Tag: technology spectator

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Weekly Wrap 119: Ducks, ducks, sheep and bull

The bulk of the business end of my week Monday 10 to Sunday 16 September 2012 was spent at Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 event on the Gold Coast, and the weekend at Parramatta.

Microsoft’s event, like all major vendor conferences, began with an intense burst of frustration thanks to the inevitable series of overly-long overly-staged buzzword-saturated propaganda events — “keynotes”, the industry has decided to call them — designed to hammer the new technology’s marketecture into your head while preventing the opportunity for critical thinking.

And, like nearly all others, it eventually settled down into something sensible once all the vice-presidents and managing directors and pointlessly-animated PowerPoint presentations and bass-heavy music had been stage-managed out of the room and actual engineers and designers and other geeks started talking through specific details.

I’ll have more to say about that in due course.

Parramatta, by comparison, delivered a delightful spring weekend full of ducklings and food and wine and almost no pretension whatsoever.

I’ll have more to say about that in due course also.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 154, “Good-guy hackers and other infosec anomalies”. A conversation with Michael Montecillo, a threat research and intelligence principal with IBM Security Services, covering good-guy hackers (well der!), click fraud, his views on the profile of hacktivism following the arrest of key Anonymous and LulzSec members, and more.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Tuesday I did a spot on ABC 105.7 Darwin, but it wasn’t recorded my end so I can’t bring it to you today. That’s a remarkable similar statement to last week, except that one was a pre-record with Richard Margetson and this one was live with Kate O’Toole. I’m annoyed that the recording didn’t happen, ‘cos I managed to give a coherent exposition of my thoughts about online bullying.
  • On Tuesday I did another regular Balls Radio spot with Phil Dobbie, talking about the High Court rejecting an appeal in the Optus TV Now case.
  • On Friday I spoke about the new iPhone 5 and the utility of smartphones for journalism on ABC Radio National’s Media Report.

Corporate Largesse

I attended Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 on the Gold Coast as their guest.

  • Microsoft covered my airfares from Sydney to the Gold Coast and return, airport transfers, three nights accommodation at Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino on Broadbeach Island, and all the food and drinks.
  • The conference backpack was a high-quality Targus job, containing marketing material from sponsors and other vendors. The former I’ve kept, because my The North Face backpack is starting to wear out. All the latter I’ve thrown into the recycling bin, unread.

Also:

  • On Monday evening I attended the SANS Sydney Community Event “Your Security Monitoring — An Attacker’s Perspective”, where the food and (soft)drinks were sponsored by Shearwater Solutions. An article about this will appear in due course.

The Week Ahead

It’s a busy week of (mostly) writing for me, with around five articles already committed to various mastheads, as well as my presentation at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I think my original plan to win the first annual Orkney Short Crime Fiction Prize will have to be dropped. I has disappoint.

I’ll be heading from Sydney to Wentworth Falls this afternoon (Monday) and will return to Sydney for the school holiday period on the coming weekend. I also plan to be in Sydney on Wednesday morning for Symantec’s announcement of their Australian expansion plans. How will that turn into an accommodation schedule? I’ll figure that out this evening.

[Photo: Ducks at Parramatta, a delightfully pastoral scene photographed on the banks of the Parramatta River on Saturday afternoon. I managed to get quite close to this family of ducks before they raised the alarm and took to the water.]

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Weekly Wrap 113: Slow clones and their delays

My week Monday 30 July to Sunday 5 August 2012 was dominated by the insanity involved in cloning hard drives and restoring my backup system to good working order.

Doing all of this over USB 2.0 interfaces was not helpful, but they were the only ports I had available on the loaner MacBook I’ve been using. Remember, I’m nomadic and quite often 100km from Sydney.

And then my backup drive failed…

Creating a new Time Machine backup of around 450GB of data takes 6 to 7 hours. Encrypting a 1TB drive takes nearly 23 hours. Even zeroing out a 750GB drive takes 5 hours.

And whenever you make a mistake, or a drive throws an error, you have to start that process again.

It’s been a wonderful lesson in patience. See, that’s the positive angle. Sigh.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 148, “The politics of data retention”. It’s in the news because it’s one of the ideas being floated as part of the inquiry into potential reforms of national security legislation being conducted by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security. The podcast includes Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, national manager of high tech crime operations for the Australian Federal Police; Bernard Keane, Canberra corresponded with Crikey; and network engineer Mark Newton.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Monday I did a spot on ABC 105.7 Darwin with a couple of other people about overly-busy lifestyles, but the internet stream from which I was recording it was dodgy so I haven’t posted the audio.
  • On Tuesday night I did another regular Balls Radio spot, but I didn’t record it. That’s probably for the best, it was rather disjointed.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m returning to Wentworth Falls on Monday, and have a day trip to Sydney on Thursday. In theory it’s a steady-paced week of writing. We shall see.

[Photo: Blue, being a photo of Wentworth Falls railway station on Thursday afternoon, one of the few bright spots in the week.]

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Weekly Wrap 112: Security, hacks, unexpected encounters

I was in Sydney for most of my week Monday 23 to Sunday 29 July 2012, and despite some minor annoyances I’m reasonably pleased with the results.

I also started a new gig on a SEKRIT project. It looks like it’ll be quite fun, but I won’t be able to tell you about it for ages.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 147, “Mid-2012 malware: new flavours, same ice cream”. Has 2012 turned out to be “the year of cyberwar” accompanied by an explosion of Android malware? Hear from Alex Kirk, senior research analyst with the Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team (VRT); David Hall, Symantec’s consumer spokesperson for Asia Pacific; and Bob Hansmann, senior product marketing manager at Websense.

Articles

If ever there was a week that illustrated my transition to grumpy-old-man writing, this is it.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

It looks like it’ll be a relatively easy week, but with most of it spent at Wentworth Falls — both because that’s the schedule and because it’s that end-of-the-month week where I really don’t have any money left.

[Photo: Diary of the Lost Crane being the view from level 12 of the Metro Sydney Central Hotel on a foggy Wednesday morning.]

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Weekly Wrap 109: Cold and wet until it wasn’t

My week from Monday 2 to Sunday 8 July 2012 started in the cold and rain of winter, but ended on a brighter note.

That simple sentence suppresses vast amounts of depressing detail that you simply don’t need to know about.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 144, “Hands off our packets, it’s the law”. Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC and the guy who more or less connected Australia’s universities to the internet, reckons that Telstra handing over web browsing logs to an external organisation is something that should be investigated by law enforcement. I posted the background earlier.

Articles

  • Cashing in on Kaching, Technology Spectator, 6 July 2012. All about Commonwealth Bank’s mobile banking strategy, in an article twice the length of anything I’ve written previously for this masthead.

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday I spoke about the Telstra thing and other mobile data privacy issues on the Twisted Wire podcast, Is your phone watching you?

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday the Commonwealth Bank briefed the media about their new Kaching for Android app and their mobile strategy generally, and that happened over food and wine at Sydney’s Flying Fish Restaurant on their tab.

The Week Ahead

So it’s the second week of the school holidays, so Bunjaree Cottages is still booked out, so I’m still lurking in a SEKRIT location in Sydney. Until Sunday lunchtime, probably.

On Tuesday Symantec is holding its Next@Norton media briefing as “an indulgent High Tea” from 0930 to 1200, presumably oblivious to the fact that high tea is an early evening meal for labourers and children. I’ll probably write it up for CSO Online.

On Thursday afternoon I’m interviewing futurist Mark Pesce about the themes being discussed in the blog-cum-book he’s writing with Robert Tercek, The Next Billion Seconds. That’ll be the following week’s Patch Monday podcast, unless some news cycle event bumps it.

There’s other writing tasks to interleave with that, as well as some work on the last remaining web management client on my books.

I might take the afternoon off on Friday.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up) and via Instagram. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags. Yes, I should probably update this stock paragraph to match the current reality.

[Photo: Sydney, Two-masted City, being a view of Sydney Tower and the mast of an unidentified ship over the roof of Jones Bay Wharf, Pyrmont, on 5 July 2012.]

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Weekly Wrap 107: Tribalism and the Gold Coast

So here’s my week from Monday 18 to Sunday 24 June 2012, which turned out to be much as planned. Thank you, Fate.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 143, “Microsoft? Is that still a thing?” I took a sickie on Monday, so this was another Patch Monday (on Tuesday) edition. And that meant we could talk about Microsoft’s new Surface device that was announced early Tuesday morning Australian time. But Kate Carruthers, Paul Wallbank and Benno Rice all suggested this probably wasn’t going to fix Microsoft’s flatline share price and that chief executive officer Steve Ballmer should go. That didn’t go down to well with, um, certain communities of interest.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Wednesday I visited IBM’s Australia Development Laboratory on the Gold Coast for a briefing about the security stuff that happens there. The Maginot Line story mentioned above was the first resulting media object from this. IBM covered a night at the Sheraton on the Park Hotel in Sydney en route, flights to and from Gold Coast, and a rather lovely seafood lunch.

The Week Ahead

At this stage I plan to return to Wentworth Falls on Monday afternoon and stay at Bunjaree Cottages for the week. Where I live from Friday onwards depends on how we arrange things to deal with the fact that the school holidays start on the weekend.

I don’t have any specific work locked in yet. That said, I do have a lingering feature story to start writing, and other stuff always turns up. And given that that it’s the end of the financial year, I’ll be reflecting on the work I’m currently doing and decide which parts of the mix get expanded and which cut back.

I’ve had a few thoughts already about certain media projects…

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up) and via Instagram. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags. Yes, I should probably update this stock paragraph to match the current reality.

[Photo: Shadow of my former self, a rather pointless self-portrait I took Friday afternoon because I saw my own shadow on the wall.]

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Weekly Wrap 104: Worms, smartphones and television

My week from Monday 28 May to Sunday 3 June 2012 was complex, busy and stressful, yet there were also some memorable highlights.

I won’t be telling you anything about the latter.

I will say that spending the night in six different locations in one week is probably stress-inducing.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 140, “Cybercrime: it’s just too easy”, the second of two episodes based on material recorded at the AusCERT 2012 information security conference. AusCERT general manager Graham Ingram explains why cybercrime is here to stay, and F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen details a complex transnational criminal operation that saw goods bought fraudulently in Denmark being resold in Moscow, as well giving his views on hacktivism and the level to which antivirus companies should cooperate with governments.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I attended the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone at the Sydney’s Capitol Theatre, where I was given food and drink — and later a review unit of said smartphone.
  • Even though I didn’t go paintballing with Eugene Kaspersky last week, I still got the media pack from Kaspersky Lab. The army-style khaki satchel contained: a t-shirt emblazoned with my callsign “Seagull 17”; a packet of Austcam “Paint, face, camouflage NSN 6850-66-130-0172”; blank dog tags attacked to a Kaspersky-branded USB memory key, containing the media kit of course; a Mars Bar 2-pack; and a can of V, that terribly dangerous drink that should be banned, which I gave away.

The Week Ahead

Monday, as always, is a busy day of media production as well as the discussion I’m leading in Katoomba, Surviving and thriving as a freelancer in a globalised market. And it’s a Full Moon, so that’ll help.

The rest of the week will be easier, in theory — at least as far as work goes — and I even hope to spend Friday with a friend and then head to Sydney as an early start to the Queen’s Birthday long weekend.

I’d originally intended to be in Sydney on Tuesday evening. Intel has a launch event for their 3rd Generation Core processor chips. But to be honest I find it difficult to excited by new widgets — they’re faster and better that the previous widgets, right? — so I think I’ll give it a miss. Plus at the start of a new month no-one has yet paid for last month’s work, so it’s hard to justify the expense — especially since I’ll be paying for accommodation away from Bunjaree Cottages for the long weekend.

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 (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up) and via Instagram. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags. Yes, I should probably update this stock paragraph to match the current reality.

[Photo: Sydney’s Saturday night fashion. These young women were spotted alighting at Wynyard station, Sydney, around 11.30pm Saturday night. While I’m obviously no fashion guru, I think it’s fair to say that this look does not flatter them. What made it worse was that neither of the women were steady with their operation of those heels. As they walked down the platform there was considerable swaying and undulation. And it didn’t seem to be because they were drunk. Can someone explain to me when undergarments became acceptable Saturday night partywear? I want to say something about yellow and black being the colours of warning, but I’d better not.]