### Issue 2189 - Monday 7th October, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- WSJ reporting that telco backdoor designed for USA spooks used by Chinese hackers
- X has to pay a fine for not co-operating with eSafety Commissioner
- Grok Academy's former boss, James Curran, is a dirty old man
- Three YouTueb videos you might enjoy
- Cheap Telstra pre-paid, Coursera Plus, 2TB & 4TB SSDs, Steam Melbourne International Games Week sale, PSVR2 PC adapter

## The News

### WSJ reporting that telco backdoor designed for USA spooks used by Chinese hackers

You know how tech people keep telling the cops and government that if you add a backdoor to systems like end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, that backdoor will be used by everyone, not just the "good guys"? The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon got into "surveillance systems" that are "used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations" at Verizon, AT&T and Lumen. It's unclear what data was accessed, just "a vast collection of internet traffic from internet service providers that count businesses large and small, and millions of Americans, as their customers" and what equipment was vulnerable (maybe Cisco, but unconfirmed).

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### X has to pay a fine for not co-operating with eSafety Commissioner

X has to pay a $610,500 fine for failing to co-operate with the eSafety Commissioner's request for information about steps X takes to address CSAM material on its platform. The transparency notice was sent to Twitter in Feb 2023 and was rebranded/merged into X in March 2023, so X's lawyers tried to use the argument that "hey that fine was for Twitter and Twitter doesn't exist, so we aren't paying". The court said it upheld the fine because if it didn't, "it could have set the concerning precedent that a foreign company's merger with another foreign company might enable it to avoid regulatory obligations in Australia". eSafety is now commencing "civil penalty proceedings against X Corp. in relation to its alleged non-compliance with the transparency notice".

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### Grok Academy's former boss, James Curran, is a dirty old man

Grok Academy/National Computer Science School delivered coding classes to over 200,000 Australian high school kids and university students for over a decade, but that's all about to shit the bed thanks to its creepy boss, James Curran. There's been multiple investigations into his behaviour that confirm harassment of female students but it wasn't until a third investigation in May 2024 by Grok Academy that they decided to sack him. This dirty old man spammed dozens of kids (they're in high school for fucks sake!) with Facebook messages late at night asking inappropriate things. He would also agree to mentor female students and start inappropriate conversations with them too, all while abusing his position of power. It's disgusting stuff, good riddance.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Three YouTueb videos you might enjoy

- Loads of videos from AusNOG 2024 got uploaded recently. I liked this one from Paul Tremlett at TPG explaining how they're building out their 5G network.
- I can't be the only one who's noticed that Chinese apps (Temu, Aliexpress, etc) look absolutely wild and are packed full of info compared to "western" apps that are clean/minimalist/lots of whitespace.
- This guy just wanted to restore a 35 year old old Mac SE/30 but ended up practically gutting the entire thing with salvaged ICs, new parts, reproduction PCBs and even a translucent reproduction case.

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## Bargains

- Telstra pre-paid $35 credit (6 months on the casual plan) - $12 from Telstra
- Coursera Plus Annual Subscription 50% off - $296.50 from Coursera
- Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB SSD - $243.10 from Amazon USA
- Samsung T9 4TB Portable SSD - $485.19 from Amazon USA
- Games featured in Melbourne International Games Week are on sale on Steam
- PlayStation VR2 PC Adapter - $78 from Harvey Norman

## Image Of The Day

Dynamic Graphics Photograph 44: Corporate Concepts 2 (Internet Archive / ShivaShaw)

## The End

📻 Elliott Smith - L.A.

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