Cyrus Farivar

While I was working at Macworld Expo last week, Chuck Joiner of MacVoices pulled me from behind the mixing board out to the mic: With some convincing, we dragged Cyrus Farivar, the engineer for all the shows taped in this year’s Macworld.com Podcast Studio, up to the mic to find out what he’s been up to since leaving his post at Macworld magazine. Cyrus talks about his love of technology journalism, his mentors at Macworld, how he uses his grandfather…

It appears there’s been an update to the Estonia cyberwarfare piece that I filed for The World on in August. In it, I interviewed Margus Kurm, Estonia’s chief prosecutor, who talked about a certain Dimitri — an ethnic Russian and Estonian citizen, who at that time was the only person that had been arrested in connection to the cyberattacks on Estonia in April and May 2007. BBC: A 20-year-old ethnic Russian man is the first person to be convicted for…

While I’m still waiting to see “The Singing Revolution,” it appears that there’s also a new great movie coming out from Latvia as well, “Defenders of Riga.” It tells the Latvian equivalent of the Revolutionary War. While it only came out several weeks ago, it’s the highest budget Latvian movie ever, at $4 mil USD, and has broken all Latvian box office records. As the YouTube entry describes: Story is about 11 november 1919. WWI was over but renegade german…

The Atlantic is the last magazine that I still pay for. I dropped my The New Yorker subscription months ago as it would come too fast before I would have a chance to read it. The Atlantic is monthly, and as such, I usually make time to read it. That being said, I find myself only reading a few of the articles in the magazine — and now that the paywall is coming down, I will just let my subscription…

David Simon asks, in The Washington Post: What I don’t understand is this: Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It’s hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all…

The New Yorker: The alternatives facing Democratic voters have been characterized variously as a choice between experience and change, between an insider and an outsider, and between two firsts—a woman and a black man. But perhaps the most important difference between these two politicians—whose policy views, after all, are almost indistinguishable—lies in their rival conceptions of the Presidency. Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore…

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece about the addition of some Library of Congress photos to Flickr will air on Morning Edition today! It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams). New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific…

Big ups to Brianne, for introducing me and Becky to Flight of the Conchords, my new favorite band/thing on TV. It’s been making the rounds amongst my circle of friends.

So last week The World’s Tech Podcast sent me to Vegas to cover one session at CES. The result can be found here (Facebook), or here (MP3).

As much as I love Oakland Airport, I do think that this airport security fast-track is bad for one basic reason: it’s easily defeated. All you have to do is be a terrorist who has a clean record and then register for this service. Then you get to bypass the line, and boom — you’ve just infiltrated the the system. Still, I think that it’s a bad idea to have tiered-service at a public place like an airport. Everyone should…