20 February 2026

Welcome

I was surprised to learn this week that the OECD reckons Australia is number two when it comes to digital government — until I then learned that it was specifically for machinery of government and our rollout of digital services rather than digital policies for the nation.

How bad must the others be?

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg made his first ever courtroom appearance in front of a jury, telling us that whatever may have happened in the past, Meta no longer sets targets for increasing the amount of time users spend using their products. It’s going to be an interesting trial.

And of course there’s lot of news that mentions AI, for which I make no apology. With so much of the tech industry now focusing on AI, it’s become essential for their stock market valuation and investment. The major players have to make it work, but can it live up to the hype?

It’s inevitable that as the evidence of flaws build up their claims will become more desperate. How will it all turn out?

Zuckerberg says Meta isn’t trying to be addictive

In the US trial over whether social media giants deliberately made their products addictive, as discussed last week, Mark Zuckerberg has said his company Meta no longer designs apps to maximise screen time, although yeah OK they used to.

Judge Carolyn Kuhl also scolded Zuckerberg’s team for wearing Ray Ban-Meta AI glasses, because recording devices and cameras are generally banned in the Los Angeles County Superior Court. The wearers were ordered delete any recordings they may have made, or face contempt of court charges.

Meta is already facing criticism over its plan to add facial recognition to their Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, so that anyone the wearer looks at is tagged with their name and whatever other information can be found — at least if they’re your Facebook friend. For now.

Meta displayed its attitude yet again in this quote from an internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

HOW’S THAT AI BUBBLE GOING? The latest podcast episode is The 9pm S-Bend of Technology with David Gerard. He’s the editor of the Pivot to AI newsletter, video essay, and podcast. Look for The 9pm Edict in your podcast app.

Australia is #2 in OECD digital government

Yes, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has put Australia in the number two spot in its 2025 Digital Government Index (PDF) — but it’s important to note that it’s for very specific things.

“By modernising systems, connecting data, and adopting agile ways of working, governments can become faster, more efficient, and more responsive, without sacrificing accountability,” the OECD writes.

“Digital transformation enables better services, smarter decisions, and collaboration across siloes and borders.”

Australia scored highly for its leading performance in the categories digital by design and user-driven services.

However Australia was only 4th in supporting public servants through shared digital capabilities (what the OECD labelled “government as a platform”), and 5th in proactiveness by anticipating and responding to community needs.

And to stress once again, this is about how the government runs itself, not how the government handles digital policy for you and me.

Also in the news

• New opposition leader Angus Taylor has of course appointed a new shadow ministry. Of interest to us are Senator Sarah Henderson as shadow minister for communications and digital safety; and Aaron Violi for cyber security, for the digital economy, and for science, technology and innovation. Senator James Paterson has been moved to defence.

• OpenAI promised Australia $115 billion of economic benefit over the next 5 years, reports Crikey ($), even though public servants advised that AI’s wider benefits had “yet to emerge”. And yes, some of OpenAI’s lobbying did lead to regulations being watered down.

• Police searching for a missing four-year-old have used drones and AI to hunt for clues. “The search area was 15 kilometres in radius, with a pixel size of one to two centimetres,” said Sci-eye founder Andrew Walsh. That’s more than a trillion pixels.

• A South Australian woman may have to leave her home because the government’s new algorithm-driven integrated assessment tool (IAT) decided to halve her disability support.

• More than two dozen staff at KPMG Australia have been caught using AI to cheat in an exam on using AI. Some of us are old enough to remember when using calculators in maths exams was considered cheating too.

• People are overconfident about spotting AI faces, relying on outdated visual cues when trying to distinguish real faces from highly realistic AI-generated ones. Try the online test. I got a mere 6/20, while the average score is 11/20. Even just guessing would have scored 10/20. Ouch.

• NBN Co is planning to offer Amazon’s LEOsat internet service at wholesale prices roughly the same or lower than those for its outgoing Sky Muster and Sky Muster Plus satellite services.

• Feeling nostalgic for 2021? Australia Post has launched a $15 ‘DigiStamp’ NFT for Lunar New Year.

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Elsewhere

• The US in setting up an online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere, and of course it’ll be called freedom.gov. Right now it’s just an animation of a galloping horse and rider, and the slogan “Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.”

• Via The Conversation, “A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly.”

• Climate and energy communicator Ketan Joshi has looked at the claims that AI will “solve climate change”, meaning all these new data centres are just fine, and discovered that they’re garbage and mere greenwashing. “We found that most of the ‘benefit’ tends to relate to older, smaller and leaner forms of machine learning, what has been called ‘traditional AI’, while we also know that most of the new harm is likely stemming from consumer generative AI over-deployment,” he writes.

• The redoubtable Simon Sharwood has an interesting piece of the multi-stakeholder governance of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC).

• The inaugural World Conference of Computational Neurosurgery was held in Sydney earlier this month, and that’s led to the Declaration of Sydney on the Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Neurosurgery.

• OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable with large language models (LLMs), not just engineering flaws.

• “Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation,” reports 404 Media.

• Don’t ask AI for secure passwords, because they keep generating the same bad passwords.

• The EU Parliament is banning AI features on MEPs’ devices, for the cybersecurities don’t you know.

• We can now track and identity individuals using the unique signals transmitted by their pacemaker, if they have one.

• “The India AI Impact Summit offers a timely opportunity to experiment with and formalise new models of cooperation,” especially in the so-called global south, or so says a paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Meanwhile, Australia and India announced five new AI research projects worth $3.76 million.

• British satirist Armando Iannucci has recently posted a video clip about AI which was originally broadcast in 2001. Has anything changed?

Inquiries of note

• Nothing new this week, but the Australia Institute’s The Point published a guide on how to make a submission to a parliamentary inquiry.

What’s next?

Parliament is currently on a break and will return in 10 days from now, on Monday 2 March.

This coming Tuesday 24 and Wednesday 25 February, however, there are pubic hearings in the House committee inquiry into schemes, digital wallets and innovation in the payments sector.

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