Even though my week of Monday 29 March to Sunday 4 April 2021 was truncated by Easter, it saw the appearance of three podcasts and a peer-reviewed cyber paper.
Podcasts
- The 9pm April Fool’s Disinformation Dialogue with Elise Thomas, freelance journalist and open source intelligence (OSINT) analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
- The 9pm Recycled Edict 1 (Remix), being a repeat of a least-worst-of episode first posted two years ago. The Edict was a very different style back then.
- The 9pm Recycled Edict 2: A Modest Proposal, being an episode from 2012 about the nature of political journalism, which I’ve repeated because recent news events brought it back to my mind. There’s some new commentary in the intro.
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Articles
- The Encryption Debate in Australia: 2021 Update, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 31 March 2021. It’s finally online, the peer-reviewed update to my 2019 paper, The Encryption Debate in Australia.
You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to get a compilation of new stories by email each Sunday morning, if there are any.
Media Appearances
- On Tuesday I spoke about recent hacks on Australian organisations, including Nine Entertainment, on ABC Melbourne.
Videos, Corporate Largesse
None.
Recommendations
- The Base Tapes is an astounding two-part documentary from ABC Radio’s Background Briefing. “Secret recordings reveal how a global white supremacist terror group actively targeted young Australian men for recruitment, including a One Nation candidate for federal parliament,” they describe it. The two audio episodes are at part one and part two.
- Kamen Rider episode 1. Japan’s Kamen Rider metaseries celebrated its 50th birthday this week, and the first two episodes of every series have been posted on YouTube with modern English subtitles.
- ‘High rollers’ A study of criminal profits along Australia’s heroin and methamphetamine supply chains, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
- Space Force sounds like a joke thanks to pop culture: how that could be a problem for an important military branch. I must admit, the Steve Carrell TV series Space Force on Netflix did amuse me, and USSF is now associated with Donald Trump, but here’s the counterpoint.
- Marc Rebillet makes magnificent semi-improvises songs. I am late to discovering him. He already has 1.2 million subscribers. I quite like Vaccinated Attitude.
The Week Ahead
It’s the short work week after the Easter long weekend, and I really do need to get some writing done. Nothing specific is locked in yet, though, apart from Wednesday being a day trip to Sydney for medical and related appointments. I’ll fill this in on Tuesday morning.
Update 6 April 2021: Let’s go for a simple structure. Tuesday is about administrivia and loose ends and story pitches. Wednesday is the trip to Sydney for medical things, on World Health Day no less, and setting up my next Pozible campaign. Thursday and Friday will be writing days. And I’ve added some things to the calendar.
The weekend will be the weekend.
Further Ahead
Currently in the calendar:
- The 8pm Quiz S02 E03, 15 April 2021. Please be ready to play another episode of this silly quiz at 8pm AEST.
- NEW: The 9pm Edict with blockchain and crypotocurrency realist David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money, to be posted 16 April 2021.
- NEW: Google News Initiative Live: Investigations and Pinpoint Australia, being an introduction to some of Google’s document analysis tools, 16 April 2021.
- Aaron Chen’s Sorry Forever, The Comedy Store, Sydney, 22 April 2021. There are also shows on 23 and 24 April.
- NEW: Google News Initiative Live: Visualisation and Mapping Australia, being an introduction to some more of Google’s tools, 23 April 2021.
- AusCERT 2021, Gold Coast and online, 11–13 May 2021 (TBC).
- Australian Cyber Conference, Melbourne, 15–17 November 2021 (TBC).
[Photo: Some of the new office towers around the new Parramatta Square development next to the railway station, photographed on 3 April 2021.]