US embeds trackers in AI chip exports to China | Russia limits WhatsApp, Telegram calls | Influencers to fight Australia’s under-16 social media ban
Plus, Indonesia considers Roblox ban over child safety concerns, ‘immoral’ content
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U.S. authorities have secretly embedded location trackers in select shipments of AI chips and servers to detect illegal diversions to China, sources say. Devices reportedly appeared in Dell and Super Micro gear with Nvidia/AMD chips, aiding BIS, HSI and FBI export-control probes despite Beijing’s criticism. Reuters
Russian authorities partially restricted audio calls via WhatsApp and Telegram on August 13, 2025, citing risks like scam, fraud, terrorism. Roskomnadzor blamed unaddressed warnings. WhatsApp condemned the move’s threat to secure communication. The crackdown aligns with broader internet controls, including VPN blocks, shutdowns, and push for the monitored app MAX. Associated Press
Newly released documents show eSafety chief Julie Inman Grant warned of a tech-industry “ground war” using influencers against Australia’s under-16 social media ban. The government added YouTube to December’s restrictions; YouTube Kids may be exempt. Meetings involved TikTok, YouTube’s Neal Mohan and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel. The Guardian
ASPI
Digital siege puts Taiwan’s resilience to the test
The Strategist
Nathan Attrill
The most sustained conflict unfolding between China and Taiwan is not taking place on the water or in the air; it is happening in cyberspace. Over the past two years, China has escalated a comprehensive cyber warfare campaign against Taiwan. The campaign is persistent, technically sophisticated and politically calibrated. It combines state-backed espionage, psychological operations, critical infrastructure intrusions and disinformation, and it is deeply integrated into Beijing’s broader effort to destabilise Taiwan with action below the threshold of war.
Indonesia considers Roblox ban over child safety concerns, ‘immoral’ content
South China Morning Post
Aisyah Llewellyn
Dr Gatra Priyandita, a senior analyst in cybertechnology and security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the threat to ban Roblox fitted into a broader pattern of digital regulation in Indonesia. He said under President Prabowo Subianto there had been heightened attention to children’s use of digital platforms. The education minister’s concerns about “violent” or “immoral” content aligned with conservative social values and “give moral justification to censorship and tighter digital regulation”, Priyandita added.
AUKUS Pillar Two can deliver fast—after we fix it
The Strategist
Jason Van der Schyff and Courtney Stewart
Pillar Two of the AUKUS technology-sharing agreement offers more immediate benefits than the parallel, decades-long nuclear-submarine effort—but not until we fix serious shortcomings in its execution. It has six capability workstreams—undersea robotics, quantum, AI and autonomy, advanced cyber, hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, and electromagnetic warfare—plus widely applicable efforts on innovation and information sharing. Unlike AUKUS’s submarine-focused Pillar One, these offer near-term opportunities for Australian companies to design, test and integrate technologies directly into allied systems.
Enterprising adversaries: Escalating cyber threats in the Indo-Pacific
The Strategist
James Corera and Jason Van der Schyff
The Indo-Pacific’s cyber threat environment has entered a new phase. The 2025 Threat Hunting Report of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike describes the rise of ‘enterprising adversaries’, actors both state and criminal that operate with the precision, scale and adaptability of a well-run business.
Australia
Famous influencers to wage ‘ground war’ on Australian government over social media ban, documents reveal
The Guardian
Sarah Basford Canales and Josh Taylor
Australia’s online safety chief has warned the Albanese government of the imminent “ground war” by tech giants harnessing “the most famous influencers” before a social media ban for under-16s later this year. Anthony Albanese announced in July the government’s decision to include YouTube in the restrictions set to begin from December, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the video platform.
Former Liberal MP Andrew Laming wins a High Court appeal over fines for three Facebook posts
ABC News
Elizabeth Byrne
Former Queensland Liberal MP Andrew Laming has won his High Court appeal against a $40,000 fine over three Facebook posts. He was accused of not properly identifying himself as a political candidate when posting on a Facebook page in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election. Andrew Laming was the LNP member for Bowman when he made the Facebook posts on a page he administered titled "Redland Hospital: Let's fight for fair funding".
Wired for harm: how tech-facilitated abuse silences women and undermines peace
The Strategist
Julie Inman Grant
The struggle for influence and the right to be heard has often been a dangerous and fraught one for women. But the strategies to silence us are getting darker and more sophisticated. Women in 2025, wherever they live, must contend with a growing number of digital threats in their fight to be meaningfully represented in all spheres, including humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.
ID theft, scams and online abuse top cybercrime threats
The Canberra times
Farid Farid
Nearly half of Australia's internet users experienced some form of cybercrime in the past year, a survey of more than 10,000 people shows. A report from the Australian Institute of Criminology found identity theft accounted for more than one-in-five victims (22 per cent), while fraudsters and scammers duped almost one-in-10 (9.5 per cent).
Leaked Treasury advice lists possible outcomes of Labor's yet to be held round table
ABC News
Federal Parliament
The pre-written list, prepared for cabinet and seen by the ABC, shows advice from Treasury to pause changes to the National Construction Code, similar to a proposal by former opposition leader Peter Dutton that was panned by Labor at the federal election. It also recommends measures to speed up housing approvals, including a national artificial intelligence plan to cut environmental red tape
The role of entrepreneurial urgency in Defence tech
InnovationAus
James Riley
Professor Tanya Monro is six and half years into her role as chief defence scientist and says the growing sense of urgency in the work within the Defence Science and Technology Group is the biggest change over that time. The mission has continued to evolve with the geostrategic context, and has driven the pace of research and technology development of DSTG to have an accelerated influence on Defence decision-making.
Use of AI could worsen racism and sexism in Australia, human rights commissioner warns
The Guardian
Krishani Dhanji
AI risks entrenching racism and sexism in Australia, the human rights commissioner has warned, amid internal Labor debate about how to respond to the emerging technology. Lorraine Finlay says the pursuit of productivity gains from AI should not come at the expense of discrimination if the technology is not properly regulated.
CommBank and OpenAI launch Australia’s first strategic partnership to drive AI innovation
Tech Business News
Matthew Giannelis
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, marking the tech firm’s first strategic banking alliance in the country. Under the agreement, CommBank and OpenAI engineers will jointly develop advanced generative AI solutions, targeting improved scam and fraud detection as well as more personalised services for customers. The deal will see CommBank staff progressively gain access to OpenAI’s enterprise-grade tools, including ChatGPT Enterprise.
OpenAI inks deal with Commonwealth Bank Financial Review
AI revolution poses great risk to First Nations creative work, threatens cultural sovereignty
The Nightly
Emma Garlett
If you’re not using artificial intelligence right now you’re already behind — that’s the view of those urging us to jump on the AI wave or risk missing out. Among those advocating for a open-armed embrace of the AI revolution is the Productivity Commission. The commission last week released a paper which proposed creating a carve-out in Australia’s digital copyright laws which would allow tech companies free access to protected materials to train its AI models.
Australian authors challenge Productivity Commission's proposed copyright law exemption for AI
ABC News
Nicola Heath
Australian authors are furious over a recent Productivity Commission interim report that says AI could deliver a $116 billion boost to Australia's economy over the next 10 years. The centrepiece of the report was a proposal to implement a text and data mining exception to the Copyright Act, which would permit tech companies to use copyrighted work to train AI.
China
China’s Lead in Open-Source AI Jolts Washington and Silicon Valley
The Wallstreet journal
Raffaele Huang
China’s ambition to turn its open-source artificial-intelligence models into a global standard has jolted American companies and policymakers, who fear U.S. models could be eclipsed and are mobilizing their responses to the threat.
Expanding China’s geopolitical influence through peripheral communication
National Bureau of Asian Research
Andrew Grant
The discourse of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and trio of global initiatives implies that the country’s geopolitical interests are firmly global. Nonetheless, in recent years Chinese scholars and intellectuals have increased their attention on the periphery of the People’s Republic of China. For many PRC scholars, this is presented as a course-corrective to earlier efforts to improve China’s position and status in “far away” places around the globe—efforts that in Western countries have produced weak results or backfired.
China’s vision for a driverless future is miles ahead of everyone else’s
Rest of World
Yi-Ling Liu
Strong government backing and strict regulatory oversight of the Chinese autonomous vehicle industry contrasts sharply with the piecemeal laws and slower adoption in the U.S. At the glitzy Auto Shanghai show in April this year, the message was clear: China is making the cars of the future, and that future will be increasingly electrified, connected, and autonomous.
USA
US embeds trackers in AI chip shipments to catch diversions to China, sources say
Reuters
Fanny Potkin, Karen Freifeld and Jun Yuan Yong
U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic. The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said.
China and the US-Nvidia Deal: National Security for Sale? The Diplomat
Why China Loves and Fears Nvidia’s H20 Chip The Wall Street Journal
White House says chips deals could perhaps expand to other companies Reuters
Trump’s China deal on Nvidia, AMD AI chips prompts security concerns The Hill
How the unraveling of two Pentagon projects may result in a costly do-over
Reuters
Alexandra Alper
Donald Trump's Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems. The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
Hack of federal court filing system exploited security flaws known since 2020
Politico
John Sakellariadis
A sweeping hack of the federal judiciary’s case filing system exploited unresolved security holes discovered five years ago — allowing hacking groups to steal reams of sensitive court data in the ongoing breach. POLITICO first reported last week that officials are concerned that multiple nation-state and criminal hacking groups exfiltrated sealed case data from at least a dozen district courts since at least July.
Musk Loses Court Bid to Dismiss OpenAI’s Harassment Claim
Bloomberg
Robert Burnson
Elon Musk must face claims by OpenAI that his attacks on the startup in court and in the media amount to a “years-long harassment campaign,” a federal judge ruled.
China is winning the cyberwar America needs a new strategy of Deterrence
Foreign Affairs
Anne Neuberger
American companies are world leaders in technology—be it innovative software, cloud services, artificial intelligence, or cybersecurity products. Yet beginning as many as three years ago, hackers believed to be backed by the Chinese government did something the United States, the tech powerhouse, could not adequately defend against: they gained and maintained access to major U.S. telecommunications networks, copying conversations and building the ability to track the movements of U.S. intelligence officers and law enforcement agents across the country. The attack, dubbed “Salt Typhoon,” constituted a large part of a global campaign against telecoms, and it penetrated systems.
If the U.S. doesn’t set global tech standards, China will
The Wall Street Journal
Shane Tews and Luke Hogg
Imagine an internet where your identity is automatically attached to everything you do—every website you visit, every click you make. That was the vision behind New IP, a proposal Chinese engineers introduced at a United Nations telecom forum in 2019. New IP would have replaced the current open internet with a government-controlled system designed for surveillance and censorship.
North Asia
Second ransomware attack in two months disrupts South Korean ticketing giant
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
South Korea’s largest ticketing and online book retailer, Yes24, said it has restored services after a ransomware attack knocked its website and mobile app offline for several hours on Monday — the company’s second such incident in less than two months. The disruption began around 4:30 a.m. local time, preventing customers from booking concert tickets, accessing e-books and using community forums. Yes24 said it took its systems offline to prevent further damage and relied on backup data to recover operations within seven hours.
Researchers identify Chinese cybercriminal working for North Korean threat group
NK News
Dave Yin
Cybersecurity researchers say they have identified an operative working for the DPRK threat group Kimsuky who is Chinese, potentially marking the first known case of direct foreign participation in Pyongyang’s state-backed cybercrime. In a report released at the DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas last week, two researchers claimed to have stolen data from the workstation of an individual that they say likely works for Kimsuky, a North Korean cybercrime syndicate known for targeting South Korean industry, government and nuclear power operators, as well as institutions in Russia, the U.S. and Europe.
South & Central Asia
Why can’t India produce a Nvidia or a DeepSeek?
Financial Times
Henny Sender
When DeepSeek emerged from obscurity this year, the large language model was hailed as China’s ‘Sputnik’ moment. It spoke to the ambitions of China to challenge the dominance of the US and Silicon Valley in both hardware and software. In India, though, the breakthrough brought both dismay and soul searching. The South Asian country has long prided itself on the quality of its engineering talent.
NZ & Pacific Islands
Church-linked phishing emails in Pacific languages have high success rates
Pacific Media Network
Aui'a Vaimaila Leatinu'u
A new study reveals phishing emails, written in Pacific languages and framed as community or church requests for help, are among the most convincing for Pasifika recipients. Conducted by the University of Auckland, the research titled Language as Lure: A Naturalistic Study on Pasifika Phishing Susceptibility is led by Professor Giovanni Russello, the Head of the School of Computer Science.
Ukraine – Russia
Russia restricts calls via WhatsApp and Telegram, the latest step to control the internet
Associated press
Dasha Livinova
Russian authorities announced Wednesday they were “partially” restricting calls in messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp, the latest step in an effort to tighten control over the internet. In a statement, government media and internet regulator Roskomnadzor justified the measure as necessary for fighting crime, saying that “according to law enforcement agencies and numerous appeals from citizens, foreign messengers Telegram and WhatsApp have become the main voice services used to deceive and extort money, and to involve Russian citizens in sabotage and terrorist activities.”
Starlink techies keep Musk’s network running, even in a War
Bloomberg
Volodymyr Verbianyi
In most of the world, fixing broken receivers for Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service is fairly straightforward: Users can get help by entering a support ticket with the company online. “Please make sure,” the website helpfully reminds customers, “to update your shipping address in the event replacement hardware is shipped.”
High-tech drones are changing warfare – terrorists may soon follow the same playbook
The Conversation
James Paterson
In June 2024, Ukraine shocked Russian forces with the surprise Operation Spiderweb, an unprecedented, coordinated drone strike deep inside Russian territory. More recently, as part of Operation Rising Lion, Israel used drones to destroy Iranian air defences in a highly coordinated opening attack.
Europe
Leaked files reveal Serbia's secret expansion of Chinese-made surveillance
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Jelena Jankovic and Reid Standish
The Serbian government is substantially expanding its advanced Chinese-made surveillance system, leaked documents reviewed by RFE/RL show, despite years of protests and backlash from the public over its use. The documents seen by RFE/RL contain contacts with the Chinese technology giant Huawei.
Why the EU needs to go hard on quantum computing software
EURACTIV
Théophane Hartmann
The Allied cracking of Germany’s Enigma machine reshaped the course of World War II. Now, Europe is racing to harness a far more powerful code-breaking tool — the quantum computer, but it’s running short on the software needed to do it. In the near future, the quantum computer holds the power to impact sectors from defence, to health care, chemicals and more with hardware already more and more accessible. But cracking the physical infrastructure is one thing. Cracking on with the software is another entirely.
German tech firm sues Nvidia for patent infringement, seeks to block Nvidia across 18 European countries — ParTec lawsuit alleges DGX AI supercomputer design theft
tom's hardware
Hassam Nasir
German supercomputing firm ParTec AG has stepped up its legal challenge against Nvidia with a third patent infringement lawsuit filed at the Unified Patent Court in Munich. This new suit targets Nvidia’s DGX supercomputers, which are a key part of AI infrastructure powering advanced workloads in sectors ranging from healthcare to automotive and finance.
In the Assemblée Nationale, the rise of 'TikTok speeches' sparks debate
Le Monde
Robin Richardot
Many French MPs now post their speeches from the chamber on social media, leading to a more scripted speaking style. Some within the Assemblée see the practice as grating, others as undermining the legislature's work. The method is often the same: a brief intervention never exceeding two minutes, a few edits to remove hesitations, subtitles for viewers with the sound off, epic background music for those with the sound on and a few catchy lines.
UK
Government expands police use of facial recognition vans
BBC
Kate Whannel
More live facial recognition vans will be rolled out across seven police forces in England to locate suspects for crimes including sexual offences, violent assaults and homicides, the Home Office has announced. The forces will get access to 10 new vans equipped with cameras, which scan the faces of people walking past and check them against a list of wanted people.
Middle East
Artificial Intelligence and the orchestration of Palestinian life and death
Tech Policy Press
Sarah Fathallah
Criticism is mounting in response to the apparent starvation campaign waged by Israel in Gaza, prompting policymakers to probe the system of humanitarian aid delivery managed by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Following Israel’s ban of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, GHF was established in February 2025 to take charge of aid distribution in Gaza. A few months later, plans for mandating the use of facial recognition tools at distribution sites surfaced, leading rights groups to decry this hypothetical ‘biometrics-for-food’ mechanism of control and surveillance.
Africa
Lagos summit weighs AI ambitions against Africa’s tech infrastructure gap
RFI
Nigeria is hosting one of Africa’s biggest tech gatherings on Tuesday, with debates ranging from Wolof-speaking chatbots to medical algorithms. The ambition is to harness artificial intelligence to transform economies – but patchy internet, unreliable electricity and low investment remain major obstacles.
Big Tech
YouTube to begin testing a new AI-powered age verification system in the U.S.
Associated Press
Michael Liedtke
YouTube on Wednesday will begin testing a new age-verification system in the U.S. that relies on artificial intelligence to differentiate between adults and minors, based on the kinds of videos that they have been watching. The tests initially will only affect a sliver of YouTube’s audience in the U.S., but it will likely become more pervasive if the system works as well at guessing viewers’ ages as it does in other parts of the world.
LinkedIn joins Meta and YouTube in abandoning policies designed to counter anti-trans hate
Tech Policy Press
Jenni Olson
In light of LinkedIn’s recent surreptitious removal of its targeted misgendering and deadnaming policy (the longstanding best-practice policy language maintained by nearly every major platform), it’s an important moment to remind ourselves that public-facing hate speech policies, versus behind-the-scenes moderator enforcement guidelines, exist for a reason. Since most major platforms say they aspire to maintain civil and safe spaces for their users, having clearly stated public policies is a fundamental baseline practice — so that users understand the actual rules of the platform, and also so that trust and safety teams can moderate in alignment with those publicly-stated guidelines.
Musk-Altman rivalry devolves into lawsuit threats, insults in social media brawl
Axios
April Rubin
Tech titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman bickered over their relative trustworthiness on Tuesday, with each of their artificial intelligence platforms contributing to the feud. The big picture: The two tech giants' acrimonious relationship has become increasingly public since Musk sued Altman for breaching OpenAI's founding mission last year.
Apple rejects Musk's App Store bias claims
BBC
Liv McMahon & Tom Gerken
Apple has rejected accusations from Elon Musk that its App Store stifles competiton, insisting it is "designed to be free and fair of bias." X owner Musk has threatened Apple with legal action after claiming it had made it "impossible" for apps to compete with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in the store. He also called OpenAI boss Sam Altman a "liar" - after Altman claimed Musk used his platform to "benefit himself and his own companies".
Artificial Intelligence
Companies are pouring billions into A.I. it has yet to pay off.
The New York Times
Steve Lohr
Nearly four decades ago, when the personal computer boom was in full swing, a phenomenon known as the “productivity paradox” emerged. It was a reference to how, despite companies’ huge investments in new technology, there was scant evidence of a corresponding gain in workers’ efficiency.
AI eroded doctors’ ability to spot cancer within months in study
Bloomberg
Harry Black
Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study. AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed, their ability to find tumors dropped by about 20% compared with rates before the tool was ever introduced, according to findings published Wednesday.
The looming social crisis of AI friends and Chatbot therapists
Derek Thompson Substack
Derek Thompson
Last week, I explained How AI Conquered the US Economy, with what might be the largest infrastructure ramp-up in the last 140 years. I think it’s possible that artificial intelligence could have a transformative effect on medicine, productivity, and economic growth in the future. But long before we build superintelligence, I think we’ll have to grapple with the social costs of tens of millions of people—many of them at-risk patients and vulnerable teenagers—interacting with an engineered personality that excels in showering its users with the sort of fast and easy validation that studies have associated with deepening social disorders and elevated narcissism.
China is taking AI safety seriously. So must the U.S.
Time
Brian Tse
China doesn’t care about AI safety—so why should we?” This flawed logic pervades U.S. policy and tech circles, offering cover for a reckless race to the bottom as Washington rushes to outpace Beijing in AI development. According to this rationale, regulating AI would risk falling behind in the so-called “AI arms race.” And since China supposedly doesn’t prioritize safety, racing ahead—even recklessly—is the safer long-term bet. This narrative is not just wrong; it’s dangerous.
Misc
DEF CON volunteers step up to help water sector after China, Iran attack utilities
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
When Jake Braun put out a call online last year seeking volunteers who wanted to help secure a water utility, the response was so overwhelming that he had to shut down the website. He ended up with a list of 350 names, and says he could have probably gathered thousands more. The response enabled the work of DEF CON Franklin, an initiative that recently completed a nine-month pilot program that paired white-hat hackers with water utilities in Indiana, Oregon, Utah and Vermont.
Research
How language is hiding the real internet from you
BBC
Ryan McGrady
Most of the internet is out of your reach, but the barrier isn't just algorithms. In another language, the same platforms turn into to whole other worlds. When you go online, it feels like you're accessing all the world's information. But you form social media relationships based on shared language. You search Google with the language you think in. And algorithms built to maximise attention have no reason to recommend what you won't understand. So, most of the internet remains out of sight, on the other side of a language filter – and you're missing far more than content.
Events & Podcasts
The Sydney Dialogue 2025
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is pleased to announce the Sydney Dialogue, the world’s premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies, will return on 4-5 December. Now in its fourth year, the dialogue attracts the world’s top thinkers, innovators and policymakers, and focusses on the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and security. TSD has become the place where new partnerships are built among governments, industry and civil society, and where existing partnerships are deepened.
Jobs
Events Manager
ASPI
ASPI has an exciting opportunity for an experienced and motivated events professional to join the organisation as Events Manager. Lead a small, dedicated, tight-knit team to deliver a program of internationally renowned events on a variety of topics ranging from defence and national security to cyber and critical technologies. The closing date for applications is Thursday 21 August 2025 – an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
Defence Strategy Program Coordinator
ASPI
ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program analyses how Australia defends its national interests in an era of intensifying strategic competition. Our research focuses on three areas: understanding Australia’s security environment and regional partnerships; developing military strategy, deterrence concepts, and future force design; and strengthening the defence industrial base, supply chains, and economic resilience. Together, these efforts provide government, industry, and the public with evidence‑based insights to enhance Australia’s defence. The closing date for applications is Thursday 28 August 2025 – an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.
The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.
