10 April 2026

Welcome

It’s been the short week after Easter. Parliament is on a break. Attention is focused on the war on Iran, the price of oil, and the amazing Artemis II mission around the Moon. The news has been packed!

So this week it’s a collection of many briefer items that are all important in their own way — but to which I have nothing to add.

I will draw your attention to the inquiry into government secrecy provisions, however, down near the bottom. “The bill would remove criminal liability from more than 300 secrecy offences — representing a reduction of more than one third of Commonwealth secrecy provisions that attract criminal liability,” says the explanatory memorandum. That does sound like a lot that needs changing...

In the news this week

• Meta is censoring posts about illicit drugs even when they’re warning of dangerous drug combinations or part of established public health harm-reduction campaigns. Community groups say that entire pages and personal account are being flagged by automated content moderation systems as promoting drug use.

• The Minerals Council of Australia wants the government to try out using AI to speed up environmental approvals decisions, and of course they want the government to pay for it. Could this lead to robodebt-style environmental failures?

• The government has declined to take action on generative AI in schools, merely responding to 34 of 35 inquiry recommendations as “noted”.

• Attorney general Michelle Rowland says that the government may consider changes to copyright law in the face of AI. Copyright holders wouldn’t lose protection, she says, though there might be “other ways in which the copyright system can be improved in the age of AI”. Somehow.

• Several Sydney local councils are worried that new datacentres could cause blackouts, compete with residential housing, and affect locals’ health. “The prevailing narrative from many of these stakeholders is that datacentres are extractive; they take more than they give when it comes to energy, water, land,” the Committee for Sydney told an inquiry.

• “Cyber Battle Australia 2026 will see students from around the country learn vital skills at a time when the industry needs them most,” reports Cyber Daily.

• “More than 620,000 migrants to Australia are working in jobs below their skill level,” reports Information Age, although that number is the total across all sectors. The demand for ICT managers set to grow by 25.5% by 2030.

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Elsewhere

• From The Conversation, “Slopaganda wars: how (and why) the US and Iran are flooding the zone with viral AI‑generated noise”. “ Even obviously fake propaganda videos can influence viewers — and erode their trust in all kinds of information.”

• Back in the days of DOGE, the (not) Department of Government Efficiency, Mark Zuckerberg offered to censor Meta users to help Elon Musk.

• Commercial satellite imagery company Planet Labs has complied with a censorship order from the US government to block pictures of the Middle East.

• Coworkers of OpenAI boss Sam Altman say he can barely code and misunderstands basic machine learning concepts. As Futurism reports, one senior executive at Microsoft said: “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

• “OpenAI is still going for an IPO as absolutely soon as possible — because Sam Altman needs those public dollars. And he wants to get in before Anthropic,” writes Pivot to AI. But even their own CFO says the company isn’t ready.

• Cambodia has passed a tough new cybercrime law targeting the country’s notorious scam centres.

• “The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report (PDF) shows cyber-enabled crimes defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence-related complaints among the costliest,” the agency says in a press release.

• British computer scientist and Bitcoin entrepreneur Adam Back denies he is Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, as claimed by the New York Times (gift link). In 2024, Australian Craig Wright was ruled by the UK’s High Court to have falsely and persistently claimed to have been the inventor.

• “The wave of change from artificial intelligence (AI) rolling across the corporate landscape is going largely unnoticed,” reports ABC News. “Previously, machines mostly replaced manual labour. Computers and calculators assisted some professions. But this time, machines will be replacing intellectual pursuits and possibly even creative thought. In law, finance and a myriad [sic] other industries, entry-level graduates are no longer required as the mundane jobs they once performed can be farmed out to AI.”

• Machine learning expert Lee Han Chung has written an essay titled The AI Great Leap Forward, comparing companies’ top-down mandate on AI transformation to Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962. The parallels are striking.

• From The Register and its delightful British tabloid style, “Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find”. You may therefore like an increasingly popular term for how AI makes you dumber: cognitive surrender.

• “How accurate are Google’s AI overviews?” asks the New York Times (gift link). Answer: Not very accurate.

• AI is being integrated into the processing of asylum-seekers around the world, but mistranslations are quietly eroding rights and accountability.

• Anthropic claims that its Claude Mythos AI is too powerful to release because it’s already found “thousands” of significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Such a tool is only safe in the hands of the good guys, I guess.

• Amazon is killing off support for older Kindles, specifically those released before 2012. Readers can still access what’s already on their device, or read it in other ways, or buy a new device — Amazon has some promotional offers. But after 20 May nothing new can be added.

• Finally, an interesting perspective on the grift of “passive income”. “‘Passive income’ as an organising philosophy for your entire business life, for how you think about work, is almost perfectly designed to produce garbage.”

Inquiries of note

• Somehow I’d missed the introduction of the Secrecy Provisions Amendment (Repealing Offences) Bill 2026, which would “result in a significant reduction of the number of secrecy provisions across the Commonwealth statute book that attract criminal liability, ensuring that secrecy offences only attract criminality where this is necessary and proportionate to protect the most sensitive information”. There is of course a Senate inquiry, and while no closing date for submissions has yet been set, the committee has to report back by 19 June.

What’s next?

Parliament is on break until Tuesday 12 May, when it’s Budget Night — but I’ll be watching out for public hearings for the various inquiries under way.

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