Zero to One-Eighty » identity

A so-called emptiness

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 23:00:11 +0000

Writer Jennifer Mills was recently interviewed by Anita Barraud about her new book Gone (2011, University of Queensland Press) about a hitchhiker making his way through the outback on a journey of thousands of miles. One of her answers is a nearly perfect statement of how Australian settler culture projects its own anxieties onto the landscape:

Anita Barraud: “Some of us are meant for the desert,” says one of Frank’s rides, a tough woman with dyed black hair. Do you think that holds true?

Jennifer Mills: I don’t know. I think you do get a sense that places call you. And I’ve been in Alice [Springs] for five years now and I sort of… I feel like that’s maybe a little bit of a myth that people hold on to, that they’ve been called, or that they have some reason to be there, because when it comes down to it, it’s just rocks and dirt, really.

AB: Ah, so you’re a bit more pragmatic about it?

JM: Well, I don’t know. I’m kind of…

AB: Because part of it—the story here—there is quite a lot of discussion, and mainly from women, I think too, interestingly, that the rides he gets some of the women—“Out here, you change your mind about a lot of things,” says one woman that picks him up.

JM: I think the desert is transformative, and I don’t think that’s because of anything the desert’s doing. I think it’s because of what the desert represents to us, and what human culture says about the desert. And we have a very precarious and contested relationship with the Outback in Australia. It’s very large in the national pysche. We’re a very urbanised population and at the same time and yet we constantly refer to this great so-called emptiness at the heart of the country, which was never empty and isn’t really our heart. And so I think there’s an element in the book of trying to interrogate that kind of mentality in our culture, and I don’t think I have any answers for… what the truth of it is. A lot of questions, all bunched together.

The book goes on sale in Australia on Monday. See also…

The top ten podcasts

Administrator, please

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:18:09 +0000

John Strand on Verizon store customer terminals:

As you can see the system is logged in with an account that has Administrator Privileges. There is no “hacking” this box…. You just walk up to it.

When he returned, without the adapter I needed, he noticed that I had the command prompt up. He asked me the basic questions like, “What the hell are you doing?” Which I answered truthfully with the necessary mitigation steps. You see, I am a pathetic, hopeless white hat. I spent a few seconds re-explaining the problem to him while his eyes glassed over. When I was done he said that he would need to take my name and a copy of my drivers license so he could run this “incident” by the management and possibly the police. It was my turn for my eyes to glass over and quickly leave the store. The irate store clerk was shocked that I would just walk away without complying with a perfectly sound and logical request to hand over my PII to a store that cannot secure a simple terminal.

To my horror, all of the Verizon stores in my area were set up the exact same way.

The moral of this story is not to use public terminals wherever you may find them, as the people who set them up ~~may not~~ usually don’t know what they are doing. (Read back through this year’s Philosecurity posts for more examples.)

Identify yourself

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:03:29 +0000

Identify is a Firefox extension by Glenn Jones that uses the Google Social Graph API to identify people based on the rel="me" link attribute. It’s easy to use—“Ctrl + I” (Mac) or “Alt + I” (Windows) on someone’s Twitter profile, for example—it pulls in available data from the present site and other social web sites. According to Google’s API, the plugin can identify public URLs that belong to the person being looked up, and publicly declared connections between that person and others. The plugin gives a sense of how quickly one can be identified when software aggregates information spread across multiple applications. So, you know, be careful.

Via Marshall Kirkpatrick.