Issue 2295 - Thursday 20 March 2025

The News

Australia is reportedly a spyware customer which is why our MPs love using disappearing messaging apps

Australia is accused by researchers of being a customer of notorious spyware company Paragon which sells software for hacking into people’s messaging applications (Cyberscoop). Paragon’s zero-click hacking tools, which the company claims are only provided to democratic governments fighting crime, have been reportedly used to hack journalists, activists and opposing politicians, according to Meta (Reuters). Now, research firm Citizen Lab has found evidence that its tools were operational in six countries including Australia (Citizen Lab). I can’t find any evidence from the federal government that it has used Paragon’s tools but I’ve pinged both them and Meta.

I guess the knowledge that someone could have been snooping on their communications will be news to the many politicians and public servants who are taking advantage of how many government agencies don’t restrict ephemeral messaging apps, according to the information commissioner’s recent audit (The Guardian Australia).

People don’t want to share fun stuff because it’ll get slurped up into AI models

Hollywood creators are ditching plans to share scripts, content art and other creations because they don’t want it get sucked into AI models. Star Wars television show Andor’s showrunner Tony Gilroy says he won’t get forward his plans to put out 1,500 pages of stuff about the show because “why help the fucking robots any more than you can?” (The Verge).

This is the reality on the internet now: if you upload it, it will be sucked up into someone else’s AI model for their personal gain regardless of what you want. We know that people running these companies don’t care about your preferences — just ask git-hosting service SourceHut which this week said it’s being inundated by “aggressive LLM crawlers” despite its robots.txt (sr.ht). It’s just scuttlebutt but there’s a lot of speculation about how even major companies continue to crawl the web while pretending to be web browsing users. It majorly sucks because it means the only way to protect your intellectual project is not to share it.

Get ready to start seeing more politicians online

Folks, start your ad blockers because it’s election ad season. Clive Palmer is back on his bullshit and spending $50k daily in YouTube and Google ads alone (AFR, $). Meanwhile, I found a new climate focused “news organisation” with fewer than 10 articles that has run 1000+ anti-Peter Dutton Facebook and Instagram ads, outspending both major parties for much of the past month (Crikey, $). And if it’s not politicians or political groups, it’s scammers running ads featuring Twiggy Forrest — a phenomenon that we’re about to find out a lot more about because a US district court just ordered Meta to hand over details about the ads as part of the Australian billionaire’s suit against the tech company (AFR, $). I’m personally a massive nerd about digital political advertising so if you see anything new, novel or weird, please let me know!

Leftovers

Oh, Also

There was an anti-authentication app protest at an Australian university

The University of Melbourne has quite stringent authorisations requirements. How do I know this? Because complaints about Okta asking them to authenticate, then re-authenticate, their devices several times in a lecture are all over various University of Melbourne online spaces. Which bubbled over into this: perhaps the first ever anti-authentication rally at the uni this week (Reddit).

I’ll keep reporting on this movement which, I’m told, may soon spread to other university campuses.

Bargains

General

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

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.