Saturday, December 28, 2019

Art of Hunting Hackers

I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
— Emily Brontë, who died  in 1848


Defunked Blog Awards


George Bailey, Meet Thomas Merton | Word on Fire.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us

This is a question I still get asked a lot, so I thought I would write my view of the situation having been the last Digital & Media Director at Prague's paper of record.

Firstly, I want to welcome the many people seeing Think Magazine for the first time on their Facebook feed. As the group has been dormant for some time, I decided to merge the two media groups to connect with those readers who have one thing in common; an interest in and love of Prague and Czech Culture. For those of you happy to be here, go ahead and hit the share button to spread the joy :)




Australians shun My Health Record with only 9 per cent ever logging in


Medical specialists, pathologists and patients are shunning the federal government's $1.7 billion My Health Record system with only a small minority accessing the digital health records almost a year into its rollout.





Meet Cliff Stoll, the Mad Scientist Who Invented the Art of Hunting Hackers | WIRED 

As The Cuckoo’s Egg hits its 30th anniversary, the book has sold more than 1 million copies. And for a smaller core of cybersecurity practitioners within that massive readership, it’s become a kind of legend: the ur-narrative of a lone hacker hunter, a text that has inspired an entire generation of network defenders chasing their own anomalies through a vastly larger, infinitely more malicious internet.



Cattle have stopped breeding, koalas die of thirst: A vet’s hellish diary of climate change Sydney Morning Herald


The Medium Is the Mistake NYRB. Review of Taibbi’s Hate, Inc.
James Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The New York Times, and his new book, Audience of One, tells a double story: the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of television. Poniewozik wants to show us that TV has everything to do with the formation of Trump’s character—his manners, his place in the commercial culture, his ability to track and manipulate popular sentiment and opinion. It seems a reasonable hypothesis. How good is the evidence?
Trump entered the presidency, says Poniewozik, backed by “a four-decades-long TV performance.” That is not quite true. During the first two of those decades, Trump was mainly a creature of the tabloids and celebrity magazines; occasional appearances on TV may have helped, but were not the main event. Television facilitated his passage from tabloids to politics, with a starring role in The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice—a survivor show that looked like a quiz show. All the while, of course, Trump was famous as a real estate billionaire in the post-Reagan era when “lifestyles of the rich and famous” were a favorite subject. Anyway, TV-and-Trump is the argument here. They are said to march together more inevitably than, say, Reagan and movies or FDR and radio. We are meant to acknowledge a pairing as inseparable as P.T. Barnum and the circus.