My week from Monday 14 to Sunday 20 May 2012 was mostly about the AusCERT information security conference and a blur of returning pain thanks to my dodgy shoulder.
As I finish compiling this post, I’ve still got lots of AusCERT material to produce and Monday looks like being intense. So let’s just list everything and see what happens.
Podcasts
- Patch Monday episode 138, “Anonymous ‘crippled’: where to for hacktivism?”. Following last week’s conversation with Israeli information security researcher Tal Be’ery about hacktivists’ tactics, I spoke with former journalist and commentator Barrett Brown, who has worked with Anonymous for about a year and a half. He discusses Anonymous’ position in the wake of revelations that Sabu, a core member and informal leader of the offshoot hacking group LulzSec, had become an FBI informant.
Articles
These are just the first two articles from my AusCERT coverage. More will follow.
- AusCERT 2012: Russian crims evade transaction profiling, ZDNet Australia, 17 May 2012.
- AusCERT 2012: DNS poisoning the ‘thin end of a wedge’, ZDNet Australia, 17 May 2012.
Videos
- 5 Conference Tips for PR Professionals, an impromptu video message from Gold Coast airport.
Media Appearances
- On Monday I spoke about Facebook charging for highlighted posts and the company’s stock market float on ABC 702 Sydney.
- On Tuesday I spoke with journalism student Tom Davey about various attempts to regulate the internet. Here’s his resulting radio report.
- On Friday night I spoke about AusCERT, cybercrime, cyberwar and claims that Apple is behind the pace on ABC Local Radio.
- On Sunday afteroon I spoke about the surveillance society at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Here’s the audio recording.
- On Sunday night I spoke about using Twitter to generate ideas with James O’Loughlin on ABC Local Radio. Here’s the audio recording.
Corporate Largesse
- AusCERT 2012 conference organisers and sponsors paid for various meals and drinks, but I didn’t keep track of that. While that means I can’t disclose who paid, it also means I can’t be influenced because I can’t remember who’s meant to be doing the influencing. Complete market failure, that.
The Week Ahead
There’s a couple of days of intense writing and production ahead. At the very least there’s two or three articles about AusCERT 2012 and the Patch Monday podcast. Then there’s a piece to do for CSO Online, and one for Technology Spectator.
I should be returning to Wentworth Falls this evening, but I plan to be back on Wednesday night to go to a paintball session with Eugene Kaspersky and other journalists. That could be weird. And I’ll probably be in Sydney again at the end of the week, but that hasn’t been planned out 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) 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: Airbus A320-232 VH-VGY at Gold Coast airport, the aircraft I traveled in on Saturday. Check out the complete history of VH-VGY at FlightAware.]
[Update 26 May 2012: Links added to last weekend’s audio recordings, added earlier today as separate blog posts. Update 3 June 2012: Link added to Tom Davey’s radio report.]