Scale of Chinese spying overwhelms Western Governments | Deepfakes and falsehoods are legal in Australian political advertising | Inside the effort to stop foes swaying the November election with AI

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• Beijing is conducting espionage activities on what Western governments say is an unprecedented scale, mobilizing security agencies, private companies and Chinese civilians in its quest to undermine rival states and bolster the country’s economy. Western spy agencies, unable to contain Beijing’s activity, are raising the alarm publicly, urging businesses and individuals to be on alert in their interactions with China. But given the country is already deeply entwined in the global economy, it is proving a Sisyphean task, said Calder Walton, a national security expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Western governments “are coming to terms with events, in many ways, after the events,” he said. The Wall Street Journal

• Outside of protections in the Commonwealth Electoral Act against misleading statements related to the actual voting process, no legislation at a federal level presents misleading claims like these in political advertising. The AEC itself is not keen on being the one who administers the laws, preferring that a different organisation, or a completely new one, be given the job. Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers told ABC NEWS Verify that "our involvement in that process will damage our neutrality, and it will therefore have an impact on people's perception of the integrity of the vote". ABC News

• Nimmo’s report said OpenAI had uncovered 20 operations and deceptive networks around the world this year. In one of them, an Iranian was using ChatGPT to refine malicious software intended to compromise Android devices. In another, a Russian firm used ChatGPT to generate fake news articles and the company’s image generator, Dall-E, to craft lurid, cartoonish pictures of warfare in Ukraine in a bid to better attract eyeballs in crowded social media feeds. The Washington Post

Australia

Deepfakes and falsehoods are legal in political advertising. Not everyone is on board with fixing it
ABC News
Matt Martino
Outside of protections in the Commonwealth Electoral Act against misleading statements related to the actual voting process, no legislation at a federal level presents misleading claims like these in political advertising. The AEC itself is not keen on being the one who administers the laws, preferring that a different organisation, or a completely new one, be given the job. Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers told ABC NEWS Verify that "our involvement in that process will damage our neutrality, and it will therefore have an impact on people's perception of the integrity of the vote".

Inquiry stops short of election ban on AI deepfakes
InnovationAus
Justin Hendry
A parliamentary inquiry has rebuffed calls for laws banning AI-generated images and videos in election campaigns despite acknowledging the technology will almost certainly be used to spread disinformation.

Australia needs to lift its game in science research: Brian Schmidt
The Australian
Helen Trinca
It comes down to not being a political priority. I think a lot of it comes down to David Horne’s The Lucky Country. Life has been pretty easy for us; we dig things out of the ground and these resources are taking care of us. So the connection of our affluence to our research investment – which I see absolutely buried in the psyche of the US, of China, of Europe – just isn’t in place here.

China

Scale of Chinese spying overwhelms Western Governments
The Wall Street Journal
Max Colchester and Daniel Michaels
Beijing is conducting espionage activities on what Western governments say is an unprecedented scale, mobilizing security agencies, private companies and Chinese civilians in its quest to undermine rival states and bolster the country’s economy.Western spy agencies, unable to contain Beijing’s activity, are raising the alarm publicly, urging businesses and individuals to be on alert in their interactions with China. But given the country is already deeply entwined in the global economy, it is proving a Sisyphean task, said Calder Walton, a national security expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Western governments “are coming to terms with events, in many ways, after the events,” he said.

Chinese scientists hack military grade encryption on quantum computer: paper
South China Morning Post
Zhang Tong
Chinese scientists have mounted what they say is the world’s first effective attack on a widely used encryption method using a quantum computer. The breakthrough poses a “real and substantial threat” to the long-standing password-protection mechanism employed across critical sectors, including banking and the military, according to the researchers..In the latest work led by Wang Chao, of Shanghai University, the team said it used a quantum computer produced by Canada’s D-Wave Systems to successfully breach cryptographic algorithms.

USA

This threat hunter chases U.S. foes exploiting AI to sway the election
The Washington Post
Cat Zakrzewski
Nimmo’s report said OpenAI had uncovered 20 operations and deceptive networks around the world this year. In one of them, an Iranian was using ChatGPT to refine malicious software intended to compromise Android devices. In another, a Russian firm used ChatGPT to generate fake news articles and the company’s image generator, Dall-E, to craft lurid, cartoonish pictures of warfare in Ukraine in a bid to better attract eyeballs in crowded social media feeds.

The Cloud conundrum
The Wire China
Eliot Chen
The world's AI ambitions are currently tethered to the U.S.-built cloud. Can the U.S. keep it that way?

North Asia

TSMC plans more chip plants in Europe, Taiwan official says
South China Morning Post
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is planning more plants in Europe with a focus on the market for artificial intelligence chips, according to a senior Taiwanese official, as the chip maker expands its global footprint.

Europe

All hail the AI Eurocrat: Commission rolls out its own ChatGPT-like tool
POLITICO
Pieter Haeck
The European Commission is known more for regulating artificial intelligence tools than deploying them — until now. The Commission’s IT department, DG DIGIT, has rolled out an AI pilot project to assist staff in drafting policy documents. While the Commission has been a global front-runner in regulating AI models underpinning tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it also wants to use AI’s benefits in the European Union executive daily proceedings.

Some of the web’s sketchiest sites share an address in Iceland
The New York Times
Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu
That’s because the museum’s street address, Kalkofnsvegur 2, is also the registered address for Withheld for Privacy, a company that is part of a booming and largely unregulated industry in Iceland and elsewhere that allows people who operate online domains to shield their identities.

EU braces for Chinese trade blows in aftermath of EV tariff vote
South China Morning Post
Finbarr Bermingham
European Union officials are bracing for an onslaught of retaliatory trade actions after a team of Chinese officials tasked with resolving an EV tariff row were hauled back to Beijing over the weekend. The bloc’s punitive import tariffs of up to 35.3 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are set to kick in by the end of the month, capping a year-long anti-subsidy investigation that China fought ferociously.

UK

Social media must do more to tackle payment fraud, says UK regulator
Financial Times
Akila Quinio and Martin Arnold
He likened the problem to “whack-a-mole”, as fraudsters that are blocked on one site “keep popping up” elsewhere. Tech groups and banks sharing data with law enforcement would help to take criminals “out of the system altogether”, he noted.

Microsoft UK chief to head government’s industrial strategy council
Financial Times
Jim Pickard and Michael O’Dwyer
Clare Barclay, the chief executive of Microsoft UK, has been appointed to a new role overseeing the British government’s industrial strategy. Barclay will chair the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council, which will provide advice to the government in partnership with businesses, unions and other stakeholders. “Whilst we fully embrace the industries of today, we must also have a clear plan for future growth, and the advisory council will play a central role in shaping and delivering this plan,” she said.

Big Tech

Elon Musk’s vision of robotaxis and humanoid robots triggers a $99.6 billion sell-off
The Sydney Morning Herald
Stephen Bartholomeusz
Earlier this year Elon Musk said that anybody who didn’t believe Tesla was going to solve autonomy shouldn’t be an investor in Tesla. After last week’s much-hyped Robotaxi event, it seems a large number of investors took his advice.

Tesla Optimus bots were remotely operated at Cybercab event
Bloomberg
Edward Ludlow and David Welch
Tesla used humans to remotely control some capabilities of its Optimus robot prototypes at a recent event designed to generate investor enthusiasm for forthcoming products

SpaceX catches giant Starship booster in fifth flight test
Reuters
Joey Roulette
The novel catch-landing method marked the latest advance in SpaceX's test-to-failure development campaign for a fully reusable rocket designed to loft more cargo into orbit, ferry humans to the moon for NASA and eventually reach Mars - the ultimate destination envisioned by Musk.

Google wants US judge's app store ruling put on hold
Reuters
Mike Scarcella
In a court filing on Friday night, Google said U.S. District Judge James Donato’s injunction order, which goes into effect on Nov. 1, would harm the company and introduce "serious safety, security, and privacy risks into the Android ecosystem."

Artificial Intelligence

With AI warning, Nobel winner joins ranks of laureates who’ve cautioned about the risks of their own work
CNN
Meg Tirrell
When computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his work on machine learning, he immediately issued a warning about the power of the technology that his research helped propel: artificial intelligence.

Meta’s Yann LeCun says worries about A.I.’s existential threat are ‘complete B.S.’
TechCrunch
Anthony Ha
LeCun argued that today’s large language models lack some key cat-level capabilities, like persistent memory, reasoning, planning, and an understanding of the physical world. In his view, LLMs merely demonstrate that “you can manipulate language and not be smart,” and they will never lead to true artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Misc

The Internet Archive is back as a read-only service after cyberattacks
The Verge
Tom Warren
The Internet Archive is now back online in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to founder Brewster Kahle. “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.” While you can access the Wayback Machine to search 916 billion web pages that have been archived over time, you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive.

Drones are changing modern warfare
ABC News
Norman Hermant
From the Middle East to battlefields all over the world, drones are dominating warfare and nowhere is their evolution happening as fast as it is in Ukraine. Norman Hermant reports.

Research

AI-pocalypse Now? Disinformation, AI, and the super election year
Munich Security Conference
Randolf Carr, Paula Kohler
AI-enhanced disinformation was predicted to wreak havoc on elections around the world in 2024. However, the real negative effect of AI seems to have been limited. Several factors can explain why AI disinformation mostly fell flat, but they should not give rise to complacency. Technological and societal trends around AI indicate that greater disruptions to democratic processes are on the horizon.

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