6 November 2026

Welcome

I’m having a busy day, so I’ll just press send...

Teen social media ban battle hits the High Court

Reddit’s case against the government had two days of hearings in the High Court this week. So far it’s just the parties presenting their arguments, and there’s some interesting ones.

The Saturday Paper’s summary of day one links to some of the more detailed reporting, though the sound bite is that Reddit says the ban was “ill thought out and overbroad”. If the government was worried about certain features, they reckon, then it should have focused on those features — which is something it’s doing with the Digital Duty of Care Bill that we wrote about last week.

On day two the government responded by saying the ban was “indirect and modest”, and that it’s “not a blunt instrument but … designed to minimise the adverse effects of these [social media] features”.

There’s obviously a lot of rhetoric here, so it’ll be interesting to see what the court eventually decides.

If you’re going to follow this in slightly more detail, then I recommend following Josh Taylor at the Guardian, who’s been following tech-related courtroom dramas for years. Here are his summaries of day one and day two.

Binance loses US$6.36B in biggest heist ever

Oh yes, the hack of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, news of which was kicking off as we wrote this newsletter last week, was very serious indeed.

The exchange lost around US$6.36 billion in customers’ assets in about 20 minutes, making it the biggest heist in history. Unsurprisingly, Binance users withdrew billions as soon as the platform restarted operations.

Very soon the FBI blamed North Korea, with the agency listing the Bitcoin addresses that they say belonged to the hackers. TRM Labs provided technical details. Both named the hacking team TraderTraitor.

Kim Jong Un’s sister has denied North Korea’s involvement, however, but then she would say that.

Binance says the North Koreans used a fake job interview to trick an employee into installing malware, as detailed in their incident report. Yes, humans are nearly always the weakest link.

US regulators have contacted banks to check that they’re doing OK.

PLEASE CONSIDER SUPPORTING THIS NEWSLETTER: The Weekly Cybers is unfunded. It and my podcasts The 9pm Edict and Another Untitled Music Podcast are supported by their audiences. This season’s crowdfunder is hoping to reach its second target by next Sunday 15 November, and right now we’re 77% of the way there. It’d be lovely if you threw in your support. If you’ve already done so, thank you.

Also in the news this week

• The government is “sleepwalking its way into another robodebt” by deploying algorithmic and AI-based decision-making without transparency and appropriate legislation. So says the Centre for Public Integrity in their new report Computer Says No (PDF).

• Western Australia Police announced the results of its five-month live facial recognition trial. They scanned 1,380,882 faces across 43 locations, generating 292 alerts, of which nine were incorrect. The final result was 122 arrests, but we don’t know how many of them will eventually lead to convictions.

• The City of Geelong is using AI to find and measure potholes. This is a wonderful application of computer vision algorithms which have been around for decades, so I was disappointed to see people pushing back against it, saying things like “People can also see potholes”. They can, but much more slowly than automatically processing video being shot by streetsweeping equipment. The wasteful use of large language models (LLMs) and chatbots for everyday tasks has poisoned the field for all the other applications of AI.

• I’ve always been impressed by the ABC TV program Behind the News, an educational news program aimed at 10–13 year old kids, because it just gets on with it. So I’m pleased to see that recently they answered kid’s questions about ai. Adults should check it out too.

• Australians can stop Meta using their posts to train AI. It’s a feature they snuck out without announcing it.

• I’d missed this one. Australia’s new Ambassador for Cyber Affairs, Artificial Intelligence and Critical Technology is Dr Derek Bopping.

NEW PODCAST: This week I recorded The 9pm Cruel Philosophy of AI with Patrick Stokes, a philosopher, reprobate, and all-round cleverthinker. We ask whether AI is intelligent, or sentient, or has moral sensibilities. We discuss some fictional AI. We even talk about a bird — that’s nothing to do with AI though. It’s a fun conversation. Look for The 9pm Edict in your podcast app.

Elsewhere

• Google’s first data centre in space is online and writing poetry, “after launching earlier this month alongside more than 100 other spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket,” reports TechCrunch. The satellite is part of Project Suncatcher and carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). “However, the power demands of the TPU mean it can only turn one on for about 20 minutes at a time.” We have some way to go.

• “Kids hooked on AI chatbots are showing dramatically worse mental health,” reports Futurism, surprising nobody. That said, maybe it’s that kids with mental health problems are turning to the chatbots. Both may be true, of course. Here in Australia, new research shows that the evidence is not so clear.

• Following the US midterm elections, the data centre industry is among the biggest losers. “When data centres were on the ballot, they overwhelmingly lost,” wrote Cam Wilson at ABC News. “There were about 41 different proposals put to voters in ten states, and all but one are on track for a loss for data centres. Down goes the NASDAQ.

• Elon Musk admits that his Grok Bot costs too much to serve.

• OpenAI has released GPT-6 Cyber, and promises this one will stay within the “rules of engagement”. I guess we’ll see.

• The hackers who’ve hit French and other supermarket refrigerators have now hacked the French blood banks, but officials say that so far none of the blood products have been compromised. The US has warned of an ongoing cyber threat to industrial refrigeration systems.

• Many of those pushing for the teen social media ban had been influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. At best, the evidence is equivocal. It has since been revealed that tech platforms tried to stir up opposition to Haidt, which in turn has led to academics who genuinely opposed him to be doubted. The highly respected danah boyd has pushed back: “No one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught me that he was wrong.”

Inquiries of note

Nothing new for us this week.

What’s next?

Parliament is on break for another ten days. The Senate returns on Monday 16 November, and the House of Reps joins them on Monday 23 November. Parliament is scheduled to wrap up on Thursday 26 November, but of course this may change. There’s a lot for them to get through before Christmas.

The Senate committee looking at the Online Safety Amendment Duty of Care) Bill 2026 is holding public hearings in Canberra this coming Monday 9 and Tuesday 10 November.

DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? Let me know. If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.