Cybershow News Autumn 2024

Wow, we're already at season 4 of the show. It's been a year of steadily building ideas and trying more ambitious production formulas. We keep on researching, writing, composing music, editing and recording everything from monologues and seminal readings, through poetry to in-depth interviews with multiple guests on difficult topics. We've experimented with AI in images and now music, but kept both temptations cautiously yet curiously at arms length in favour of what is human "Intelligence Amplification" (IA) not generative slop "Artificial Intelligence" (AI).

We're staying conistently way ahead of the curve with our insight and commentary on everything from dumping your surveillance phones, getting out of dependency on US big tech, anticipating government policies and legal regulations to our warnings about the ambitions of Silicon Valley 'bro' technofascists.

Lots of new guests! You'll probably notice that season 4 is filled with more interview style episodes. We've been delighted to have loads of interesting thinkers and leaders reaching out to us, and coming because they say they really like the feel and quality of the show - but crucially that they appreciate "courageous and irreverent delivery of quarter-pound truth burgers with a double side of fact-fries"

Likewise we've had hugely warm receptions from people we've reached out to and invited. It's been great to work with Sarah and Louise from Origin Coms, a British firm of representatives of key cyber personnel. We're in the process of very carefully choosing some more potential sponsors including non-profits and agencies whose values align with our own. Among this season's line-up there is:

Seamus Lennon, VP of European operations for Threatlocker came on the show to join us. He spoke about "Default Deny". We'd previously touched on the whole allow-deny dichotomy when looking at Marcus Ranum's "Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security". The sad reality is that beyond SE-Linux and Apparmor Free and Open Source offerings for effective application whitelisting is still quite thin on the ground and difficult to use. We need some better UX around that. So for practical security there's a place for companies like Threatlocker and that's why we decided to feature a commercial software vendor. This is how it should be done. Helen asked Seamus a few hardball question, but he survived the whole ten rounds gracefully.

Ed talked to Christian Have, Logpoint CTO and ex-head of Denmark's national police and intelligence cyber division. They spoke about changing international relations. The age of the European cloud is upon us. Personally I cannot wait to see the reckoning for US Big Tech which has been a blight on security and privacy for decades now. Their decline will surely be a good thing for what remains of US non-monopoly tech too! Christian was buoyant about the prospects for European investment and changing winds. We recorded the episode a day before the US election result. In the wake of Trump's re-election and reaction to it on this side of the pond, everything we talked about now seems magnified and more urgent.

Tara Garcia-Mathewson of The Markup joined Andy for a deep dive into the subject of censorship in education. Tara's excellent research from over ten years of reporting on North American education came shining through, painting a bleak picture of the prospects for humane schooling in the US. The reality of decaying school systems dominated by invasive technology, Big-Tech monopolies, surveillance of children, discipline by algorithms, and exclusion of marginal students by technology is heartbreaking to hear. Every teacher should listen to this episode.

Martin Petrov of Integrity 360 spent an illuminating hour with us on the subject of payments processing. For some it might seem dull, until you realise how complex and precarious point of sale terminals are, how they are regulated (or not) and what happens when you're a victim of fraud. This interview sits well with Ross Anderson's first three lectures in his Security Engineering series with Sam Ainsworth, which I would suggest watching as homework before the Cybershow episode.

Jeff Wichman gave us a jaw-dropping episode - perhaps my favourite of the season so far - when he came on the show to talk to us about ransomware negotiation. Jeff clearly has a long pedigree with cyber in law enforcement and had loads of funny and disturbing anecdotes about what happens when you're a big company that get well and truly pwned. Jeff currently works at Semperis where he is director of incident response.

On the arts side we had another in-depth session on the subject of Algorave featuring a new guest Stephen Monslow AKA [fakedac~] M-onz, alongside our regular Robert Thomas. This episode took me right back to my days in Bristol and London amongst the arts-hacker scenes like GOTO-10, and it's amazing to see that not only is the livecoding scene still alive, it's filled with new blood and thriving along with legends like Alex McLean still developing and playing-out. Of course tools like Miller Puckette's pure data are immortal, but to see what has been built since my involvement on the scene 20 years ago is amazing and heart-warming! We inevitably talked about "AI in music" again, continuing where Rob and I left off in an earlier episode.

On the fun side, Helen and I put on our Scully and Mulder hats to ponder the paranormal together in a "Hacked or Haunted" special episode for Halloween. She dug up some spooky stories of people who believe their computers are haunted and communicate messages from the dead and from time-travellers.

Coming up we've got episodes with experts in criminal forensics, beating-up cyberbullies, more on online dating and how geeks are leading the way to break out of the digital echo-chamber into real-world relationships, plus a lot more on cyber arts, music and poetry all in the pipeline.