Category: security

The new book: ‘Facebook: Sins & Insensitivities’

[Disclaimer: you’ll probably see ads under and possibly incorporated into articles on this blog. I don’t choose them and I don’t approve them: that’s the price I pay for not being able to afford to pay for all my blogs…]

I’m amused to see that Amazon has excised the word ‘Facebook’ from the ordering details of the latest book. I’m not sure whether that’s because of corporate mistrust of competitors, nervousness because it isn’t complimentary about Meta, or just that I’ve breached some unwritten rule of titling. But at least the title survives on the book cover.

Available as Kindle eBook and as paperback.

“Sadly, while it would be entertaining (for me, but maybe less for you) to write a more academic book tracing the historical aspects and trends in Facebookland, that will have to wait. Here, my primary aim is to provide an overview of Facebook-related issues that will be of more use to the everyday Facebook user than to academics and security mavens. However, the links to articles in the Appendix, covering issues such as the Cambridge Analytica shambles, may be useful to researchers wanting to go deeper into those issues that I haven’t covered in an in-depth article here. (Or even that I have covered, but not in depth!)”

 

Covid-19 security-ish issues

[Update: as noone was reading it regularly, I pretty much gave up updating the AVIEN Covid-related pages, though I might still put something up there if it’s really called for. In the meantime, AVIEN has returned to its usual state of induced coma.]

I don’t want this blog to diversify into security, but there was so much poor information around, I figured the least I can do is put up some pointers to information I think is fairly reliable, so I’m going to try maintaining a page where I post links as I see articles worth flagging. I’m putting it on the AVIEN blog, since I used to maintain similar specialist security-related pages there when it was part of my job.

Update: page now broken into sub-pages.

David Harley

St Helena radio interview (part II)

While it’s not really Wheal Alice fodder, here’s the follow-up to the St. Helena radio interview I mentioned here previously

While it’s not really Wheal Alice fodder, here’s the follow-up to the St. Helena radio interview I mentioned here previously: the article for ESET linked below gives a little backstory and a lightly edited version of the interview.

Child safety: An unexpected radio interview

I promise this blog is not going to become a sort of backdoor security PR resource. 🙂

David Harley

An unexpected radio interview

Talking about security in the South Atlantic.

While a sizeable proportion of my income still comes from writing about security, I do very little media stuff nowadays. I probably won’t do another conference presentation, and I can’t remember the last time I did a live interview, let alone radio. Except tomorrow, 14th November 2016, when I talk to an audience whose location is so remote, it makes my little corner of West Penwith look metropolitan.

I’m doing an interview with Craig Williams, who has a small company called Gigabyte IT, on Saint FM. That’s a community radio station on St. Helena, way down in the South Atlantic, which has only recently started to benefit from the mixed blessing of the mobile phone. I’ll probably use my bit as a basis for a blog article or podcast (or both) in the near future: that’s not an obvious fit for this blog – in fact, it’ll probably go up on ESET’s blog site – but I’ll flag it here anyway in case any of my readers (how are you both?) are interested.

David Harley