Tag: microsoft

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Weekly Wrap 18 and 19

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly. Once more I’ve skipped a week, but I haven’t been all that prolific so I’ll think you’ll cope.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 60, “Credit cards risked by standards failure”. My guest is Mark Goudie, head of the forensics practice for Verizon Business in Melbourne. I also chat with journalist and telco analyst Richard Chirgwin about the NBN opt-out issue.

Media Appearances

  • While it’s not strictly “media”, the panel No Man’s Land at the National Young Writers Festival the other weekend went remarkably well. I did make a crappy phone-quality recording of the session, and if that can be turned into a podcast I will do so. Eventually.

Geekery

  • I finally completed the migration of all my Prussia.Net internet hosting clients to a new server. For those who care about such things, it’s a leased dedicated server at ServePath running CentOS and the cPanel/WHM hosting control panel. I had its security improved by the good folks at ConfigServer, and Bobcares continue to provide user support. I’ve also used Linode to supply a bunch of secondary DNS servers.

Corporate Largesse

I’ve decided to introduce this new section, where I declare who’s bought me food and drink or given me gifts, so you can properly judge whether I have been influenced by them in my media coverage. In the last two weeks that’s:

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: Realising her full potential, a billboard which caught my eye at Town Hall station in Sydney. For having “realised her full potential”, this young woman seems remarkably unexcited. Plus I’d have thought that “full potential” is only realised once you get into your career, not just when you get your Bachelor of Commerce or Economics degree.]

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Weekly Wrap 4

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, posted a day early because I’m about to go off-grid for the weekend.

Articles

  • Inside Microsoft’s Security War Room, my debut for iTnews, along with a photo gallery. During my Microsoft-funded trip to Redmond, Washington, I visited the War Room where they work on critical security patches for all Microsoft products.
  • The political naivety of the digital elites for ABC Unleashed, in which I bemoan the way some people seem to see all politics through the narrow, narrow prism of the Australian government’s mandatory internet censorship policies. The comments are fascinating, especially those who seem to think I’m in favour of Senator Conroy and the government’s internet censorship plans.

Podcasts

[Photo: A sign spotted outside the ZanziBar, Newtown, last night, offering free Snuggies for hire. “Snuggie”? If you haven’t heard of this device before, check their website or watch the infomercial.]

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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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Visiting Microsoft HQ to talk security: what should I ask?

I’m off to America! Some tin-pot little IT start-up called Microsoft has invited me to visit their headquarters in Redmond, Washington (pictured) to find out what they’re doing about security, and in particular their Trustworthy Computing initiatives.

Now if you’re a crusty old network administrator like me, you may think that “Microsoft” and “security” in the same sentence is an oxymoron. A decade ago I was building Linux-based firewalls and, like so many people doing the same, I referred to Windows-based computers as “the targets”. And certainly the vast majority of the world’s malware is targeted at Windows.

But I’ve always though that the simplistic “Windows is bad, m’kay” was a bit, well, simplistic. Information security isn’t just about the technology, it’s also about people. Human factors are also the weakest link. And over the years I’ve found that people who throw around those tired platform-wars slogans usually aren’t up to date when it comes to the things they love to hate.

So, I’m off to Redmond later this month to spend three days with some of Microsoft’s engineers and developers, including briefing sessions with senior executives from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

Continue reading “Visiting Microsoft HQ to talk security: what should I ask?”