The News

Australia’s tech industry wants to build data centres, train AI on copyright material and get Albo using AI

Let AI train on copyrighted material, cut red tape for building data centres and make government use AI — those are some of the items on the Australian wish list of Atlassian co-founder and voice of the local tech industry Scott Farquhar (ABC News). The Tech Council of Australia chair laid out his plans to ensure that Australia doesn’t miss “a chance to lead the next industrial revolution” (Tech Council’s full press release here).

The Sizzle: Not great timing that Farquhar’s company also laid off 150 staff yesterday in a move that some linked to the company’s embrace of AI (CyberDaily). On Farquhar’s specific demands: I’d really like to know more about why there’s such a push for Australia to be a data centre mecca. It’s been attributed to Australia’s location, our laws, and our cheap energy. On that last point — proponents are eager to promote clean green energy as the source, but I can’t help but worry that it’s our wealth of non-renewables that might appeal to these companies…

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Like it or not, the future of the internet is age-gated

Amid all the excitement yesterday about YouTube, I forgot to include that Google is rolling out its age checking technology in the US, too (The Verge). Meanwhile, tech companies continue to ratchet up enforcement of their age restrictions with Spotify the latest to require facial scans or ID to access explicit content in the UK (Engadget).

The Sizzle: Reason nailed it: the age-gated internet is here. Earlier this week, I said that UK’s rollout completely closes the door to any idea that the teen social media ban’s age check requirements would ever be overturned. Now I expect they’ll all just default to doing it globally even if there’s not a local law. We’ll look back the last 25~ years of essentially no age restrictions on the internet as an odd blip in our history — the big question is how we’ll feel about it once it’s gone?

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The group that was linked to the Qantas hacking didn’t do the Qantas hack

It wasn’t Scattered Spider behind the Qantas hack, says leading cybersecurity outlet Bleeping Computer, but another group called ShinyHunters (albeit one with some crossover in membership). It cites a Google threat intelligence group report saying that hackers were targeting employees with phishing efforts, telling them they were IT support staff, and guided to install a “malicious version of Salesforce’s Data Loader OAuth App” (Google).

The Sizzle: This probably mostly annoys me but a lot of Australian media reported that the Qantas hack was essentially confirmed to be Scattered Spider. It’s not really a massive deal to me that it wasn’t, nor will it annoy most people, but it shits me!!!!

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Leftovers

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Oh, Also

It’s very easy to see what famous people listen to on Spotify

What’s Sam Altman been listening to? Which Backstreet Boys song does JD Vance listen to while making dinner? Thankfully, these questions and more are answered by Panama Playlists, a website made by an anonymous individual who exploited Spotify’s fairly weak privacy guardrails to find out how famous people are using their accounts. Now, if that sounds familiar to some of the true Cam fans out there, you might remember I did something similar (but not as systematic) for then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison in 2021 (Crikey, $).

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Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Mobile

The End

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