Weekly Wrap 67: Spring comes to Sydney

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. A relatively quiet week, because I took a bit of time off in Kuala Lumpur and then in Sydney when I returned.

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None.

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: Sydney cityscape, photographed from Potts Point, photographed with my new Nikon Coolpix S8100 camera. I really did need a decent digital still camera for editorial work, and this will do the trick.]

No Canberra for cyberwar after all

As it happens, I didn’t end up going to the 2nd National Cyber Warfare Conference in Canberra this week. The conference sessions weren’t open to the media, and I decided that it wasn’t worth the trip if we’d have to rely on second-hand information.

That said, we did manage to get a recording of the over-dinner speech by David Irvine, the director-general of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which Liam Tung turned into the story “Insidious” cyber chaos too fast for ASIO. It also served as part of the inspiration for my story Yet another free pass for Aussie spooks.

Who wants to go to Canberra anyway?

However SC Magazine did send Darren Pauli and John Hilvert, and their stories were:

Links for 22 October 2009 through 27 October 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 October 2009 through 27 October 2009, published after far too long a break. I really, really do need to work out a better way of doing this…

Should court hearings be streamed live?

ZDNet Australia logo: click for story

I don’t know whether it’s the first time an Australian legal trial has been covered live via Twitter, but the Twitter coverage of the AFACT v iiNet hearing in the Federal Court is breathing new life into court reporting. So, why don’t we just stream everything live to the Internet, audio and video?

That’s the question I ask in my first opinion piece for ZDNet Australia, Twitter in court: Why not streaming video?, which was posted on Friday afternoon after I’d spent half the week watching ZDNet.com.au‘s Liam Tung and The Australian‘s Andrew Colley bring us their observations as the case unfolded.

As it happens, the ban on live broadcast coverage from courtrooms dates back to the 1930s. Although there have been experiments with TV coverage, it’s still rare. But apart from the obvious cases where you’d want to keep it banned, why shouldn’t we allow it? That’s what I explore over at ZDNet.com.au. Have a read and let me know what you think.

If you want to follow the hearing, which is expected to last until mid-November, monitor the Twitter hashtag #iitrial.