19 December 2025

Welcome, and that’s a wrap

What a year! So much AI. So much social media. So much cybers. It has been, as they say on reality TV, a journey.

The Bondi Beach mass shooting has of course dominated this week, with a rapid announcement of new hate speech laws — which of course will have an online component. We have yet to see any details.

And of course there’s the usual deluge of AI news.

As I look back on The Weekly Cybers for 2025, I note that I haven’t really covered fintech. Personally I find it a bit boring, despite the potential for reporting on scams and such. The problem for me is that it’s mostly just people who say things like “payment rails” trying to invent new ways to insert themselves into your cashflows.

Is that too harsh?

I also don’t really cover cryptocurrency and related investments because... well, I think the reasons are obvious. Besides, there’s already plenty of people writing about that, and some of them aren’t fanboys.

Are these reasonable choices?

If you have any feedback, suggestions for improvements, complaints, whatever, you can just reply to this email.

Policy fallout from Bondi Beach mass shooting

The vast majority of news about Sunday’s terrorist incident at Bondi Beach is outside the scope of this newsletter — apart from the announcement of new hate speech laws.

The five changes, to quote the Guardian, are:

• A new aggravated hate speech offence for preachers and leaders who promote violence.
• Increased penalties for hate speech promoting violence.
• Making “hate” an aggravating factor in sentencing crimes for online threats and harassment.
• Developing a regime for listing organisations whose leaders engage in hate speech promoting violence or racial hatred.
• Developing a federal offence for serious vilification based on race and/or advocating racial supremacy.

In broad terms, these and the other proposals represent an acceleration of some the proposals from antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal.

As the Guardian also writes, “The [Segal] report also tasks the eSafety commissioner, the antisemitism envoy, and the communications minister with addressing online antisemitism by early 2026, including the potential creation of new rules to address online hate”.

There are few details yet. The Opposition is calling for parliament to be recalled to address the issues, and at the time of writing this has not been completely ruled out.

And then there’s the conspiracy theories...

“In the wake of Sunday’s tragic Bondi shooting, conspiracy theories and deliberate misinformation have spread on social media,” reports The Conversation.

“One thing some people have latched onto is the idea Google Trends data show a spike in searches for ‘Naveed Akram’ — the name of one of the attackers — from Tel Aviv (or other locations) before the shooting occurred. In a surprising lateral jump, this is taken to show Akram must be an Israeli agent”.

Yeah nah.

There’s also been plenty of AI-generated disinformation and straight-up fiction.

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST IS ABOUT FOOD: My good friend Snarky Platypus and I express some opinions in The 9pm Slop Bowl of Discourse with Snarky Platypus. Look for “The 9pm Edict” in your podcast app.

Also in the news

• Elon Musk’s X has won an appeal to lift the block on Australians seeing the video of Charlie Kirk being assassinated. Their argument was that it wasn’t excessively offensive, and was an objective record of a “public event of historical and political significance”.

• “The decision by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service [ASIS] to feature its director-general and operational officers on the Seize the Yay podcast marks a deliberate shift towards public transparency, an unprecedented move for Australia’s most secretive intelligence agency,” reports the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

• The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has some security guidance for AI in small business.

[Update 20 December 2025: ACSC seems to have taken down this page. The link will be updated and this notice removed if and when it comes back online.]

• The Productivity Commission has released the report from its inquiry, Harnessing data and digital technology. I haven’t had a chance to read it.

• Is the University of Sydney envious of Western Sydney University’s cyber failures? Because USyd has been hacked, with 13,000 people affected.

• The ACCC has published a snapshot on AI developments, which it says “highlights the need for continued monitoring of emerging technologies”.

• Google has started testing real estate listings. Bad news for the share prices of REA Group and Domain’s parent company Costar.

• Amusingly, the ACCC can’t speed-test the NBN’s new residential internet plans because 2Gbps is too fast for its equipment.

• Optus may be sacking a few people following those widely-reported Triple Zero outages. Here’s the full report (PDF) released on Thursday.

IF YOU FIND THIS NEWSLETTER HELPFUL, PLEASE SUPPORT IT: The Weekly Cybers is currently unfunded. It’d be lovely if you threw a few dollars into the tip jar at stilgherrian.com/tip. Please consider, especially at the summer freelancer drought looms. And, you know, it’s Christmas.

Elsewhere

• Via ABC News, “Trump Media & Technology Group, the company which owns the US president’s social media platform Truth Social, has bought a fusion power company for $US6 billion ($9 billion)”. It’s all about powering the AI boom, of course. Or at least extracting shareholder value from government investment in AI.

• I’m sure that Trump’s moves to ban US states from regulating AI is completely unrelated.

• From the New York Times, the AI spending frenzy is also propping up the real economy (gift link). I’m loving that AI is being contrasted with “the real economy”.

Update: I only saw post-sending that this New York Times story is from 27 August. I suspect it’s probably still a valid commentary. So much of the US economy is being inflated by the techbros and their mad schemes.

• A third of UK citizens have used AI for emotional support, according to recent research.

• “A once-thriving Discord channel for gay gamers over 30 experienced a mass exodus after an AI chatbot was forced onto the server,” reports Queerty.

• Robot vacuum cleaner pioneer iRobot, maker of Roomba, has filed for bankruptcy. It turns out you can’t sell premium robots for nearly 10 times the price of does-the-job-OK cheapies.

• Robin AI is a legal review AI that was really humans, and it just went broke, reports Pivot to AI.

• Also from the Pivot, “Resonant Computing presents itself as a manifesto for a human-centred internet”, but it’s the same AI slop from the same AI guys. Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto? Gawd.

• A headline at Oligarch Watch reads: Why Sam Altman is getting into the pornography business. Is the answer “Because he’ll make a shipload of money”?

• “In an attempt to stop Ukrainian drones from reaching their targets, the Russian authorities have significantly ramped up online repression,” reports the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. How far will it go?

Inquiries of note

Nothing new this week.

What’s next?

Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 3 February 2026, per the sittings schedule posted a few weeks ago.

And that’s it for 2025. At this stage I plan to return for The Weekly Cybers on Friday 23 January. Rarely does anything important happen in this country’s policy circles until after Australia Day anyway.

Thank you very much for your support this year, and all the best to you and yours for the holiday season.

DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? Let me know. If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.