Tag: podcast

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Weekly Wrap 27

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — very late this week because I just couldn’t be arsed doing blog posts while I was in San Francisco. But here’s the summary of last week. On Wednesday. So I’ll refund your goddam subscription fees.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 68, “Wikileaks: the survival lessons”. A panel discussion with network engineer Mark Newton — he described WikiLeaks as “a bespoke cloud-based CDN [content distribution network] that is enabled by the Streisand Effect” — information security specialist Crispin Harris, and platform architect Benno Rice.

Media Appearances

None. What wrong with you people?

Corporate Largesse

Where do you start? This week was all about me travelling to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com. So they paid my airfares, accommodation, food and drink throughout the event, and “networking functions” at the W Hotel and the Palace Hotel. Plus they gave me a Flip HD video camera, a scarf, a t-shirt, a universal power plug thingy and a can of whipped cream. Don’t ask.

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: A comparison of real American men with the idealised version portrayed in advertising in a storefront on Market St, San Francisco.]

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Weekly Wrap 24

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 65, “Hello cloud, meet cookies. Goodbye privacy”. My interview with Kevin Shaw from iappANZ.
  • A Series of Tubes episode 119. Ruckus Wireless engineer Steve Chung talks 802.11n streaming and I talk about the OECD’s comments on the National Broadband Network, privacy and crowdsourcing.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

They have lovely biscuits at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

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: A close-up of my eyes, taken by Trinn (‘Pong) Suwannapha, cropped out of the photo he took for my US visa application.]

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Weekly Wrap 23

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

Podcasts

Media Appearances

  • On Monday I spoke with Fiona Wyllie on ABC Radio’s Statewide Afternoons and the Fairfax tracking cookie beat-up and a father who installed a radio jammer to kill the internet so his kids wouldn’t spend so much time online. Alas, there is no recording. That’s a shame. It’s not often you’ll hear me giving parenting advice on the radio.

Geekery

  • I learned how to use Google Site Search by plugging it into the Fender Australia website. It’s fairly straightforward, but it quickly shows you the problems with how your site is constructed. As an aside, if you’re a web developer visiting that site for the first time you’ll be horrified to see that in many places it uses tables for layout. That’s because the site was originally built in 2001 and has just been re-skinned a couple of times since. It’s also maintained manually, all 950 pages of it. There’s little business case for a major overhaul — the numbers are not compelling — but we’re planning to build a proper modern database-driven site early in 2011.

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: Old bar sign at the Town Hall Hotel, Newtown. Gender roles were a little different back then.]

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Weekly Wrap 22

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth — and this week I’ve done a lot of writing.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 63, “The govt’s data retention dreams revealed”. If you’d prefer to listen to the edited highlights of that Senate hearing rather than read about it, this is the go.

Media Appearances

  • Parity Bit episode 1. A new IT-related video podcast produced and presented by Owen Kelly. I was chatting with him and the other panellists about #ozlog and other news stories. I didn’t swear once.

Geekery

Not a sausage.

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.

[Photo: Enmore village in the spring rain, taken from the Warren View Hotel. Compare this with the similar view from a few weeks ago.]

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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 20

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those suffering from early-onset dementia.

Articles

  • Is Brisbane’s sewer broadband a crock of …?, for Crikey. Believing that the National Broadband Network will take too long to solve Brisbane’s internet problems, Lord Mayor Campbell Newman has signed a deal with the i3 Group to run fibre through the city’s sewers. As you do.
  • Cloud security? Better get a lawyer, Son!, a 2000-word feature for ZDNet.com.au. As the intro says, “Moving your data into the cloud creates a raft of security challenges, but according to information security specialists, those challenges are less about hackers and more about data availability and signing the right contracts.”

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 61, “Microsoft exposes the botnet threat”. My guest is Microsoft Australia’s chief security advisor, Stuart Strathdee.
  • A Series of Tubes episode 117. Richard Chirgwin’s podcast returns after a bit of a break. Apart from my usual natter about stuff, we hear from i3 Group’s CEO Elfed Thomas about that Brisbane sewer-based fibre project.

Media Appearances

  • Again it’s not strictly “media”, but on Tuesday I took part in a lunchtime discussion about the future of book publishing, hosted by Blurb. I haven’t had time to write it up yet, but here’s Ross Dawson’s summary.

Geekery

  • Wait for it…

Corporate Largesse

  • Blurb paid for Tuesday’s lunch at History House on Macquarie Street. And very pleasant it was.
  • I was invited to a few other things this week, but I was a tad crook and didn’t go. Ethics are restored, or something.

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: Staff of The Duke, Enmore, dress up for The Village People concert at the Enmore Theatre. I won’t link to a higher-resolution version. We have suffered enough.]