radio – Page 33 – Stilgherrian

01 June 2013

Talking ASIO hack on BBC World Service

Monday night’s Four Corners episode claimed, amongst other thing, that Chinese hackers had stolen the plans to the new headquarters of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). It made global news, and as a result, I ended up being interviewed on the BBC World Service program World Have Your Say.

The 15-minute live panel discussion also included Four Corners journalist Andrew Fowler, one of the BBC’s journalists based in China, and a journalist from The New York Times.

I quite enjoyed the chat, but it also showed how new all this stuff is to a mainstream audience.

Here’s the audio of the full 30-minute program. It starts off with a discussion of the current situation in Syria, and then we start at about the 14-minute mark.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:38 — 12.3MB)

01 June 201304 June 2013

Talking NBN on Radio Adelaide

The National Broadband Network (NBN) has been a thing in the news for years. It’s less that four months until another federal election where the NBN will be a critical policy issue. And yet I still find myself explaining some of the basic concepts in the media.

Tuesday morning saw another such session, on Radio Adelaide‘s breakfast program with presenter Angus Randall.

I wonder how well we managed to explain the differences between the Labor and Coalition policies. In interviews like these, I try to present both policies fairly. While I have my own views on what I think Australia should do in terms of its broadband policies, it’d be completely unprofessional to turn such an interview into an opportunity to push my own agenda.

~~Here’s the full audio.~~

[Update 4 June 2013: The interview has been posted at the Radio Adelaide website, and at their request I’ve linked to that instead of embedding the audio here. Due to a quirk of how they’ve set up their site, I am unable to make that part of the iTunes-compatible feed on this website.]

22 May 2013

Talking Chris Hadfield and space on ABC Radio’s “AM”

ABC logo Of all the things I thought I’d be talking about last week, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wasn’t one of them. And yet I did end up talking about him — ever so briefly — on ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.

Why? Because there was massive media interest in Hadfield’s rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. That’s the video embedded above — and if that’s not working you can watch it on YouTube.

Journalist Martin Cuddihy recorded maybe five minutes with me via phone to San Jose, but just one sentence ended up in the final report:

Commander Hadfield has really brought space alive and made it more engaging to a new audience, far more than anyone has done in recent years.

I wrote back in 2006 why I thought that the US space program is shite. In 2007, I lamented the end of the Space Age, and again in 2008 with the death of Arthur C Clarke. And it’s two years since I wrote about my own memories of the Space Age, both real and imagined.

Perhaps I should write more about Space…

Anyway, here’s the full audio of the story from AM, and over at their website you can read the transcript.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:18 — 1.5MB)

05 May 201307 February 2024

Weekly Wrap 152: LulzSec, Optus, radio and thinking stuff

My week Monday 29 April to Sunday 5 May 2013 began gently, with planning and washing and other chores, and just two articles to write. But by Wednesday night I’d also done four radio spots, washed an infinite number of towels, and eaten most of a sheep.

Or so it felt.

Then Thursday was full of the Optus Vision 2013 conference, followed by a late train journey back to the Blue Mountains. It was tough to get into work mode on Friday, but I did, and wrote my second article. And washed more towels. And then on Saturday I did the full sloth.

But the most important part of the week, at least in the long term, was all the time I spent from Friday onwards thinking about the unexpected good news I mentioned last week. It means that I’ll soon be able to work on some projects that have been sitting on the back burner, and you’ll start to see them emerging over the next few weeks.

Articles

Both of these articles resulted from this week’s Privacy Awareness Week activities.

Australia’s Privacy Commissioner gets serious about infosec, CSO Online, 30 April 2013.
The fuzzy logic of Australia’s data breach draft, ZDNet Australia, 3 May 2013.

Media Appearances

On Monday I spoke about Facebook’s possible decline, maybe, on ABC 774 Melbourne.
On Tuesday I spoke about LulzSec and hacktivism generally in an interview for Triple J’s Hack, and I was frustrated by the result.
On Wednesday morning I spoke about the dark web (ugh!) and the attacks on Silk Road on ABC Gold Coast.
On Wednesday I spoke about LulzSec and more on ABC Radio National’s Download This Show.

Corporate Largesse

On Thursday I attended Optus Vision 2013, which meant I was fed food and drink through the day at their expense.

The Week Ahead

I plan to write a story each for Technology Spectator, CSO Online and ZDNet, at the very least, as well as kick off one or more of these new projects. Stay tuned.

It’s my birthday on Thursday, but I’ll just have a quiet drink that night. I’ll head to Sydney on Friday instead and have a proper birthday dinner then, thanks to the Snarky Platypus. I’ll then stay overnight before catching United Airlines flight UA870 to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, arriving there on Saturday morning.

Saturday night and Sunday day should be free time in San Francisco before, I’m guessing, a social function on Sunday evening serves as prelude to NetSuite’s SuiteWorld. The event proper starts on Monday in San Jose.

[Photo: Changing alphabets, a photograph taken at Optus Vision 2013 once the staffing level of the registration desk had been reduced during the afternoon, and then the desks themselves removed.]

02 May 201301 November 2013

Talking LulzSec and more on ABC Download This Show

ABC logo My third radio spot for this busy radio week was Marc Fennell’s Download This Show, which we recorded on Wednesday morning.

Can you imagine being able to control a crematorium, a powerstation or traffic lights somewhere out the world from your laptop? Welcome to the mysterious search engine Shodan. If Google is the search engine for web pages than Shodan is the Google of “things”. Also in this episode we examine the state of Lulzsec in Australia and experiment with the new crowdsourcing app SeeSaw.

My fellow panellist was Claire Porter, technology editor for News.com.au. And here’s the full audio.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:00 — 12.4MB)

02 May 2013

Talking the dark web (ugh!) on ABC Gold Coast

ABC logo On Tuesday morning I did another radio spot, this time about two web-related issues: the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web, and the so-called “dark web” and the denial of service attack against The Silk Road.

The presenter was Bern Young, who I’ve spoken to before on the Drive program, but it seems she’s doing the Breakfast shift now.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:26 — 2.7MB)