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!
It’s September, and that means that here in the Southern Hemisphere, Spring has sprung. In the United States, there’s a thing called Spring Break. But in Australia, things didn’t quite break. It was more of a bruise, though a pretty bad one.
In this podcast there’s talk of Mark Zuckerberg, crime, science, journalism, bruising, the Sydney Push, and more.
Continue reading “The 9pm Spring Bruise”
It’s that special day that comes but once every five years. Australia’s national Census 2016. And so far hasn’t it been a disaster.
“Look we don’t like to call it data mining, it’s more like data fracking,” tweeted by Johannes Jakob on 9 August, and he’s right.
Continue reading “The 9pm Fracking Your Data Real Good”
Australia has chosen its face for Eurovision 2015, and it needs a shave. Christopher Pyne explains science. And Malcolm Turnbull explains reality.
In this podcast, there’s talk of logic, leadership, public relations, science and Florida. Obviously.
Continue reading “The 9pm Shut Up It’s Called Logic”As we approach the end of 2013, I’m going to do my usual series of blog posts looking back at what actually happened on this little planet. This is the first, being a list of the most-read posts on this website.
There hasn’t been a lot to choose from in the last couple of years, because most of my writing is done elsewhere these days. That means some rather mundane pieces of writing, such as Weekly Wrap posts, end up on the list. That’s possibly an argument for abandoning this little exercise.
As brokers of reliable information about the scale of online crime and espionage, most information security vendors would make great used car salesmen — but McAfee’s latest research finally seems to be taking the right path.
In my column at ZDNet Australia this week, I give McAfee some praise for the most recent research they’ve funded, a preliminary report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies titled The Economic Impact of Cybercrime and Cyber Espionage that dismantles the daft idea that cyberstuff costs the global economy a trillion dollars a year.
McAfee now admits that you can’t run a small-N survey in a couple dozen large, wealthy nations — often a self-selected sample of known crime victims at that — and extrapolate the data globally.
Their new figure is “probably measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars”, although they never quite commit to one specific number…
“In the context of a $70 trillion global economy, these losses are small, but that does not mean it is not in the national interest to try to reduce the loss, and the theft of sensitive military technology creates damage whose full cost is not easily quantifiable in monetary terms,” McAfee writes.
True, but as McAfee themselves point out, this supposed cybercrime explosion is really down at the level of shoplifting. Retailers generally budget between 0.5% and 2% for pilferage and other such “shrinkage”.
I also mention my previous critical comments about various infosec vendors’ dodgy statistics — but I don’t link to them, because they were mostly published at non-CBS mastheads. So here’s a selection of stories I’ve written on this subject over the last couple of years.
Continue reading “Do McAfee’s new cyberstats really represent a shift?”
The media totally misrepresents the real risks to our lives. Senator Conroy totally misrepresents the facts. Again. And the government literally makes my life more painful.
Here is episode 10 of The 9pm Edict.
You can listen to this episode below. But if you want them all, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:00 — 7.2MB)
For more information about the topics covered in this episode, check out Australia’s Standard for the Uniform Scheduling of Drugs and Poisons, the National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee’s (NDPSC) decision on codeine, especially the NDPSC record of reasons, 56th meeting 16-17 June 2009, the ABC News story on same, and some background on codeine; the Marketplace story Big companies are hoarding cash; ABC News stories about the Pope’s Easter service being clouded by the sex abuse scandal and Jews upset that the Vatican compares criticism of the Pope to the Holocaust; and Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 3303.0 — Causes of Death, Australia.
If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.
[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project, as were the other sound effects. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]