The Weekly Cybers #71
Services Australia says AI and automation will be deployed with empathy, Apple faces pressure to open up app sales, HMAS Canberra kills Kiwi wi-fi, and much more.
The Weekly Cybers #71 | 6 June 2025
Welcome
I was amused that last week’s edition failed to reach a number of readers. Why? Because a discussion of how social media age restrictions might prevent important s-xual health messages reaching their intended audience triggered spam blocks because we used s-x words!
You may want to whitelist these emails, or use the RSS feed.
I’m still laughing.
Anyway, this week Services Australia reckoned it’s going to start deploying empathy.
Apple faces global pressure to open up its App Store.
And an Australian warship blows away New Zealand’s rural wireless broadband. With conflict in the South China Sea, Black Sea, and Baltic Sea, is the Tasman Sea feeling left out?
All that and more... and enjoy your long weekend if you’re having one.
Services Australia rethinks AI and automation
Services Australia has committed to “human-centred design” and a more empathic approach when implementing new technology. This will include “engaging” with “customer and staff advocacy groups”, including the Independent Advisory Board for Government Services.
“This strategy outlines how we’re going to responsibly integrate automation and AI, ensuring its design, application, and governance will be human-centred, safe, transparent, ethical, legal, and fair.”
“We set our sights high and imagine a future state where our technology landscape empowers the agency to respond promptly, efficiently and empathetically to the needs of our customers,” the agency buzzwrote.
The commitment is part of its Automation and AI Strategy 2025–27 released recently.
At The Mandarin, Julian Bajkowski writes: “There’s a fair bit to unpack in the forward-looking document, but the broad gist is that the massive agency will continue to embrace new technology rather than eschew it in the wake of its illegal fake-debt manufacturing and enforcement.”
That would be robodebt.
Public servants have mixed feelings about generative AI
The robodebt debacle has dampened public servants’ AI enthusiasm, according to research (PDF) by UNSW Canberra’s Public Service Research Group.
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, we did not find concrete agreement around how a range of senior public servants see the future of genAI use in policy work,” they write.
As co-author Helen Dickinson told The Mandarin: “Public servants are wary of anything that might compromise citizen trust and confidence in government, and so there is hesitance in allowing genAI to be used in areas like external-facing service delivery.”
The use of AI in policy work requires adequate human oversight, she said. Which is good, I guess, given that its use within government is already spreading quickly.
Unions call for a government big tech boycott
Meanwhile, unions have called for a federal boycott of big tech in government procurement, saying that “public contracts should not reward suppliers engaged in unethical or unsafe behaviour — including tax avoidance, labour exploitation, or other unethical behaviour”.
“It’s time the government used its massive purchasing power to demand higher standards from companies like Amazon,” said ACTU president Michele O’Neil.
“If you don’t pay your fair share of tax, if you deny workers their rights, if you track every second of their working day — you should not be rewarded with public money.”
Will Apple be forced to open up the app market?
Australians may soon be able to download iPhone apps from outside Apple’s App Store, reports the Guardian. Maybe.
Why? Apple takes a cut of up to 30% of any sales through its App Store, including in-app purchases, and some folks reckon that’s a bit steep. And under Apple’s rules, companies can’t tell customers how to purchase elsewhere.
The EU has already made progress on this, passing the Digital Markets Act, which is intended to “make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable”.
Apple is of course appealing the decision, calling the rules “deeply flawed” and a threat to user security.
Here in Australia, Treasury released a paper (PDF) last year which proposed a system for “designating” some digital platforms as holding “a critical position in the Australian economy and that are significant to Australian consumers and businesses”. Anti-competitive rules would then apply.
Apple argues that their 30% fee only applies to the biggest players. The vast majority of sales, some 90% of the US$1.3 trillion total, attracted no fees at all. And most developers who did have to pay, paid 15%.
The company also argues that allowing unvetted apps onto devices through third-party vendors — a process known as side-loading — would open up security and copyright violation risks.
That issue is undoubtedly true. If anyone is in the best position to judge the security of apps on iOS, it’s Apple.
The question is whether Apple users should have the right to screw up their own security — sorry, to take on the risk of unvetted apps. After all, they can already do so with their macOS computers and the world has not ended.
This is a political and philosophical argument about the nature of computing ecosystems which I don’t have time to go into today.
Anyway, The Verge has a good summary of the action so far.
Is a 30% margin too high or too low?
As for Apple’s fees, your writer notes that in other retail environments the retailer’s margin is often much higher.
An author selling their book through the traditional publishing houses might only receive few a dollars per copy sold. Back in the days when music was sold on CDs, musicians would receive maybe one or two dollars of the $19 cover price.
In the physical world a musical instrument might have a 50% retail margin, which is why retailers are happy to knock $100 off a thousand-dollar item to close the sale.
Computers used to be like that too. Back in the personal computer boom of the 1980s and 1990s, margins might have been around 25% or 30%. These days those retail margins are generally less than 15%, or even under 10%. Retailers make more money from selling you the finance package.
I’m not saying that Apple’s cut of app sales is either too high or too low, just that it’s part of a broader discussion of who makes how much money at each point in a supply chain.
Maybe opening up that question to market forces is the correct neoliberal solution? Do we still do that?
Disclosure: For what it’s worth, this newsletter is being typed on an Apple MacBook Pro.
HMAS Canberra kills Kiwi rural broadband
Fixed wireless broadband access points were blown offline as Australian warship HMAS Canberra passed down New Zealand’s Taranaki coast this week.
“It was full-scale, military-grade radar triggering built-in safety protocols designed to protect airspace,” said Matthew Harrison, managing director of telco Primo. Other telcos were also affected.
As veteran tech reporter Bill Bennett wrote on Friday, Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) is way to increase the performance of wi-fi devices by using unlicensed frequencies — such as those used by military radars. So guess who’s more powerful.
Is the real issue here that the NZ government has been tardy opening up new frequencies? Or that telcos were foolishly jumping the gun by configuring customer equipment to use the unlicensed frequencies?
Also in the news
- One in five Australian secondary schools are planning to introduce or expand AI tech this year, according to a new report from Campion Education. Almost four in five Australian secondary schools are already using it.
- The Business Council of Australia has called for “clear, practical” AI regulations, whatever that means.
- More broadly, the National Artificial Intelligence Centre has published an AI Adoption Tracker. The latest insights, using data from Q4 2024, show that 40% of small and medium businesses claim to be adopting AI — up five percentage points from the previous quarter — while 38% are not planning to adopt it, and the remaining 21% are not aware of how they might use AI. The remaining percentage point is a rounding error.
- Telstra has commercially launched its Starlink-to-mobile messaging service, starting off with Samsung Galaxy S25 series devices.
- Meanwhile, Telstra has been penalised for mistakenly disabling the emergency call relay service used by people with hearing and speech impairments. The fine was $18,780, the maximum which could be imposed.
- Crypto ATMs are increasingly being used for scams and money laundering, which should not be a shock to anyone.
- The National Anti-Scam Centre wants more businesses to report scams to Scamwatch. “The work of our fusion cells has demonstrated that a piece of data that may be unremarkable on its own, when joined with other pieces of data, can form powerful intelligence,” said ACCC deputy chair Catriona Lowe. See scamwatch.gov.au.
- From 7NEWS Australia, “Hungry Jack‘s is under fire after a TikTok [video] went viral showing artificial intelligence (AI) being used at one of its drive-thru restaurants, with critics voicing concerns the technology was taking away jobs from teenagers”.
- I missed this one last week, but it’s kind of important given the global cyber skills shortage: “Defence has created a whole new cross-service cyber career stream, with pay to match. The APSC [Australian Public Service Commission] will need to take notice as talent moves.”
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Elsewhere
- The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a comprehensive series on the geopolitics of subsea data cables. It’s particularly important given the recent rise in the number of cable-break incidents. Disclosure: Stilgherrian received an honorarium for two papers he wrote for the Carnegie Endowment a few years back.
- “More than half of all the top trending videos offering mental health advice on TikTok contain misinformation, a Guardian investigation has found.”
- Florida’s social media age restrictions are likely unconstitutional, says a federal judge. Unlike Australia, the US has a Bill of Rights.
- The Dead Internet Theory, the conjecture that the rise of disinformation and AI-generated content will make the web useless, is gaining traction. “It’s clear that, very soon (if not already), we cannot verify that there’s a real human behind online content,” reports iTWire. Which is not the same as whether it’s true or not.
- In Thailand, there’s been a boom in AI-based fortune telling.
- From the New York Times (gift link), “A new wave of ‘reasoning’ systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don’t know why.”
- A new statistical analysis looks at how AI is depicted in movies and how often AI is the villain.
- In Europe, new regulations for smart device energy labelling and ecodesign require software support for at least five years from the date of last sale, as well as labelling highlighting battery life and repairability.
- Finally, according to evolution your smartphone is a parasite. Which is fair enough, given that language is a virus.
MUSIC PODCAST SECOND PILOT POSTED: My good friend Snarky Platypus and I have posted the second 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
It’s still too early for this. The Australian government is still working out who’s even in it, let alone what their plan is.
What’s next?
Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 22 July, which is more than six weeks away, but we may see some policy announcements before then.
In any event, we’re descending into the winter break, so this newsletter will not be published on Friday 27 June. I’ll be taking a holiday back in my hometown of Adelaide.
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).
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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.