Mālō e lelei, or hello, I missed Tongan language week back in August so making up for it here. Welcome back to the ITP News in Brief. It is only 49 sleeps to Christmas but it’s a stunning day out there in the capital.
Crypto News
The FTX Crypto currency exchange failure has been like a train wreck unfolding in recent weeks, headlines like $24b to zero and learning some of the crypto was perhaps stolen, how Sam Bankman-Fried was proud of gaming during meetings and interviews – you wonder what is going to emerge next.
Cyber News
It has certainly been a week in cyber news! Omg, especially coming out of Australia. I am most impressed with the Australian government response – setting up a 100 strong permanent operation to target hackers! When you couple this with creation of a new Minister for Cyber and merging their disparate functions into one agency they are really focused in this space.
The big news you do need to follow however is the Medibank hackers releasing more data, it’s heartbreaking watching these stories unfold, personal medial (or mental health) records of individuals released in the name of extorting a ransom. The wonderful MOD (Mike O’Donnell) wrote about Why Protecting Customer data matters, another important read in this space.
In Brief
- Glastonbury ticket site collapsed again – Our website was down yesterday due to a outage of our site hosting service – a lovely, usually reliable cloud contain service – which reminded me of last Monday night when trying to purchase Glastonbury tickets and the site went down. 1,000,000 people were simultaneously trying to purchase 100,000 tickets and kinda unsurprisingly the host was overwhelmed and crashed. Personally I got as far as the payment page, then got kicked out, I was following twitter and others got further than me, with it crashing after they had put in their credit cards etc. It seems like a crazy system inviting a DDOS attack on your site as a way to sell tickets knowing the volume involved. There must be a better solution for this.
- DNS explained – I like plain English documents, our industry is littered with jargon and acronyms. This report from the AUDA (the .au domain association) while Australian is full of great plain English definitions and terms like explains what the difference between the internet and the web is? Or what a DNS is? Or how it is governed.
- I’ve always been fascinated with submarine cables so found this article fascinating.
- Have you seen Amazon’s new Sparrow Robot? Thoughts?
- How do we feel about Education and Training? Continuing with the How do you Feel survey series, what about your education and training? Worth it? Wonderful? Waste of time and money?
All of your answers are anonymous and we will be incorporating them into a report summarising our collective views on how we feel about a range of topics in 2022, out early 2023.
ITP Events coming up
Dunedin branch have an after work drinks today from 5pm, and then I will be heading to Dunedin soon with Minister Clark for a panel event so watch this space if you are in Ōtepoti. All welcome.
Tech Chat Tuesday – next one is on the 6th of December at 12:30pm for ITP members.
Finally
Congratulations to Dartz – we are all proud as here at ITP of our team members Crispy and Danz who are members of the punk rock band Dartz. You see their debut album “the band from Wellington, New Zealand” is #1 in the NZ Album charts – to beat Six60 on downloads, sales and listens is an amazing achievement!
You can read their origin story here.They are off on tour in Australia next week too.
Mālō, thank you, Vic