Tag: zdnet

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Weekly Wrap 166: Early spring, with fewer distractions

Railway Parade: click to embiggenMy week Monday 5 to Sunday 11 August 2013 saw the return of productivity. While I didn’t get everything done that I’d planned, I’m very happy with what did appear.

And that’s despite Thursday night being much later than planned, thanks to further train delays and a strange incident with a drunk and potentially violent man, and losing Saturday to a sore throat. But I won’t dwell on that.

Podcasts

  • Corrupted Nerds: Conversations 3, being a wide-ranging conversation with Peter Coffee, vice-president and head of platform research for Salesforce.com. His reasoning being why everything will eventually end up being done in the cloud, and what will unfold from that, are just two of the many highlights.

I’m pleased to say that Corrupted Nerds is now available in Apple’s iTunes Store.

I had hoped to kick off The 9pm Election podcast too, but the sore throat put an end to that plan. To be honest, I’m now thinking that it’d be adding just a little too much to my workload. That, plus the fact that I’m starting to find the obsession with the minutiae of the election campaign to be really, really boring.

Articles

Both these stories generated quite a bit of interest, it seems. I also wrote for Technology Spectator, but that piece has been held over until next week.

Media Appearances

  • On Tuesday, I spoke about Vote Compass on ABC 666 Canberra, along with its creator, Cliff van der Linden.
  • I was interviewed by ITJourno for a piece about Corrupted Nerds that’ll appear some time soon.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday, I popped into the Australian Direct Marketing Association’s conference in Sydney, where refreshments were provided.

The Week Ahead

I’m keeping things relatively flexible, but there’ll be quite a few media objects produced. Another episode of Corrupted Nerds is almost ready to post and will likely appear on Tuesday, and I’m committed to writing two pieces for Crikey and one each for ZDNet Australia and Technology Spectator.

I’ll be in Sydney on Friday night for the launch of Dom Knight’s new book, Man vs Child, and may well stay in town overnight.

[Photo: Railway Parade), photographed about 1km east of Wentworth Falls on 5 August 2013. Spring is coming very early this year.]

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Weekly Wrap 165: Distractions and decisions, of a sort

HMAS Advance (P83): click to embiggenIf there was a unifying theme for my week Monday 29 July to Sunday 4 August 2013, it was Distraction.

I distracted myself with the Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial. While I’m getting some useful real-world experience of the two products, it’s probably not going to generate any revenue, and it soaked up a lot of my time. I distracted myself even further by fiddling around with video editing.

I was distracted by delayed trains on Thursday night, sadly due to a death on the railway line at Mt Druitt, which meant I didn’t get back to Wentworth Falls until 0100 the following day.

I was distracted by Telstra’s changes to mobile broadband allowances — apparently they’ve now dropped the maximum data allowance they’ll provision to a mobile phone to a mere 9GB a month, so I was living the scenario I wrote about recently — and I had to trek to Penrith on Saturday to buy another device or risk being sodomised by their 10c/megabyte over-run charges.

And finally, today I was distracted by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally deciding to call the election for 7 September — which means I’m distracting myself even more.

Articles

  • So you call yourself a geek?, ZDNet Australia, 29 July 2013. There was quite a bit of reaction to this column, possibly for the wrong reasons.

Podcasts

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday, Channel TEN’s The Project recorded some of my comments about geoblocking, but they have not been aired yet.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

[Update Monday 5 August 2013, 2155 AEST: This section has been changed to reflect the unfolding reality.]

On Monday I’ll write a ZDNet Australia column, making up for the one I’d intended to write on Friday, and then rum some errands to Katoomba.

On Tuesday I’ll write for Technology Spectator, work on revenue-generation for The 9pm Election, and complete episode 3 of the Corrupted Nerds: Conversations podcast, amongst other things.

On Wednesday I’ll head to Sydney for some of the Check Point Experience, an event hosted by security vendor Check Point. Thursday will be another Sydney trip for a medical appointment and a few other bits and pieces. And Friday will be a day of podcast production,I hope.

The weekend is currently unplanned.

[Photo: Attack-class patrol boat HMAS Advance (P83) (click to embiggen photo), formerly of the Royal Australian Navy, now with the Australian National Maritime Museum, photographed on Sydney Harbour on 1 August 2013.]

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Weekly Wrap 164: A turn-around, with Finnish jelly beans

Glimpse of Sydney Central: click to embiggenMy week Monday 22 to Sunday 28 July 2013 was initially as unproductive as the previous two, but Thursday marked a turning-point. Thank the gods. No details.

Articles

Podcasts

None, but I did plenty of behind-the-scenes work on the Corrupted Nerds website, including settling on Cryout Creations’ Mantra theme for WordPress as the design framework.

This fixed a very, very annoying bug that I’d encountered in some other themes that broke the RSS feeds in Blubrry’s PowerPress Podcasting Plugin for WordPress, and that in turn meant that I couldn’t add the podcasts to Apple’s iTunes store.

Having removed that roadblock, I’ll be able to add more material to Corrupted Nerds very soon — including two new episodes in the coming week.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’ll complete a catch-up edition of my ZDNet Australia column, The Full Tilt, with something that’ll probably annoy quite a few people who call themselves geeks, and then spending the afternoon in Katoomba. Somewhere in there I’ll fire up that Nokia Lumia 925.

On Tuesday I’ll write a piece for Technology Spectator, one that’s been on the back burner for a while, and completing a new episode of Corrupted Nerds: Conversations podcast. The forecast is for a rainy day, so that’s perfect.

On Wednesday morning I’ll head into Sydney to attend a media event with Vodafone Australia at 1030, then the rest of the week becomes some what flexible — although I know it include a medical appointment in Sydney, another column for ZDNet Australia and some planning.

The weekend is currently unplanned.

[Photo: Glimpse of Sydney Central, being a view of the clock tower at Sydney’s Central station, taken early one winter morning from the Metro Sydney Central hotel.]

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Do McAfee’s new cyberstats really represent a shift?

Composite image of ZDNet column headline and McAfee report title: click for ZDNet columnAs 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?”

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Weekly Wrap 162: A dog, a pause, and an invisible cat

Sunday night in the village: click to embiggenMy week Monday 8 to Sunday 14 July 2013 was a continuation of my distinct slow-down, for reasons explained previously.

I still haven’t decided whether I’ll write about that any further. For now, I’ll just say that there’s been suitable initial progress on that front. Many thanks to the people — friends, colleagues and strangers alike — who’ve been in touch.

Meanwhile, as usual, here’s the media-related things I’ve done this week. Not that there were many.

Podcasts

None.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None. Well, there was some on offer, but I declined. I have heard rumour which suggest that I made the wrong decision.

The Week Ahead

The theme for the coming week is “assessment”. I’ll be be running through the various areas of my life to see where I’m up to, what issues I should perhaps address, and what the possibilities for the future might be. Personal stuff, including my health. Work, both media-related and otherwise. All sorts of stuff. I haven’t done that for a while. I’ve just been cruising along.

In between, I’ll be writing for Technology Spectator and ZDNet Australia, and perhaps some others. I’ll also post another episode of the Corrupted Nerds podcast, fix some problems with the website, and sketch out my ideas for making that a sustainable project.

On Thursday I’ll be down in Sydney for a medical appointment and lunch with a friend. Whether I’ll be staying in Sydney longer than that remains to be decided.

[Photo: Sunday night in the village, being the near-deserted Station Street, Wentworth Falls, earlier this evening.]

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Weekly Wrap 161: The black dog and the prodigal umbrella

Sydney Harbour, viewed through a dirty window in the AMP Tower: click to embiggenMy week Monday 1 to Sunday 7 July 2013 was another complicated one, as already explained. That’s why this post is very late, of course.

Once I’d gotten the bigger chunks of work out of the way, I pulled the pace back a bit — which I think you’ll agree was sensible.

I was also pleased to see the return of the prodigal umbrella. The excellent umbrella I was given by Verizon Business in Singapore had been left at a noodle bar months ago — but the owners remembered it and me. We were reunited last Wednesday. Also, pho was served.

Podcasts

None.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Friday, I was interviewed for a segment on Channel TEN’s The Project. However it didn’t air until Monday 8 July, so it’ll get its own blog post shortly, and be included in next week’s wrap.
  • On Sunday I was a guest on Reckoner episode three, as already explained.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

It’s almost over, so I’ll just mention that I’ll be writing for ZDNet Australia tomorrow, Friday, and I’ll be returning to the Blue Mountains on Sunday, probably.

[Photo: Sydney Harbour, viewed through a dirty window in the AMP Tower, photographed on 2 July 2013.]