Mentioned in today’s edition: Claude, Federal Court, Palantir, Joanna Stern, RCS messages, SA Police, VIQ Solutions, and Linux. Plus, deals on Sony headphones, Samsung Galaxy tablets and Google Pixel phones.

The News

Court transcript breach debacle reminds us sometimes cybersecurity is not handing data to shady subcontractors

The Australian company that does the transcription for Federal Court cases is accused of illegally handing over data to an offshore transcription automation company (ABC News). Staff at VIQ Solutions have been blowing the whistle about how Indian-based employees had access to — and in some cases were responsible for transcribing — highly sensitive court documents without the court's knowledge. Staff said transcription was happening too fast for humans and the output contained serious errors.

The Sizzle: Typing up court docs might seem not seem like an important topic, but the Federal Court hears some of the most sensitive and important information: Australian spy operations, child sexual abuse, high-profile corporate cases etc. It's also fundamentally a tech story because matters of data privacy and cybersecurity rely on understanding people's behaviour and creating oversight. We can build the most technically secure systems in the world, but as long as there's someone in the chain who is willing to bend the rules to save a buck — well, bad actors, there's your in. 

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Your AI lawyer does not get client-lawyer confidentiality

A US judge has rejected a bid to treat someone's conversation with an AI chatbot about their legal matters as legally privileged (Business Insider). Brad Heppner, a startup founder accused of $150m of fraud, received a subpoena for his discussions with Claude — including logs showing him game planning his legal strategy. After his lawyers claimed Heppner's chats were protected, Judge Jed Rakoff said lol no they're not and actually speaking to an AI chatbot counts as disclosing it to a third party. 

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How drones, thermal sensors and AI helped with missing boy search

When Gus Lamont went missing in September last year, SA Police used some interesting tech to assist their search (Information Age). Police flew helicopters with infrared sensors, planes with specialised cameras and drones around the area where Gus disappeared to capture high-density data on the area. They then relied on AI to help analyse the data. This tech was able to immediately identify thousands of sheep, goats and kangaroos, but sadly no Gus. Still, pretty cool to be able to visually search hundreds of square kilometres in short order. 

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

This Norwegian researcher is not "Havana" good time

For a few years, there's been a debate in the national security and science circles whether US diplomatic staff have been suffering from "Havana Syndrome" — a collection of symptoms purportedly created by hypersonic weapons. 

The Washington Post has a super interesting article on it (archived), centred around the story of one Norwegian researcher who thought Havana Syndrome is bullshit. He set out to prove this by creating his own hypersonic weapon and testing it on himself. Unfortunately for him (in two ways) it worked and he reportedly suffered "neurological symptoms similar ... [to] hundreds of US spies and diplomats around the world." Oops!

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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