Tag: zdnet

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Weekly Wrap 97: Facebook, Instagram and emergency duck

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 9 to Sunday 15 April 2012 — another short week in terms of writing and media production, thanks to the 4-day work week after Easter.

There’s no photo this week because I lost my camera — though it has since been found in the Blue Mountains taxi where I dropped it. I’ll be collecting it on Sunday, probably.

There was also quite a bit of disruption thanks to the need to perform some emergency geekery. I may or may not write about that another time.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 133, “OS X botnet: disaster or speed bump?”. A chat about the Flashback botnet with Chris Gatford, director of penetration testing firm Hacklabs, and applications architect Benno Rice.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m in Sydney all this week too, before returning to Wentworth Falls on Sunday afternoon. My main task is to complete a feature story for ZDNet Australia and an opinion piece for CSO Online. I’m also attending two launch events for new “smart TVs”, one for Samsung and one for LG. And apart from that I’ll be attempting to avoid the seasonal affective disorder that usually strikes at this time of the year.

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). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

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Weekly Wrap 96: Plenty of chaos and a mysterious pump

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 2 to Sunday 8 April 2012.

T’was a short week in terms of writing and media production because it was the 4-day work week prior to Easter, I spend about 10 hours judging entries in the Lizzies, the Australian IT journalism awards — the finalists have now been announced, and the awards night is on 20 April — three and a half hours troubleshooting the ADSL connection at Bunjaree Cottages, and two hours restoring a website that a new developer had accidentally taken offline.

There was also a mysterious pump.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 132, “Cyberwar: don’t believe the hype”. Thomas Rid, reader in war studies at King’s College London, destroys some myths. I found this to be one of the more fascinating podcasts I’ve ever done.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday I was quoted in Harrison Polites’ story at Technology Spectator, A storm in a postbox, on the Australia Post’s new Digital Mail service and a similar product from Computershare. “I already have a ‘digital mailbox’. It’s called email,” was one of the things I said. “Why on earth would I want yet another information silo to check for so-called ‘important’ mail — by which they seem to mean bills and bank statements?” Plus some stuff about encrypted email.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m in Sydney all this week, and the main blocks of work are a Patch Monday podcast to be posted on Tuesday and a 2000-word feature for ZDNet Australia. I daresay other stuff will turn up as well, but let’s focus on one stressor at a time.

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). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), a daily visitor to Rosella Cottage but a bugger to photograph because they move so fast.]

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Weekly Wrap 95: Speaking of chainsaws…

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 26 March to Sunday 1 April 2012.

Not so much media output this week, ‘cos I was dealing with a web development matter for a long-standing client, I researched one story that turned out to be a fizzer, and yesterday I got caught up in a cleaning the hackers out of a website. Plus I recorded tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast early. Plus it hit the end of the month and I reckon my editors’ freelancer budgets had run out.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 131, “Your word is your log-in, literally”. Dr Clive Summerfield, chief executive of Australian company Auraya, talks about the state of the art in voice biometric authentication. Fascinating stuff from a great explainer.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I won’t be able to lock in the week ahead until I talk to some people on Monday morning. However there’s a technical briefing on the NBN rollout in Sydney on Monday that might be useful to attend, and I’m thinking of sitting in with a team participating in the Cyber Defence University Challenge and turning that into a podcast. But, as I say, I’ll work that out tomorrow.

Friday, of course, is Good Friday, and I’ll be moving down to Sydney for a couple weeks while Bunjaree Cottages enjoys the busy time of school holidays.

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). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Chirgwin with Chainsaw: Bunjaree Cottages proprietor Richard Chirgwin observes all safety precautions — although technically this photograph, actually a frame grab from a video, belongs to last week as it was taken on 25 March.]

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Talking total surveillance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

I’m speaking at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival in a free session on Sunday 20 May called iSpy.

Even before Google controversially demolished the privacy walls between its various products, we were already living in the total surveillance society. With every keystroke we are voluntarily telling companies, governments and heaven knows who else an awful lot about ourselves. Should we be worried about the uses to which this information could be put? Technology writer Stilgherrian discusses the implications of what we share with social media consultant Thomas Tudehope.

I daresay I’ll be covering material like that in my Sydney Morning Herald story You are what you surf, buy or tweet, and the more recent ZDNet Australia story The Facebook experiment, but the conversation will be up to you, the audience.

The theme for SWF this year is “the line between the public and the private”. As artistic director Chip Rolley says in his welcome message:

The question of the limits of what is personal is one of the hottest subjects around.

“Privacy is for paedos,” ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan told the UK Leveson Inquiry into the media. Now, via Facebook and Twitter, we voluntarily tell the world things we previously might not have told even our loved ones. Investigative journalists thrive on leaks and finding out what others don’t want us to know. And the state knows few boundaries (personal or political) in its need to prevent another 9/11.

(If you want a high-powered discussion of these issues, Sydney Town Hall discussion on Friday 18 May with former High Court judge Michael Kirby, former director general of MI5-turned-thriller writer Stella Rimington, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, media and news blogger Jeff Jarvis and investigative journalist Heather Brooke.)

iSpy is on Sunday 20 May 2012 at 2.30pm at the Bangarra Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay. It’s free, and you don’t need to book — but I’m told that it can sometimes get busy at SWF.

Before that I have speaking engagements on 27 April at DigitalMe in Perth and 11 May at the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012.

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Keynoting the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012 with security

On 11 May I’ll be delivering one of the keynote presentations at Saasu’s inaugural conference, the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012 in Sydney.

The cloud is the enabler, it’s the medium that automation grows in. We want to focus on the value of online accounting automation, why it’s often undervalued and how you can get some for your own business or practice.

Saasu makes the online accounting system that I’ve been using since July 2007, and I know the chief executive officer and founder Marc Lehmann and chief happiness officer Tony Hollingsworth.

Good leadership and a good attitude continues to deliver a good product. Well, I think so anyway. At least it works for me.

My keynote will be something about security and the cloud, obviously enough, but I’ll lock down the details before the end of this week.

Mind you, I wrote the ZDNet Australia feature Cloud security? Better get a lawyer, Son! in October 2010, and since then I’ve written Cloud could be ‘privacy enhancing’: Pilgrim and Hybrid clouds the eventual reality for risk management and Today’s cloud winners: the cybercriminals and Want government cloud? Rethink security! so I’ve got plenty of material to start with.

Saasu has kept the price down to a reasonable $99 for a full-day event. You can register online.

[Update 11 May 2012: I’ve just posted notes and background material for my presentation, Security and the Cloud: Hype versus Reality.]

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Weekly Wrap 94: Identity, privacy, fog and a lyrebird

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 19 to Sunday 25 March 2012.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 130, “Yellow alert! Windows RDP flaw explained”. Casey Ellis from Tall Poppy Group and HackLabs proprietor Chris Gatford explain all the things.
  • The 9pm Edict episode 20, which covers Tony Abbott’s tribute to Margaret Whitlam, comedian Bill Bailey’s thoughts on classical music, Harmony Day and more.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I attended the iappANZ workshop on Identity and Privacy as the guest of the Lockstep Group.
  • Also on Thursday, I met with Oliver Friedrichs from Sourcefire, and they bought me a beer.

The Week Ahead

Nothing of specific note has been locked in yet.

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). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Bunjaree Track with Fog, photographed at Bunjaree Cottages on the morning I finally saw the lyrebird.]