The Weekly Cybers #72
PM Anthony Albanese is still all for social media age restrictions, digital identities are a challenge to traditional espionage, and robot taxis are being lured to their death in LA.
The Weekly Cybers #72 | 13 June 2025
Welcome to a quiet week
It’s another quiet winter week in Australia’s digital policy salt mines. Albo is pushing the social media age restrictions, and that’s about it.
Still, Jim Penman of Jim’s Mowing etc fame has made an AI version on himself so he can more effectively share his wisdom. And there’s something about furries.
And as usual there’s quite a few stories about AI.
Albo keeps pumping the age assurance handle
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has once more talked up the importance of implementing age restrictions for social media.
In his speech to the National Press Club on Tuesday, he said that Australia’s “world-leading legislation” introducing a ban for under-16s “arose from a courageous campaign led by parents and backed by the Australian media”.
It’s about creating a community standard as well as a legal one, y’see.
“[It’s about] giving parents and teachers a signal they can point to when they’re talking with children about how to engage with technology safely,” Albanese said.
“This matters, and we won’t be taking a backward step on it.”
Meanwhile the Age Assurance Technology Trial will be publishing its preliminary findings next Friday 20 June.
And while we’re protecting the kiddies...
InnovationAus reports on all the other reforms designed to reshape the digital environment for young people, “from gaming to educational apps”.
And in France, President Emmanuel Macron has called for an EU-wide social media ban for under-15s after a fatal school stabbing.
Also in the news
- Digital identities are challenging traditional espionage according to analysis from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). “Even if you can travel on false documents, a simple Google search uncovers your lack of an online profile and digital legend,” writes Kyle McCurdy. This isn’t a completely new problem though. Way back in 2011, your writer reported how former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty had said that Facebook had killed the undercover cop.
- Victim-survivors of domestic and family violence will soon receive better support from their telco under new industry rules made by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). They come into force on 1 July.
- The eSafety Commission has posted at length about converging trends in generative AI and child safety.
- Jim Penman, the founder of Jim’s Group — which includes everything from Jim’s Mowing and Jim’s Cleaning to Jim’s Remedial Massage and Jim’s Life Coaching — has made an AI version of himself. You can chat with AI Jim about everything from franchising to his self-published research on epigenetics and biohistory.
- Telco Amaysim has launched an AI-generated TV commercial. It’s very orange.
- The new industry and science minister, Tim Ayres, reckons Australia has “no alternative” but to embrace the new technology and seek to become a world leader in regulating and using AI. “The alternative is to sit back right and just to be on the end of somebody else’s supply chain,” he said, naming an alternative.
- The Guardian’s Josh Taylor has put together an excellent backgrounder on what they’re calling the shadowy world of data brokers.
- The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has sold its stake in Digital Asset Holdings, which was part of its failed attempt to build a blockchain-based share registry.
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Elsewhere
- Some people are becoming so obsessed wth ChatGPT that they’re spiralling into severe delusions. These stories are wild.
- A former board member of OpenAI says the Trump regime’s attacks on science and research are a ‘great gift’ to China on AI. There’s been quite a few stories along these lines, including The Economist saying that China’s leaders believe they can outwit American cash and utopianism ($).
- Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney, the AI image-creation service, for copyright infringement.
- From ABC News, “New peer-reviewed research has found artificial intelligence could boost productivity in urban planning by automating tasks such as data analysis and report drafting.”
- ChatGPT suffered an outage on Tuesday and, as Pivot to AI put it, “fake jobs” ground to a halt. “You could hear the screams of the vibe coders, the marketers, and the LinkedIn posters around the world. The Drum even ran a piece about marketing teams grinding to a halt because their lying chatbot called in sick.”
- Los Angeles cops have been accessing video footage from Waymo self-driving taxis to monitor the riots there, so protesters have been setting them on fire. According to X account @ScannerPacific — which I won’t link to because that would mean going to X — LAPD has been asking Waymo to shut down the app because people are calling the robots specifically to ambush them. And boy, do they burn!
- “Unknown threat actors have defaced the US government’s vaccine website with AI-generated furry content,” reports Cyber Daily. Alas, we don’t have a screenshot of the actual site.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new yet.
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.
What’s next?
Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 22 July, which is more than five weeks away.
With Australian politics now descending into its traditional winter break, 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).
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.