Australia to force tech giants to keep paying for news | Amazon donates $1m to Trump's inaugural fund | Chinese tech group Hikvision ditches Xinjiang surveillance projects
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Australia's government says it will create new rules to force big tech companies to pay local publishers for news. The long-awaited decision sets out a successor to a world-first law that Australia passed in 2021, which was designed to make giants like Meta and Google pay for hosting news on their platforms. BBC News
Amazon is the latest tech giant to donate to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund.
The company plans to give $1m to the fund, first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian
Chinese surveillance technology group Hikvision has terminated five contracts with local governments in the north-western region of Xinjiang, a move that could help shield it from pressure from the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump. Trump’s first administration blacklisted Hikvision in 2019. Financial Times
Australia
Australia to force tech giants to keep paying for news
BBC News
Hannah Ritchie
Australia's government says it will create new rules to force big tech companies to pay local publishers for news. The long-awaited decision sets out a successor to a world-first law that Australia passed in 2021, which was designed to make giants like Meta and Google pay for hosting news on their platforms. Earlier this year Meta - which owns Facebook and Instagram - announced it would not renew payment deals it had in place with Australian news organisations, setting up a standoff with lawmakers.
Big tech firms like Meta forced to pay for news, under Albanese government’s ‘news bargaining incentive’ charge
The Conversation
Rob Nicholls
Big tech companies would have to either do deals with news organisations to help fund journalism or pay a charge to the Australian government, under a new plan announced by the Albanese government on Thursday. The new plan follows the Morrison government-era system introduced in 2021 known as the news media bargaining code, which saw companies such as Google and Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) pay news organisations to help fund journalism.Can Labor win a game of '4D chess' against the tech giants?
ABC News
Brett Worthington
Remembering which way a knight can move in chess is hard enough without adding in a new dimension. Unveiling eagerly-awaited plans to slug tech companies to help prop up Australian journalism, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones insisted Labor's strategy was akin to "playing four-dimensional chess".
North Korean IT freelancer scam hits Australian firms
The Australian
Ben Packham
Australian businesses are being tricked into employing North Korean IT workers in a global scam by Kim Jong-un’s cash-starved regime to steal hard currency and Western trade secrets, Google’s threat intelligence arm warns. Mandiant chief analyst John Hultquist said the “bizarre” insider threat was exploding in the post-Covid freelance work environment, as companies relaxed hiring rules and allowed workers to log-on remotely. He said the scam had hit US companies hard, and was now affecting businesses in Australia and across Europe.
Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers departs the AEC
ABC News
After 11 years in the job, Tom Rogers has ended his term as the head of the Australian Electoral Commission, the independent body which oversees elections. He’s a former military man, and perhaps it made sense for a one-time soldier to be manning the ramparts of Australian democracy at a time when it's coming under assault from misinformation and disinformation.
Australian gemstone used in China’s hypersonic weapons could be security risk: study
South China Morning Post
Stephen Chen
Zircon from Australia could become fiercely contested by China and the United States, a geologist who works with the Chinese military has warned. While zircon is commonly valued as a gemstone, inside, it contains the metal zirconium. The metal can withstand very high temperatures, enabling ceramics, for example, to be heated to above 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,432 degrees Fahrenheit) and providing indispensable protection for hypersonic aircraft.
Smartphones and social media 'toxic' for children under 14, psychologist Jonathan Haidt says
ABC News
Fiona Purcell
Children's widespread use of smartphones and tablets has been labelled "insanity" by a United States social psychologist, who says Australia is "leading the way" with its "bold" new social media laws. Jonathan Haidt is part of a movement that aims to roll back the "phone-based childhood", which he says is "hurting" child and adolescent mental health. During an interview with Sarah Kanowski on ABC listen's Conversations podcast, Dr Haidt said more governments, including the United States Congress, should follow Australia's lead and mandate that 16 be the minimum age for accessing social media.
Tech whistleblowers urged to come forward and expose corporate wrongdoing
The Sydney Morning Herald
David Swan
Australia’s technology sector has not yet felt the “whistleblowing wave” that has torn through Silicon Valley and the European Union, and a new guide is aiming to encourage more insiders to come forward and expose corporate wrongdoing. The past year has been marked by scandals at local technology companies, including WiseTech Global, Grok Academy and Metigy, with executives at each organisation resigning after alleged misconduct was revealed by whistleblowers who raised concerns.
China
Chinese tech group Hikvision ditches Xinjiang surveillance projects
Financial Times
Eleanor Olcott
Chinese surveillance technology group Hikvision has terminated five contracts with local governments in the north-western region of Xinjiang, a move that could help shield it from pressure from the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump. Trump’s first administration blacklisted Hikvision in 2019 over its alleged role in facilitating human rights abuses against Xinjiang’s mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group.
AI crackdown: China stamps out tech misuse to preserve national literature and ideology
South China Morning Post
Sylvie Zhuang
Beijing is stepping up its defence of classic literature against AI misuse that it says could undermine and endanger China’s leading ideology. The Chinese government says AI’s “peculiar adaptations” from classic television dramas based on Chinese literature are “highly deceptive”. Like memes, these edited video clips are made largely for laughs and social media traction, and highlight Beijing’s challenges in regulating artificial intelligence.
USA
Amazon donates $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund as tech cozies up to president-elect
The Guardian
Dara Kerr
Amazon is the latest tech giant to donate to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund. The company plans to give $1m to the fund, first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Amazon follows Meta, Facebook’s parent company, also handing over $1m to Trump’s inaugural committee. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Friday that he, too, would make a personal donation of $1m, first reported by Fox News.
U.S. and China renew science agreement as officials brace for new tensions
The Washington Post
Katrina Northrop and Eva Dou
The United States and China renewed but narrowed a long-running science and technology agreement on Friday, marking continuity in their ties while also accounting for bilateral tensions that are likely to only grow under the incoming Trump administration. The U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement, which was first signed in 1979 to enable basic research collaboration between the two countries, will be renewed for five years under altered terms that reflect the fraught reality of today’s U.S.-China relationship, according to statements from the U.S. and Chinese governments.
US tech-defence leaders want to upend the establishment
The Strategist
Bill Sweetman
Elon Musk wants to cancel the F-35, get rid of manned combat aircraft generally and rely more on drones. It was no surprise, even without Musk’s comments along those lines, that the US Air Force punted any decision on the Next Generation Air Dominance air-combat project to the next administration. Leadership been undecided about how to proceed and about the impact of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program upon requirements. And the incoming Trump administration has dialled the chaos to 11.
US needs to do more make cyber attackers pay, Trump adviser says
Reuters
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's administration will examine ways to impose higher costs on private actors and U.S. adversaries who wage cyber attacks on America, Trump's pick for national security adviser, Representative Mike Waltz, said on Sunday. The comments come after U.S. allegations of a sweeping Chinese cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon that targeted and recorded telephone calls of senior American political figures.
US should use advanced technology to identify mysterious drones, Senator Chuck Schumer says
South China Morning Post
After weeks of fear and bewilderment about the drones buzzing over parts of New York and New Jersey, US Senator Chuck Schumer is urging the federal government to deploy better drone-tracking technology to identify and ultimately stop the airborne pests. The New York Democrat is calling on the Department of Homeland Security to immediately deploy special technology that identifies and tracks drones back to their landing spots, according to briefings from his office.
Europe
TikTok influencers flee Romania amid tax probe into their election role
POLITICO
Andrei Popviciu
Romanian TikTok influencers who helped propel an ultranationalist, pro-Putin candidate to the brink of the presidency have fled the country, pursued by tax authorities investigating their alleged role in swaying the election. Independent candidate Călin Georgescu was virtually unheard of inside his own country when he won the first round of the presidential election last month. He had been due to face centrist rival Elena Lasconi in the runoff for the presidency on Dec. 8, but evidence of widespread interference and a TikTok influence operation — allegedly orchestrated from Russia — prompted Romania's Constitutional Court to annul the entire election.
UK
UK could offer celebs protection from AI clones
POLITICO
Joseph Bambridge
Celebrities and other public figures could be offered fresh legal protections to stop artificial intelligence tools mimicking their likenesses, under plans being considered by the British government. Ministers are preparing to launch a consultation as soon as Tuesday on controversial changes to the U.K. copyright regime that would allow AI firms to train models on copyrighted works for commercial purposes, unless rights holders expressly opt out.
NZ & Pacific Islands
Cook Islands govt fends off cyberattacks, passes bill to strengthen financial transparency
RNZ
Losirene Lacanivalu
Significant attempts were made from overseas to hack into the government's central network a few weeks ago, revealed Prime Minister Mark Brown. However, the Prime Minister said that the government's robust firewall security systems were able to fend off these attempts. Brown revealed this while speaking in support of the Financial Transactions Reporting Amendment Bill 2024, which was passed in parliament last week.
Gender & Women in Tech
Meet the women in GovTech 2024
GovInsider
Amit Roy, Choudhury Mochamad Azhar, Si Ying Thian, Marion Paul and Yogesh Hirdaramani
GovInsider is proud to launch the record-breaking Women in GovTech 2024 report, featuring the stories of more than 100 inspiring women in government technology from across the world. More than a hundred stories, 23 countries across four continents, five community partners, and one sponsor – marking multiple firsts for us and the most comprehensive Women in GovTech report in GovInsider’s history!
Big Tech
OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
Mercury News
Jakob Rogers
A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week. Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said.
Blacksky is nothing like black Twitter—and it doesn’t need to be
WIRED
Jason Parham
If you dwell in certain internet neighborhoods long enough, the rules of governing, however absurd or toxic, become second nature. On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism, and hate speech had become so uniquely poisonous under the ownership of Elon Musk, that if you identified as Black, a woman, queer, trans, or disabled you were all but guaranteed to have a target on your back.
AI helps Telegram remove 15 million suspect groups and channels in 2024
TechCrunch
Charles Rollet
Telegram has been under unprecedented pressure to clean up its platform this year, after its founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and faces charges over the alleged harmful content shared on his messaging app. After announcing a crackdown in September, Telegram now says it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels related to harmful content like fraud and terrorism in 2024, noting this effort was “enhanced with cutting-edge AI moderation tools.”
Musk's xAI offers free access to Grok-2 AI chatbot
Reuters
Nilutpal Timsina and Sandra Maler
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, said on Saturday that its new version of the Grok-2 chatbot will be available for free to all users of the social media platform X. "As always, Premium and Premium+ users get higher usage limits and will be the first to access any new capabilities in the future," the artificial intelligence startup said. xAI has been quietly testing a new version of the Grok-2 model over the past few weeks, it said.
Artificial Intelligence
AI with reasoning power will be less predictable, Ilya Sutskever says
Reuters
Jeffrey Dastin
Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, had a prediction to make on Friday: reasoning capabilities will make technology far less predictable. Accepting a "Test Of Time" award for his 2014 paper, with Google's Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, Sutskever said a major change was on AI's horizon.
Research
China’s growing legacy chip production
European Union Institute for Security Studies
Tim Rühlig
The EU is concerned that it could soon become overly reliant on legacy chips from China. Legacy chips are of strategic importance as they are irreplaceable in a wide range of sectors ranging from the automotive industry to medical appliances to defence and aerospace. The challenge poses a threat to the EU’s economic security, as China could exploit this dependency to exert influence.
Misc
An epidemic of vicious school brawls, fueled by student cellphones
The New York Times
Natasha Singer
Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted. He watched, horrified, as a dozen teenage boys rampaged through the cafeteria, pummeling and kicking one another, overturning tables and chairs. Other students jeered and jostled to film the fight on their phones. “It was like a stampede of videos,” said Mr. Martinez, now 18 and a senior. “Everyone was trying to get the best angle.”
Why video games matter in foreign policy
Foreign Policy
Chloe Hadavas
This year, the Global Engagement Center, an agency that leads the U.S. State Department’s efforts to counter foreign disinformation, offered a $1 million grant to applicants proposing a video game “that builds cognitive resilience to authoritarianism and promotes democratic norms and values.” The posting showed just how seriously the U.S. government takes gaming—a $455 billion global industry that, while centered on leisure, has considerable foreign-policy implications.
Jobs
ASPI Director – Defence Strategy Program
ASPI
ASPI is recruiting for one of its key leadership positions - the Director of its Defence Strategy Program. This is an exceptional opportunity for a talented senior leader to contribute to the work of one of the Indo-Pacific’s top think-tanks with a focus on military strategy and capability, emerging security issues and our region. The incoming Director of Defence Strategy is expected to have strong knowledge in at least some of the issues covered by the team, in addition to superior management (including project and stakeholder management) skills, a proven ability to build senior and global relationships and the capacity to fundraise to support the team’s work.
ASPI Deputy Director – Cyber, Technology & Security Program
ASPI
ASPI is seeking a talented leader for the Deputy Director of Cyber, Technology & Security (CTS) Operations. This is an exceptional opportunity to contribute to one of the Indo-Pacific’s leading think tanks, focused on advancing policy and research at the intersection of cyber, technology, and national security. The CTS Program is ASPI’s largest program, and includes ASPI’s China Investigations and Analysis team. CTS spans cyber and critical infrastructure security, critical and emerging technologies, national resilience and social cohesion, and hybrid threats. This includes disinformation, economic coercion and other ‘grey zone’ threats.
ASPI Analyst - Hybrid Threats - Cyber, Technology & Security Program
ASPI
ASPI is seeking a motivated and detail-oriented individual to join the Cyber, Technology & Security (CTS) program as an Analyst – Hybrid Threats. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to one of the Indo-Pacific’s leading think tanks, focused on advancing policy and research on hybrid threats, disinformation, and emerging security challenges. The Analyst will work closely with the Senior Analyst – Hybrid Threats and the broader CTS team, supporting policy-oriented research, stakeholder engagement, and capacity-building initiatives. This role involves contributing to the analysis of hybrid threats and information manipulation, including election integrity, resilience of critical technologies, and cybersecurity.
Researcher/Analyst/Senior Analyst - Defence Strategy
ASPI
There are a small number of potential roles available in ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program, across multiple levels including researcher, analyst and senior analyst. This is an exceptional opportunity for talented individuals to contribute to the work of Australia's leading think tank on defence and strategic policy issues.
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