The Weekly Cybers #51
Meta continues its swerve to the right, NBN to dump fibre-to-the-node, Services Australia gets a new minister, and much more.
Welcome
Meta dominates the news again this week, and I’ll continue to cover it because it has such a big impact on Australian internet users.
The NBN is getting rid of fibre-to-the-node over the next five years, Services Australia gets a new minister, and a different minister gives ACMA some guidance despite it being an independent statutory authority.
NBN to get $3.2 billion fibre boost
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised $3 billion in funding to “finish” the National Broadband Network (NBN), enabling some 95% of the 622,000 premises still using fibre-to-the-node (FttN) to get actual fibre internet.
Labor reckons this will be finished by 2030, eventually giving a total of more than 11 million premises access to speeds up to 1 Gbps. The current average speed for NBN connections is 76.64 Mbps.
Your writer objects to the term “finish” because the NBN will always need to be extended to cover new buildings, but I suppose it gives Albanese to excuse to say this:
“Labor created the National Broadband Network, and only Labor will finish the NBN.”
Feel free to enjoy the press release and press conference. Yes, he’s in election mode already.
In an excellent analysis at the Guardian, Josh Taylor asks, correctly in my view, don’t Australians now care more about price than higher speeds?.
BONUS LINK: Back in 2020 I was one of the guests on the ABC’s Rear Vision program, What happened to the NBN, Australia’s ‘information superhighway’?. Overall it’s a balance presentation that avoids some of the more loopy partisan politics.
Meta gets worse and worse every day
Following Meta’s various announcements which we covered last week, the company has also dumped its DEI program — that’s diversity, equity and inclusion — and made clearer what we can expect in the very near future.
At 404 Media, Joseph Cox says Meta is laying the narrative groundwork for Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans.
Much of that story is based on a leaked document obtained by The Intercept.
“[The document] provided examples of what sort of material would now be allowed on Meta. ‘Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit’, ‘Mexican immigrants are trash!’, and ‘Migrants are no better than vomit’ are all examples given in the document of allowed statements on Meta. Comparisons to ‘filth or feces’ have now been downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of ‘insult’,” Cox writes.
Apparently it’s now perfectly fine to say “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals”.
There was much more in Zuckerberg’s three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, which on YouTube alone has had more than seven million views. I am not one of them, and won’t be until I’m paid a lot more.
Among the highlights, or rather lowlights, were Zuck’s claim that Meta meeds more “masculine energy” despite women making up only a third of the staff, as well as more bleating about freedom of speech and the horrors of woke.
A Lowy Institute analysis notes: “The social media giant’s move to user-based content moderation is a perilous step that risks enabling state-backed disinformation attacks”.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has announced he’s sacking 5% of Meta’s staff to dump “low performers faster”.
Some are already leaving this ship, including the lawyer in Meta’s AI copyright case. Stanford law professor Mark Lemley has “fired Meta as a client” because Mark Zuckerberg has gone full “Neo-Nazi”.
“I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness … I cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer.”
Finally, The Conversation has an interesting perspective: “Meta’s fact-checker cut has sparked controversy — but the real threat is AI and neurotechnology”.
ACMA should focus on public safety: Minister
I’d missed this one at the end of last year, but apparently the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) should be focusing on consumers, public safety, and harm minimisation.
That’s according to a statement of expectations issued by communications minister Michelle Rowland on 20 December.
“I expect the ACMA to actively monitor relevant sectors to identify and address regulatory gaps and keep the Government advised about general technological and market trends and matters that may highlight new and emerging risks. Where potential risks arise, I expect the ACMA to take reasonable measures, consistent with its statutory framework, to minimise harm to consumers and to promote better consumer outcomes.”
The four-page document is quite the shopping list of expectations. It lists 11 “policy priorities”, meaning that everything is a priority all at once, and includes motherhood statements such as wanting an “inclusive, connected, productive, cohesive, and creative society”.
For amusement, you might like to compare it to the previous statement of expectations and ACMA’s response from April 2024. I await this year’s response with morbid fascination.
Thanks to The Mandarin for their story which led me to this.
Services Australia gets a new minister
On Thursday the prime minister Anthony Albanese announced that Senator Katy Gallagher will become the new Minister for Government Services, replacing Bill Shorten who is retiring.
Amanda Rishworth will become the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), with Dr Anne Aly as the Minister Assisting.
“These positions will be in addition to the ministerial responsibilities already held by Ministers Rishworth, Gallagher and Aly,” Albanese said.
In Gallagher’s case that’s on top of her very busy workload as Minister for Finance, Minister for Women, and Minister for the Public Service, as well as being the Manager of Government Business in the Senate.
They’ll all be sworn in on Monday morning.
Also in the news
- The Department of Home Affairs has launched a program titled Countering Foreign Interference in Australia: Working towards a more secure Australia.
- From The Conversation, “Albanese says our laws would stop Elon Musk interfering in the Australian election. In truth, there’s little to stop him.”
- At the AFR ($), a report that Australia’s venture capitalists and start-up founders are split, pondering whether to ride America’s anti-DEI wave.
- Australians are reportedly rushing to use Chinese app RedNote, which highlights a key flaw in the government’s social media age restrictions.
- The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has created a dashboard for freedom of information statistics.
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Elsewhere
- Rapidly growing social media platform Bluesky, which now has nearly 27.7 million users, is getting a photo-sharing app called Flashes. Expect plenty of interest as users dump Meta’s Instagram.
- The UK will require stricter age checks for porn sites, with guidelines that call for the use of face scans, credit cards checks, or photo-ID.
- The UK’s technology secretary Peter Kyle has told the platforms that the country’s online safety laws are “not up for negotiation”.
- From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, analysis of Joe Biden’s new rule which “tightens control over sales of AI chips and turns them into a diplomatic tool. It seeks to enshrine and formalise the use of US AI exports as leverage to extract geopolitical and technological concessions. And it is the Biden administration’s latest attempt to limit Chinese access to the high-end chips that are critical to training advanced AI models”.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new for us this week.
What’s next?
Parliament is currently on its long summer break until Tuesday 4 February 2025, which is 18 days away.
With the political parties already moving into election mode we’re bound to see plenty of policy announcements and, um, Opposition critiques.
DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.
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.
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This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.