The Weekly Cybers #38
A plethora of stories ranging from shoddy AI and unethical practices with medical data to cables under the Pacific, digital driver licences, and cybercrime.
Welcome
It’s a quiet week on the digital policy front here in Australia, and I’m sure that has nothing to do with it being the week between the two big football grand finals.
There’s some important stuff happening in Parliament next week, however, including the Privacy Amendment and Other Measures Bill and the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill.
But this week there wasn’t anything I wanted to write up in any detail. So today it’s just...
Also in the news
- Crikey has been covering the dramas following the revelation that I-MED, Australia’s largest medical imaging clinic, has been giving patient’s scans to a tech company to train its AI. Not a good look.
- Australia is giving $51 million to Manta Ray Solutions LLC to develop a new Pacific subsea cable to Tuvalu, part of a longer-term initiative to improve Australia and its allies’ influence in the Pacific region.
- On a related note, this piece via the Lowy Institute notes that there’s more to cables than geopolitics.
- Australia’s digital driver licences will have global interoperability, thanks to the adoption of international technical standards for verifiable credentials.
- Australia has joined the US and UK in imposing sanctions on the leaders of EvilCorp, a cybercrime organisation. There’s even more detail at Risky Biz News.
- The new industry code for dating apps came into “force” (lol) on Tuesday. We wrote about that in July.
- “A new report on the online ad industry has exposed a serious risk of sensitive information about politicians and intelligence staff being sold to foreign players,” reports ABC News. “There are concerns the information could be used to blackmail officials.”
- FROM THE ARCHIVE: It’s more than a decade since former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty said that face-recognition technology and the near-universal adoption of social networking tools by teenagers could have already killed the undercover cop.
- I’ve been reporting on Australia’s anti-encryption legislation for years, so I was pleased to see this recent backgrounder from Center for Strategic & International Studies, Revisiting Australia's Encryption Landscape. Perfect if you’re new to it all.
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Elsewhere
- Facebook has deleted more than 9,000 scam pages after Australians lost $43.4 million to celebrity deepfakes.
- Victoria’s Victims of Crime Assistance Tribunal (VOCAT), has leaked the email addresses of victims of crime in a classic cc-everyone mistake. Some 480 people are affected. “We are working to recall and contain the message. Please disregard and delete the previous email,” they said, something which totally works. Oh wait, no it doesn’t.
- Cybersecurity firm AUCyber has warned of Russians hacking security cameras and streaming their imagery to the world.
- From The Mandarin, “Queensland Parliament’s ethics committee says parliamentarians have to exercise greater care than other individuals when posting material on social media.”
CLARIFICATION: These next two items have been edited since the email was sent out to fix an editing mistake.
- Software developers gain little if anything from AI coding assistants. Using GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study. Also, there was no real change in productivity or burnout levels.
- Almost $10m of cryptocurrency was seized from Jay Je Yoon Jung, The Australian accused of running the Ghost encrypted communications network. A second man has been charged, with police claiming he was a “close associate” of Jung.
- From The Sizzle, Kangaroo LLM promises an open source, all-Aussie large language model by scraping your .au websites.
- On a related note, an essay at The Strategist notes that “any attempt to regulate artificial intelligence is likely to be ineffective without first ensuring the availability of trusted large-scale sovereign data sets”.
- From The Conversation, “Big tech doesn’t just fund research into itself — it also controls researchers’ access to data. Even big tobacco didn’t have this kind of power.”
Inquiries of note
- Free TV Australia has opened a consultation on reviewing the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice. Comments close 11 November.
What’s next?
Parliament returns this Tuesday 8 October, and we already have the draft legislation program — although the government tends to random add things on the day if it suits the news cycle.
In the Senate there’s nothing relevant to this newsletter.
In the House of Reps there’s debate on the Privacy Amendment and Other Measures Bill and the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill.
NEW PODCAST TOMORROW NIGHT: Earlier this week I recorded a fun and cynical conversation with AI realist David Gerard, co-editor of the newsletter Pivot to AI. Look for The 9pm Edict in your podcast app. Once it’s posted you’ll be able to listen to it here.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
If I’ve missed anything, or if there’s any specific items you’d like me to follow, please let me know.
If you find this newsletter useful, please consider throwing a tip into the tip jar.
This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.