Saturday, January 14, 2006

Be Careful What You Say...It Might End Up Online!

At the DoD conference, I met a fellow named Paul F. Roberts who is a Senior Editor with eWeek. Jordan and I chatted with him for a while in the Expo Hall while killing time waiting for the Floppy Disk Throw. During the chat, we talked about the Mac OS X Forensics class I was in along with other presentations that either Jordan or I had attended. He showed interest in the Mac class and our experiences with them at work. Paul never mentioned he might included any of this in an article but I guess we should have expected it since he was "covering" the event.

I was taking a break from my article writing and thought I might check out the eWeek site to see what kind of stuff Paul writes. A quick search for his name revealed a slew of articles written by Paul. At the time, the latest one was titled, "Gov't Cyber-sleuths Focusing on Linux, iPod, Xbox" so I clicked it wanting to see what Paul thought about the conference. I never expected to see our names mentioned, but there we were.

Nothing really worth noting, although I would have liked to see more in-depth and insightful quotes than the ones included since they were a bit vague. For example, the Apple PowerBook I use was purchased by UF so that I could learn more about forensics and incident response on the Mac OS X platform. Very true, however, it isn't really for the entire staff to learn from since it is my primary workstation that travels everywhere with me. As for Jordan's quote, he can address that if he wants. I won't put words into his mouth.

Moral of the story...if you don't want it said in an article, don't say it in front of a reporter. Thankfully, we didn't say anything bad, but it would have been nice to know that we might be quoted. It is something I will certainly remember in the future. Paul, if you're reading this, it was great meeting you and thanks for the Corona.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Too true! Those journos are all snakes! ;-)

Nice meeting you, John.

Paul.