Weekly Wrap 73: The Mysteries of the Desert

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — finally posted on Sunday like it’s meant to be.

On a personal note, it was great to finally get the dental work done so that my jaw is no longer infected. Now, to wait for my shoulder to heal…

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 111, “Cybercrime 2016: a view of the future”. Recorded in Las Vegas, it’s mainly Michael Fey’s view of 2016. He’s McAfee’s worldwide senior vice president of advanced technologies and field engineering. Also, an explanation of how advanced persistent threats are a three-stage attack, and a chat with the bloke who taught me how to create malware and construct botnets in just one hour.

Articles

• Hybrid clouds the eventual reality for risk management, CSO, 26 October 2011. And according to the Gartner Hype Cycle, mainstream businesses will start to achieve the benefits of cloud computing in two to five years.
• DSD wins US Cybersecurity Innovation Award, CSO, 26 October 2011. DSD provided real-world evidence on how best to defeat the bad guys — and it’s cheap and simple.
• Patching the price of security, Technology Spectator, 28 October 2011. While DSD provides simple, effective countermeasures, the big infosec vendors try to sell us ever-more-complex software.

I wrote another two stories apart from these, one for CSO and one for ZDNet Australia, but they won’t be published until Monday.

Media Appearances

• On Tuesday morning I spoke about the iPod’s tenth birthday on Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa.

Corporate Largesse

• On Tuesday I covered the ISACA conference in Sydney, so of course I got free food and drink.
• On Friday I went to the launch of Intel’s Ultrabook standard for laptops at BAR100, The Rocks in Sydney, so naturally there was more free food and drink. They also gave me an Air-Tech Turbo Blimp radio-controlled indoor airship, which I gave away — to someone who then discovered that the blimp itself wasn’t in the box.

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

[Photo: A mysterious oval-shaped object in the desert somewhere between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This might be in Death Valley, but more likely somewhere else. I wasn’t paying much attention until I saw this. Any idea what it is? You can click to embiggen. Oh, and yes this photo was taken last week, not this week, but I’m sure you can live with that.]