Hi all, apologies for the late email. I tried to send this this out a few hours ago but, honestly, I clicked a wrong button and it didn’t get sent to subscribers. Sorry about that! - CW

The News

Trump is getting ready to bully the world for big tech

The Trump administration has stepped up its threats against countries like Australia that are taxing and regulating American tech companies. Trump posted on Truth Social that he was putting “all Countries with Digital Taxes, Legislation, Rules, or Regulations, on notice”, reportedly considering sanctioning the EU over its Digital Services Act (Reuters). Meanwhile, his Federal Trade Commission is also telling US companies not to “impose censorship” based on foreign laws or face legal consequences (Bleeping Computer).

The Sizzle: Given the success he’s had squeezing companies, universities and other domestic institutions, why wouldn’t Trump bully other countries? To be clear, Trump doesn’t know what the DSA is. But he intuitively hates that idea that boffins from other countries are trying to leverage US companies — that’s his domain! Australian politicians are saying they’ll continue to do things like the news media bargaining code (AFR, $), but pretty clearly they’re dragging their feet on doing anything.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Victoria’s ‘sovereign citizen’ shooter was very online

A Victorian self-described “sovereign citizen” who allegedly killed two police and injured another was an active member of online conspiracy theory communities. The accused, Dezi Freeman, had multiple online accounts which he used to take part in Australian doomsday prepper online communities and old-school conspiracy theory blogs. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called anti-government conspiracy ideology a “real concern” (PM dot gov dot au)

The Sizzle: I’ve immediately seen people clutch for ideas about how to respond to the threat of conspiracy theorist violence, floating proscribing sovereign citizens as a terrorist group or arresting more of them for contempt. The reason I’ve included this in a tech newsletter is because after Wieambilla, politicians like Peter Dutton immediately called for more anti-encryption police powers — even though the shooters didn’t use encrypted messaging apps (Guardian). There’s a lot of things we could do to address this problem, but we need to be careful about knee-jerk reactions that boil down to either more punitive measures or curtailing freedoms without proof it would help.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

If you use AI, you need to disclose it

People across industries want those who are using AI to disclose its use when making, well, anything to disclose it. Developer Mitchell Hashimoto wrote on GitHub that he believes that any pull requests — proposed changes to a project’s code — written using AI assistance should be disclosed because of “inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code”. Recently, Utah passed a law saying that police need to say when AI software has been used to help write their reports (Fast Democracy). There’s even a proposed standard for website HTML headers, AI-Disclosure, being floated (IETF).

The Sizzle: The AI cat is out of the bag. I think the only way to deal with it is norms, rules and laws about how people use it. Firstly, there always needs to be someone responsible for what AI produces, no matter how “autonomous” it is. Secondly, people should make it clear when AI’s been used in the production of something. It’s simply not possible for everyone to spend every waking minute analysing whether everything was made by a person or an “almost sounds human” machine.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

This Redditor is not having a good day

Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs found an incredible Reddit post from a guy who said he’d been paid “$250 a month by a residential IP network provider … to host devices in my own home) (KrebsonSecurity).

Why was someone paying him to host “two laptops hardwired into a modem… [running] some sort of custom application that runs and spawns several CMD prompts”? As it turns out, it appears the company, DSLRoot, is essentially a legal botnet service that has been used to fraudulently create fake traffic and generally cause headaches.

The best bit? The Redditor, who soon deleted their account after people replied by saying that choosing to run this out of your house is a very bad idea, appears to be a US Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance who works in cybersecurity. L M A O.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical and electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.