrey Smart. The view from the cafe in the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in Katoomba, photographed on 5 May 2017. The cropping and adjustments to the colour needed to bring out detail in the seated figure drew out the light in the matter of a Jeffrey Smart painting.]
My week of Monday 16 to Sunday 22 January 2017 was another one that I need to rush through today. No details.
None.
[Photo: Metaphor, photographed near the supermarkets in Katoomba, Blue Mountains, on 25 January 2017.]