The Weekly Cybers #54
Online platforms to cop a Digital Duty of Care, but when? DeepSeek continues to break brains, concerns rise over dependence on Musk’s Starlink, and the Scams Prevention Framework is about to arrive.
Welcome
This week the government released the independent review of the Online Safety Act and stressed its importance, but didn’t say when they’d act on its recommendations. Hey it’s an election year!
Brains continue to be broken by China’s DeepSeek AI system, which is now banned from government devices federally and in most states and territories.
And, given the erratic behaviour of Elon Musk, there are concerns over Australia becoming too reliant to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet services.
Plus much more, including the imminent passage of the Scams Prevention Framework Bill. Read on, won’t you?
A Digital Duty of Care for platforms, but when?
Communications minister Michelle Rowland finally released the report of the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act 2021, something she’s been sitting off for three months.
A key recommendation is imposing a Digital Duty of Care on the major online platforms, “to proactively keep Australians safe and better prevent online harms”.
“The harms that should be highlighted for attention under a duty of care should at a minimum include: Harms to young people, including child sexual exploitation and abuse (including grooming), bullying and problematic internet use; harms to mental and physical wellbeing, including threats to harm or kill, or attacks based on a person or group of people’s protected characteristics, such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability, age or religion; instruction or promotion of harmful practices, such as self-harm/suicide, disordered eating and dares that could lead to grievous harm; threats to national security and social cohesion, such as through promotion of terrorism and abhorrent violent extremist content; and other illegal content, conduct and activity.” (Slightly reformatted from the original.)
Entities with “the greatest reach or risk” will need to complete a risk assessment every 12 months or when there’s a significant change, and any service used by more than 10% of the population will be placed in that category automatically.
There’s 67 recommendations in all, so I’ll highlight just a few more here.
One is that “the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration for online service providers in assessing and mitigating the risks arising from the design and operation of their services,” whether the service is used by children or may be be used against children.
Another is that the Online Safety Act should define a “volumetric attack”, and the regulator should be able to issue notices to multiple platforms based on a single complaint.
However the report doesn’t mention misinformation and disinformation, and fails to provide guidance on further education.
Indeed, the word “resilience” only appears twice: once to note that “many Australians have demonstrated resilience in the face of an increasingly toxic digital communication environment”, and once to note that adults are generally more resilient than children, “at least in theory”.
“The Albanese Government is committed to ensuring the online world is a safe experience for all,” said Rowland. But as your writer often asks, do we impose the same duties of care in equivalent offline environments? Just how much of this is a measured response, and how much a moral panic?
Independent MP Zoe Daniel had already introduced her Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill in November but it’s probably a safe bet that the government will introduce its own bill, which will include more of those 67 recommendations.
Whether such a bill is introduced before the federal election remains to be seen, but ABC News says it’s unlikely.
China’s DeepSeek AI continues to be triggering
I wrote at length about reactions to China’s DeepSeek AI model last week, but the frothing continues.
DeepSeek has been banned from Australian government devices, as well as most states and territories. “Home affairs minister Tony Burke says [the] decision follows advice from intelligence agencies and is not in response to [the] AI chatbot’s country of origin, China.”
China is not happy. After all, as The Mandarin asks, are US AIs really any safer?
There’s further expert reaction to Australia’s bans at Scimex.
And in further DeepSeek news...
- One of the “pivotal contributors” to DeepSeek Dr Zizheng Pan studied in Australia for several years.
- The actual DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report explains how the technology works — and it lists 200 contributes, including DeepSeek-AI itself.
- The Tech Council of Australia has warned the government to “act now or risk Australia falling behind in AI development and adoption”.
- If you prefer your analysis in video form, the unblinking Patrick Boyle produced DeepSeek - How a Chinese AI Startup Shook Silicon Valley.
- And Asianometry has produced the DeepSeek’s Lessons for Chinese AI, along with a transcript (registration required).
NBN vs Starlink and equity of broadband access
This week ABC TV’s 7.30 asked: Is Elon Musk’s Starlink a threat to the NBN network? The short answer is “No, but with a but”.
The idea that satellite internet, or mobile internet more generally, will make fixed-line connections obsolete is persistent but wrong. Simple physics sees to that. Lay in optical fibre and the capacity can be ramped up almost without limit. Wireless spectrum has to be shared.
Where there is competition, however, is between terrestrial mobile networks and satellite. Here satellites have the advantage of covering the entire continent without having to erect cell towers. And it’s here that one might have concerns about the erratic nature of satellite operators.
Yes, I mean Elon Musk and Starlink, which currently has around 200,000 customers in Australia, compared with around 84,000 for NBN Co’s now-obsolescent Sky Muster.
This week the digital rights organisation Access Now released their report Holding space for human rights: improving the governance of satellite internet connectivity (PDF), which calls for stronger regulation and better protections against the whims of commercial operators.
My thanks to friend of the newsletter Leanne O’Donnell for bringing this to my attention, and for discussing these and related issues on Bluesky.
Also in the news
- With the imminent passing of the Scams Prevention Framework Bill, because the senate committee report recommended passing it with no changes, Treasury has issued a guidebook on how it will work.
- Scammers are impersonating the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
- Australian victims of online dating scams lose almost $12k on average.
- From Crikey ($), “Australia is testing hand scans to figure out your age. No-one outside the company that created it has used the technology yet.”
- For the first time Australia has imposed counter-terrorism financing sanctions on an entity that exists purely online. It is now a criminal offence to deal with Terrorgram, “an online network that promotes white supremacy and racially-motivated violence”, said foreign minister Senator Penny Wong.
- The eSafety Commissioner has published a pair of reports on young men online and the risks they face.
- The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has looked at more than 2,000 Australian retail websites and has found “some” businesses using terms and conditions that may contravene the Australian Consumer Law (ACL), although they didn’t say how many.
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Elsewhere
- Google’s owner Alphabet has dropped its promise not to use AI for weapons and surveillance tools.
- From the Guardian, “An Australian lawyer has been referred to a state legal complaints commission, after it was discovered he had used ChatGPT to write court filings in an immigration case and the artificial intelligence platform generated case citations that did not exist.”
- A UK study says school phone bans alone do not improve grades or wellbeing. There needs to be a wider strategy.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new for us this week.
What’s next?
Parliament continues this coming week from Monday 10 to Thursday 13 February.
The Senate draft legislation program includes debate on the Oversight Legislation Amendment (Robodebt Royal Commission Response and Other Measures) Bill, the National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership) Bill, and the Health Legislation Amendment (Modernising My Health Record — Sharing by Default) Bill.
The draft program for the Reps includes more debate on the Scams Prevention Framework Bill.
As always, the government may well add new things on the day, according to their needs for managing the news cycle.
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.