The Attorney-General announced it'll spend $11m to develop "a mobile app and secure website that will enable all Australians to easily and swiftly protect their identity credentials from cyber crooks". This unnamed app will work on top of the Credential Protection Register - a service the Attorney-General operates that blocks the use of known compromised credentials through the Document Verification Service. The new app will "will allow an individual to be notified, in real time, if someone is using their identity without their consent. Individuals will then be able to act immediately to control their identity credentials by enabling or disabling their use for verification". Sounds pretty good, hope they don't fuck it up.
Satya Nadella sent a memo to all Microsoft employees last week telling them "if you're faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security". I would have assumed that was common sense, but apparently that wasn't the case for Microsoft. In the memo he lays out three core principles that will guide "the entirety of our organization" - Secure by Design, Secure by Default and Secure Operations. The memo also mentions "prioritizing security over supporting legacy systems", a departure from Microsoft's status quo. You know it's serious when they're going to link some executive pay to "meeting our security plans and milestones". This is a response to a series of very shitty security issues like an Exchange 0-day that allowed Chinese hackers to access US government emails and the enormous SolarWinds incident.
Does the Australian government's News Media Bargaining Code totally confuse you? Why does it exist? Why is it so stupid? Why is Meta threatening to remove news from its platforms? Why are people who hate Meta and Google taking their side on this issue? Axel Bruns, a professor at QUT, has a blog post answering all those questions. A good quote from the post: "having news on Facebook may be important for society, as research shows that many citizens now use Facebook and other social media to inform themselves about the news; but it is not at all important to Meta itself, since Facebook is also used for many other purposes which generate more engagement and revenue than the news. In fact, for Meta news and politics is often more trouble than it's worth: while it might generate some engagement and advertising revenue, it also generates plenty of controversial debate, abuse, hate speech, mis- and disinformation that are costly to moderate".
Department of Employment and Industrial Affairs, [1970-1990?] (National Library of Australia)
📻 Mr. Mystery - Long
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