Issue 2299 - Wednesday 26 March 2025

The News

Federal budget tech snoozefest

Last night’s federal budget was a bit of a snoozefest when it came to tech. I did a wrap at Crikey ($) but TLDR there was no new money for boosting the tech industry here or even new approaches to tech regulation. AI and quantum computing weren’t mentioned (SmartCompany). “Cyber” was included just six times — all in relation to old spending (CyberDaily). ITNews did a full list of tech projects, with the big ones being upgrades to existing government tech infrastructure like My Health Record, ASIC’s business register and NDIA’s systems. Australia’s tech industry and civic society groups are bummed by the lack of any cash, naturally. It’s surprising there was so little given the domestic struggles with R&D funding, a push for more sovereign tech capability and — given the direction some countries are headed — the sense that if Australia wants to do real regulation on things like AI, it’s probably going to have to do a lot of this work itself.

You will one day get pwned whether you’re Troy Hunt or a US national security advisor

On a long enough timeline, the rate of not being pwned drops to zero. It doesn’t matter if you’re Australia’s best known cybersecurity guy HaveIBeenPwned’s Troy Hunt who admitted yesterday that his Mailchimp account got phished when he woke up bleary eyed in London (Troy Hunt). Apparently, 16,000 emails were on the list, including people who had unsubscribed? Weird choice by Mailchimp to keep those. It also even happens to people like US national security advisor Michael Waltz who seemingly accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat that was used to co-ordinate Houthi targets in Yemen (The Atlantic). If you haven’t read the piece, I really, really recommend it. The moral of the story? The weakest links in most systems are humans, and that the best way to protect something is to make it so that humans can’t expose it — whether it’s communicating war plans over protected systems or not keeping lists of people who don’t want to be contacted anymore.

Trump is making companies want to move away from US cloud providers

It’s early, but there’s signs suggesting that people outside of the US are looking to reduce their reliance on US-based companies because of waves hand everything that’s happening over there. European cloud-based companies say they’ve seen an increase in customers asking about transferring away from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, all American-based providers who power a lot of the internet (WIRED, $). While there’s been some push for Australian government to do the same — at least a physically located cloud run by a US company (InnovationAus, $) — the federal government has actually fairly recently chosen not to require Digital ID data to be held in Australia, for example (InnovationAus, $). Meanwhile, things like India dropping its digital ad tax shows just how much power the US holds and is increasingly willing to wield for its own short term gain (Reuters).

Leftovers

Oh, Also

Have you heard the Kylie Minogue song about being a font?

The world is full of such pleasant surprises. Like today, I discovered that Kylie Minogue sang on a famous Japanese techno artist’s song from the perspective of a font, German Bold Italic (YouTube). This information comes from a blog post from a Berlin-based font studio (Dinamo) about the song and the font, which was released along with the track in 1997. And if you’d like to download the font it’s available here on an archived version of Kylie’s old website (Wayback Machine).

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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