The Weekly Cybers #66
China has a new cable-cutting submarine thing, APNIC has a new-ish boss, the people of Melbourne use OSINT to track public transport ticket inspectors, and more.
The Weekly Cybers #66 | 2 May 2025
Welcome, and Happy Sausage Eve, everyone!
With the federal election happening tomorrow — and may you enjoy your democracy sausage — I’ve picked up a couple of international stories.
There was consternation about China showing off a new cable-cutting machine recently, potentially a risk to undersea telecommunications, or maybe not.
And there’s been a change in management at APNIC, a key regional organisation for internet governance.
Of course there’s also a smattering of stories about AI, because it’s 2025, and new rules for telcos. Enjoy.
How’s all that election stuff going?
With just one sleep left until the election, it’s probably not worth detailing all the little online tricks and tactics used by the candidates, so here’s just three stories that caught my attention.
- “YouTube pockets $16.5m as major parties splash on campaign ads,” reports Capital Brief ($).
- From ABC News, “Researchers monitoring Australian political advertising and campaigning on popular [Chinese language] apps WeChat and RedNote have noticed a surge in activity by the major parties and independents in recent weeks.”
- People have been complaining about the text messages they’re getting from Trumpet of Patriots. They’re perfectly legal because political parties are exempt from both the Spam Act and the Privacy Act, and there’s plenty of ways political parties can collect contact details. I also explained some of this in a rambling thread on Bluesky.
China has underwater cable cutters, but so what?
A headline at ABC News this week asked “Is China's new cable-cutter a game-changer, or just hype?”
“Reported to be able to slice through the most fortified undersea telecommunications cables at depths of up to 4,000 metres, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) described the submarine-mounted saw as a development that could ‘reset the global order’.”
Gosh.
But to go back to the ABC headline, yeah, I reckon it’s mostly hype.
First, every cable repair ship is also equipped to cut cables — because to repair optical fibre cables you first have to cut out the damaged bit and haul the ends to the surface before splicing in a new segment.
All manner of underwater vehicles have equipment for grabbing or cutting things, whether it’s for scientific research or maintaining oil and gas infrastructure.
Second, if you want to damage communications cables then you don’t need a fancy saw. You can use literally any ship and just drag its anchor along the seabed to tear up the cable. Using a cargo ship gives you “Oops, just an accident” deniability.
This is already happening in the Taiwan Strait and, presumably with Russian or Chinese backing, in the Baltic Sea.
As Statista reported in February, “In the three months between November and January, three incidents of damage to Baltic Sea underwater cables have taken place, severing at least partly seven different telecommunication links that connect Baltic states like Sweden, Finland, Germany, Estonia, and Latvia.”
To be fair, the ABC story does note that there’s nothing particularly threatening about the cable cutter itself.
“Below about 1,500 metres, cables aren't armoured anyway,” said Cynthia Mehboob, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University’s Department of International Relations and an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
It’s about formulating a narrative about failing Western infrastructure, she said. And I guess it’s worked.
APNIC gets a new boss after 26 years
The Brisbane-based Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), one of the world’s five regional internet address registries, recently appointed a new director general He replaces Australian Paul Wilson, who’d held the job for 26 years.
In an interview with The Register, Low explained that he sees “the internet” as the “the technology that allows your device to connect to mine, which essentially means we use the same set of unique identifiers, the same protocols” — so IP addresses, the domain name system (DNS), stuff like that.
This means that the apps which run on the internet aren’t really APNIC’s problem. Nor are content blocking or social media age restrictions. But it does mean that he cares about making sure those fundamental protocols still work globally.
It’s an interesting interview, but perhaps one for the wonks.
Disclosure: Stilgherrian has travelled to some of APNIC’s regional conferences as their guest.
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Also in the news
- There’s been “persistent data privacy and security issues within the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS),” says digital rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), and they’ve issued a statement of concern. There’s quite a few concerns, from overly-broad data collection to increasing dependence on machine learning and AI.
- The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has issued a bunch of new rules to protect consumers and keep them better informed during telecommunications outages. The new rules also cover outages to the 000 and 112 emergency numbers, and customer complaint-handling.
- Australians are less trusting of AI than most countries despite half of us (50%) using it regularly, according to research from KPMG.
- In a delightful piece of open source intelligence (OSINT), Melbourne commuters are using an app to spot and report ticket inspectors on the public transport network.
- Amazon’s first Kuiper broadband internet satellites have been launched, which means SpaceX’s Starlink will soon have a proper competitor.
- “Tiktok Australia has almost doubled its profits, and tripled its revenue during a massive twelve-month growth period in the country,” reports Mumbrella.
- “Cybercriminals have stolen almost 100 staff logins at the Big Four banks,” reports ABC News, although the banks say they have other protections in place. Indeed, this is what multi-factor authentication (MFA) is for.
- Sydney woman Alda Curtis earned $1 for a t-shirt she sold on RedBubble. Now she has to pay US$100,000 in a copyright case.
- The ABC’s superb If You’re Listening has kicked off a new series titled "Australia vs the Internet”. It’s worth your time, either as an audio podcast on Thursdays or a video series on Saturdays.
Elsewhere
- In the UK, health secretary Wes Streeting has mandated AI transcription of health consultations. Doctors are not happy, and have been told they may be personally liable for any mistakes the AI makes. Apparently the UK has a machine learning tsar.
- From Pivot to AI, “A new paper by Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard states bluntly: “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.”
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: My good friend Snarky Platypus and I have produced the pilot episode of Another Untitled Music Podcast. Yes, it’s about music. Look for it under that title in your podcast app of choice and let us know what you think.
Inquiries of note
- The Department of Finance has released an issues paper on the statutory review of the Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022, the law governing the sharing of public sector data while preserving privacy. Submissions close 30 May.
What’s next?
The federal election is tomorrow, Saturday 3 May, so for the next edition of this humble newsletter we’ll have a brand new government — maybe of the same type, maybe a different one.
Whether they’ll have said anything about tech policy is of course unknown for now. It certainly didn’t figure in the election campaigning.
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.